Andrew Plus

Naming holy names

2012-01-01T20:28:00.001-05:00

Today is a good day for a baptism. It is the first day of a brand-new year…and what better way to start? The weather is unseasonably warm. But the best reason that today is a great day for a baptism is that this is the Feast of the Holy Name—a feast that our Prayer Book assigns as being as at least as important as Christmas and Ascension. Our Prayer Book reminds us, in its usual understated way, that there are moments of Jesus’ life where we need to stop, look, and listen. Next week will be another one.

Jesus being taken to the synagogue by his parents to be circumcised and named is not so different than Benjamin’s being brought here this morning. So let’s take a minute to compare and contrast the nativity stories of Benjamin and Jesus.

Benjamin is a much anticipated child—not only his family but this whole parish community has been pulling for him. Jesus was also a child people were waiting for with bated breath.

Alex and Caswell had to trek a long way—several times –to Philadelphia help him be born safe and healthy. Their journey reminds me of Mary and Joseph’s journey from their hometown to that other Bethlehem.

The Cookes experienced birth and those first days and weeks of Benjamin’s life in a strange environment, not one filled with animals and straw, but one filled with high tech equipment and specialists, nurses and doctors.

Both sets of parents knew about worry and danger—the Cooke’s from the need for major surgery on such a tiny patient, and, according to Matthew, Jesus’ parents had to flee the wrath of a fear-filled, vengeful king.

And don’t forget: Jesus had angels but Benjamin had Grace.

So what you are doing today points us to what happened to Jesus and what God is doing for us.

After the angels sang their songs and the shepherds left, the parents of Jesus gathered up their baby and took him to a local synagogue to have him circumcised and formally named. After your long journey, you have gathered up your family and come here to have him baptized.

On this day, Jesus, with his circumcision, was formally incorporated into the community of God’s Covenant people and given a name.

Today, Benjamin will, through his baptism, be fully initiated into the life of the Church. This is not just the dedication of a baby, nor a thanksgiving for a safe delivery and successful surgeries—although we do thank God for those things—what we do today is the Christian version of what happened to Jesus a week or so after his birth: he is being made a full member of God’s covenant people and will be marked as Christ’s own forever.

Something else that happened to Jesus that day: he was formally given his name. Names in Hebrew culture were important. They described a person’s identity and more. Names described a person’s personality and destiny. In a few moments I will ask you to name your child. It is not as if, up until now, Benjamin has been a nothing or a number, called something like Cooke Boy #1 or Baby #2. Instead, this naming tells us something about what we think God has in store for us.

Both Jesus and Benjamin were given biblical names. By which I means straight out of the Hebrew scriptures.

Benjamin means son of right or son of righteousness. The first Benjamin was given that name by Rachel because she wanted a son and spent a long time praying and fasting. Also, in this case the parents were very old and, but Jacob and Rachel had a very crooked, rocky relationship with God that had become very intimate. So for Jacob and Rachel a baby boy was an answer to prayer. Both the biblical Benjamin and ours share something: they are both the answer to many, many prayers.

His name, “son of righteousness,” reminds the Cookes, Benjamin and us that faithfulness is always rewarded even if the path is crooked and not very obvious.

Mary and Joseph could not send out e-vites but maybe they gathered their relatives and some friends when they went to the local synagogue for the circumcision and naming of their new baby. Notice that until this little sentence in Luke, the baby is only referred to in the Gospel as “the child.” Now he has a name: Jesus.

Actually, they probably called him “Joshua” or more likely “Yeshua.” Our memory of Jesus’ name comes to us through so many cultures over so much time that a little change is to be expected. Take a Hebrew name, speak it in Aramaic, record it in Greek and remember it in Latin and you will get “Jesus.” That’s what we call the Son of God. But through all those iterations, his name still speaks to us, right down to our very core.

The name Mary and Joseph gave their baby, in obedience to God’s angelic instruction, was “Joshua,” after the great patriarch, the one who took up Moses’ mantle and brought the people of Israel across the Jordan River into the Promised Land. Joshua finished the job that Moses’ started but could not complete. Joshua finished the journey of the Exodus and brought the people home after their long desert journey from slavery through exile, testing and into the Land of Promise.

“Joshua,” or “Yeshua” means “Yahweh, God, is salvation.” Or simply “God saves.” Jesus’ name reminds us of the saving activity of God in ages past, helps us look to the saving acts which will in years to come (long after his circumcision and naming) occur on Golgotha and in an empty tomb. Jesus names helps us look to the present to see what God is doing today and forward to where God is taking us.

I have to say that you two have really great tastes in names. Not only do they sound nice, rolling off the tongue, they will never cause their teachers to stumble whilst calling out attendance. Best of all your kids names communicate! Their names tell us something about what God is up to in your lives and what you hope will unfold for them as they grow up.

In their baptisms, in the little Christian community you call home, in the parish and in daily life, you will be teaching your children about the power, presence and faithfulness of God. In your parenting, you will show them that Christians are real people capable of profound wisdom, amazing thick-headedness, deep love and great silliness. In your example of faithfulness and ethical living and in lessons of prayer, scripture, worship and good works, you will teach them that having taken the plunge of baptism they are always immersed in God’s love, power and purpose.

And the names you gave your children tell us something about your hopes, their identity and their destiny. Having talked about the meaning of Benjamin, let’s think about the meaning of Grace.

“Grace” is not a biblical name in the sense that it is named after a person so much as it is a biblical name that points us to the fact that God’s love happens. Grace means “free gift.” But more than that, “grace” reminds us God prepares our hearts to love God, “grace” means that God gives us what we need for the journey, and “grace” is that God’s love comes to us whether we deserve it or not. It just is.

So yours is a household that will, for all the riot and unexpectedness that raising children brings, is also a house that by their very names teach us that God’s loves happens no matter what (Grace) and that faith is always rewarded (Benjamin).

In choosing this day to baptize Benjamin and welcome him into the family of God’s people, you have linked him in a special way to Jesus’ own naming and initiation. You remind us—and I hope you will remind Benjamin as soon as he is old enough to hear the story—that he is who he is, and he will do what he will do because God does what God does. Grace happens. Faith and righteousness prevail. God saves.

The Feast of the Holy Name and the baptism of Benjamin Caswell Cooke, January 1, 2012 at Trinity Episcopal Church, Easton, Pennsylvania Luke 2:15-21

It only takes a girl

2011-12-16T19:11:00.000-05:00

Choosing the anchor of certainty over the sails of comprehension

2011-12-11T06:37:00.011-05:00

Joseph Bottum in the Weekly Standard writes about the rumors that Rowan Williams will resign at Archbishop of Canterbury next year and the end of Anglicanism as we know it. In the process, he starts in a useful direction and then drives off an ideological deep-end.

Early in the essay there is a decent, if rather conventional, analysis of Anglicanism today. He writes:

Anglicanism remains widespread, with 80 million members around the world, from the Episcopal Church in the United States to the followers of Henry Luke Orombi, archbishop of Uganda. England is still the largest Anglican province, with 26 million members, at least nominally. But far more Anglicans are in church on a Sunday morning in Kenya and Nigeria than in Britain, and the center of Anglican belief is now firmly in Africa—a major part, as Philip Jenkins noted in his 2002 book The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, of the nearly complete conversion of sub-Saharan Africa to Christianity over the last 100 years.

The rise of the African church could have made Canterbury an important player in international relations—not exactly a rival to Rome (Catholicism’s one billion adherents make that unlikely) but at least a second European center with which Africans would have felt a relation and to which they could have looked for intellectual and ecclesial authority.

Then he drives off an ideological deep-end, and in the process misses the point of the importance of Anglicanism to Christianity and our essential witness to the world. Along the way, he missed the disappointment if not the outright tragedy that has been Williams' tenure as Archbishop.

In all likelihood, the forcing of the issue of same-sex marriage will lead the African churches to withdraw from communion with the Western churches—while the churches of Europe and North America will denounce the African churches, choosing allegiance with standard-issue Western liberalism over the orthodox teaching of their own faith.

And thereby the world will lose one more of the old ties that might have bound it together. Freed from their African anchor, the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in America will move even further in a pro-Muslim, anti-Israel direction, providing yet more cover for fashionable liberal anti-Semitism. Let loose from their allegiance to Canterbury, the African churches will quickly move toward forming pan-African denominations that will feel entirely distanced from Europe and America—and will help build the belief the global South owes nothing to the West.

The problem with Rowan is not that Africa is an "anchor" and that the Church of England and the Episcopal Church is somehow at once pro-Muslim and pro-gay, and that the African church will march away in its theological purity. The problem is that Rowan did not use his innate voice.

Africa itself shows off the tensions and possibility within Anglicanism. The Continent that contains both Tutu and Orombi is also the Church that shares both approaches to Christianity. The Anglican Communion contains both Katharine Jefferts Schori and NT Wright. The Episcopal Church itself contains both Gene Robinson and Mark Lawrence.

Yes, it is a high wire act. Being Archbishop of Canterbury is no doubt an impossible job. I don't know if anyone can straddle that thin line successfully, and to do so will no doubt mean that someone, somewhere (probably lots of someones in lots of places) will be angry, disappointed, demanding more. That he cannot please everyone is not the problem. That he has not always agreed with any one group's particular vision for mission is also not the point.

The tragedy--and disappointment--that is Rowan Williams is that he chose not use his best possible tool in leading this impossibly diverse Anglican Communion. He chose not to use his own voice.

We all know that Williams wrote eloquently as both a priest and theologian, and even as Archbishop of Wales, for the full inclusion of gays into the life of the church including their ability to marry--or at least have some kind of civil and ecclessiasitcal analog to marriage--and that not only did he put these opinions aside, he has worked very hard to be certain that these views will never come to pass.

Bottum reveals a fact that I had forgotten, and I will bet many progressives did not know, that when he became Archbishop of Canterbury, he resigned his membership in the a group called The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children.

It turns out that Williams himself encapsulated both the comprehensiveness and the tension that is Anglicanism.

Here we have a person who was so pro-life that not only was he a member of a group working to end abortion but, in his youth, he protested the planting of nuclear missles aimed at the former Soviet Union on British soil. And saw so much the dignity of human nature restored in Jesus Christ that he could imagine a church that included openly gay men and women not only serving the church as ordained people but also a church that blessed the unions between same sex partners. He worked for the ordination of women and held to a deeply sacramental life.

Looking at it this way, it is easy to see why he might have been the right person at the right time for the Anglican Communion a decade ago. He apparently held in himself the tensions, the comprehensiveness and the possibility of Anglicanism.

But he traded all that in. In giving up his membership in the pro-life group and in convincing his friend Jeffrey-John to not become a bishop, in repudiating his earlier preaching and writing as if they were a luxury an Archbishop of Canterbury could ill-afford, he gave up the one tool he had to walk that high wire with integrity, his voice.

Oh, there were hints. His decision to make the 2007 Lambeth Conference dialogical and not legislative hinted at a vision of a comprehensive Anglicanism that could continue to be a third way between Catholic legalism and the Protestant swings between literalism and liberalism. His vision of a communion based on a common life of prayer, shared mission and intentional dialogue shows up even in his weak, TINA-based defense of the Anglican Covenant.

But giving up his voice to hold the church together only on what the most conservative voices in the room will agree to, his unwillingness to defend and include those who differ from others in faith--whether it was keeping Bishop Robinson out of Lambeth or telling our Presiding Bishop not to wear her hat whilst in England--showed that his fear of outright conflict only deepened the fissures he most dreaded. Especially after it became apparent that each concession, from Jeffery-John to the Windsor Report through successive Primates meetings and finally the Anglican Covenant, only emboldened those prone to bullying and alienated those who wanted to work with him the most.

And now he has staked his whole reputation--and our future-- on an Anglican Covenant which takes a fairly subtle and nuanced vision of Anglicanism and weighs it down with rules to regulate what happens when one church has an idea that someone else might not like--when the only rule should be "whatever happens, keep praying, keep conversation going, and keep inviting Jesus to the table."

The fourth section of the Anglican Covenant undoes the vision of Anglicanism--takes away our voice--just as surely as Archbishop Williams lost his voice and the ability to lead from the heart of Anglican Christianity when he resigned from the pro-life group and told his gay friend not to be a bishop.

Bottum sees the high-wire act of being the ABC breaking when he gave into a fuzzy western liberalism. But he names the wrong problem because Bottum misunderstands the nature of Anglicanism. The problem was that Rowans had within him the experience and possibility to help us live through complicated times by living into the comprehension that is Anglicanism, by insisting that whatever happens people in communion should live in communion.

Instead he chose a safe institutionalism. I gave up what I believed, he taught us, and you can too. I gave in to someone elses idea of the rules that go with being ABC, you can go with the rules in Section Four.

It was not just a failure of nerve. It was worse. In giving up his voice--his complex sometime contradictory voice--he taught us to quench the spirit, and so we risk losing the heart of what makes Anglicanism an essential witness to Christ to the world. He taught us that conflict trumps comprehension. Fortunately, God is bigger than that.

In the bleak midwinter--an Advent meditation

2011-12-07T19:00:00.001-05:00

Communion does matter.The Covenant is not the same as Communion.

2011-11-30T15:30:00.013-05:00

The Archbishop of Canterbury released his Advent Letter today and in it he extols the wonderful work he and others are doing in the Anglican Communion. (It is a public letter but it directed to the Primates and Moderators of the Anglican Communion.) He talks about the Anglican Communion as "a gift" and is dismayed that some see the Anglican Communion as "a problem." He insists that the Anglican Communion needs the Anglican Covenant now more than ever.

ACNS:

(Dr. Williams writes:) "This is why the Communion matters – why it matters for a bishop in Jerusalem facing the withdrawal of a residency permit...a congregation in Nigeria facing more interreligious violence, an island in the Pacific facing inundation because of climate change, an urban community in Britain wondering how to respond to rising social disorder as poverty and unemployment increase. The Communion is a gift not a problem to all such people and many more. Only in such a mutually supportive family, glorifying and praising God in Christ together, can we truly make known the one Christ."

The Archbishop's letter acknowledged the "numerous tensions" in the Communion, but cautioned Communion members never to say "I have no need of you" to anyone seeking to serve Jesus Christ. He also used the letter to appeal for "more careful and dispassionate discussion" on such issues as the powers of Primates' Meetings as well calling for "a sustained willingness on the part of all Provinces to understand the different ways in which each local part of the Anglican family organizes its life."

Dr Williams also commended the Anglican Communion Covenant "as strongly as I can" stressing that it would neither change the structure of the Communion nor give "some sort of absolute power of ‘excommunication’ to some undemocratic or unrepresentative body."

"It outlines a procedure, such as we urgently need, for attempting reconciliation and for indicating the sorts of consequences that might result from a failure to be fully reconciled," he said. "It alters no Province’s constitution, as it has no canonical force independent of the life of the Provinces. It does not create some unaccountable and remote new authority but seeks to identify a representative group that might exercise a crucial advisory function."

He said the fact that the moratoria were being "increasingly ignored" was deepening mistrust "which is bad for our mission together as Anglicans, and alongside other Christians as well. The question remains: if the moratoria are ignored and the Covenant suspected, what are the means by which we maintain some theological coherence as a Communion and some personal respect and understanding as a fellowship of people seeking to serve Christ?"

The Archbishop is right in telling us that Communion is important. It is essential that Anglicans around the world work together on these and other important questions. We need to do more to encourage common mission and the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ that we all share.

Communion is a gift. The problem is not the Communion. The problem is the Covenant.

To make the argument, Dr. Williams begs the question: since he did all the visits and all these events happened without the Covenant in place, then is it possible to be a Communion without the Covenant? Would these connections cease if the Covenant were to not pass? Would Anglicans stop working together or would our voice be diluted in any way without the Covenant in place?

Put another way, would the voice of Anglicanism be any stronger in Zimbabwe and would it influence Mugabe any more if they had the Covenant in their back pockets? Would having the Covenant stop Polynesian islands from being any more submerged and would the urban parish be any more relevant to it's neighborhood with a fully empowered Anglican Covenant?

Once more he talks about how we must not focus on the things that divide us, while extolling a document that defines itself in terms of division, rather than reconciliation. He says we need this to make room for everyone. Dr. Williams asks for an alternative to the mechanisms outlined in Part IV. He says that no one has offered an alternative. While this point is in itself debatable, allow me instead to make a my own humble suggestion:

Instead of spending time (as Section Four posits) on throwing each other out when we disagree, how about building a communion that encourages dialogue and reconciliation?

Instead of focusing on eliminating conflict by making sure that no innovation can happen without the approval of the most conservative member of the Anglican Communion, how about creating a structure and processes that encourage members of Churches who see the implications of the Gospel differently to come together, listen to one another, pray together, share experiences of mission together, and break Eucharistic bread together?

The Covenant diminishes the Communion because it assumes that Communion only happens when we agree. The truth is that Communion is happening because we share Christ. It is a gift of the Holy Spirit that is made possible by death and resurrection of Christ. Communion is because we share the same Lord, the same faith, the same baptism. A Covenant that does not help us do the hard work of living that out--that helps us pray together--despite our disagreements is not a Covenant worth having.

The Covenant certainly cannot exist without the Anglican Communion, but can the Anglican Communion exist without the Covenant? The answer is that it already does.

An Advent Primer

2011-11-26T12:45:00.000-05:00

Confessions of a guilty Christian bystander

2011-10-16T04:57:00.007-04:00

Ron Dreher is an American Tory...that is to say he is a conservative in a very different mold that the Tea Party or the "pro-business at all costs" approach of the self-styled Objectivists. He wrote an essay in the American Conservative in which he reflects on the Occupy Wall Street movement and the implications of the unbridled, unregulated wealth of the financial system we now inhabit.

Much of the response to OWS has been either abject horror or undying adoration. Two summers ago before the Tea Party was bought, packaged and re-purposed a corporate-owned re-branding of the GOP at a frat party, I was on the "abject horror" side of their movement. That's why this essay came to me a kind of tonic. In it Dreher offers a third way of approaching the discussion of Occupy Wall Street...and, as I said, perhaps as an overly late corrective to the original Tea Party movement.

After observing an "Occupy Easton" demonstration up close yesterday, I found myself struck by both the anger and the naivete of the participants.

Most of all I was taken by the cozy libertarianism of the group that cut across political lines. There were young second amendment fundamentalists holding signs right along side modern day punks, grown up hippies and guys who went to college on the original GI Bill. The place they picked was a park in downtown Easton that was close to a publicly financed playground for their children. Everyone was angry at Wall Street and Government, those amorphous entities, and well they should be. But very few were thinking about how their anger was shaped by the very values that drove the financial crisis we are now in.

Their anger at Wall Street was that they were not receiving their fair share of the pie. Their anger at Government was an oscillation between not checking the greed of the Street and fear that the Government will take more of "what's mine."

Now Dreher and I are not on the same page ideologically. Where he says that is not possible to be a Christian and a communist or a fascist, I would add that one cannot be a Christian and an (so-called) objectivist. And where he sees the "the most natural political orientation for a serious small-o orthodox Christian is on the Right", I would say that the most natural orientation for a serious small-o orthodox Christian is on the Left. I also think that Dreher pulls his punch when he says: "I do believe it’s vulgar and borderline blasphemous for a political party to claim Christ." There is nothing borderline about the vulgarity. When a political party claims Christ as their own, it is blasphemy. But I quibble over details.

Here are snippets. It is worth reading the whole essay. Especially the story of the epiphany that his financial industry friend experienced.

...I don’t believe that God has a political plan. One can be a good Christian as a socialist. One can be a good Christian as a monarchist. One can be a good Christian as a Republican or a Democrat. One almost certainly cannot be a good Christian as, say, a Nazi or a Communist, because what those political theories require one to believe is antithetical to Christian truth. My point is simply that it’s not easy to discern a particular political program from the Gospels, only general principles. In most cases, there will probably be tension between our political party and our faith convictions. There ought to be. Jesus said that His kingdom was not of this world. As soon as we think we can use politics to create heaven on earth, we lay the groundwork for the corruption of faith, and far worse. Personally, I believe that in this time and place, the most natural political orientation for a serious small-o orthodox Christian is on the Right, but I do believe it’s vulgar and borderline blasphemous for a political party to claim Christ.

And yet we cannot be serious about our faith and act as if it had no political implications. No one can take the Bible seriously and believe that the truths it teaches have nothing at all to do with how we order our common life. There is the matter of human dignity, and justice. The Bible has much to say about the poor — and what it has to say about the rich is not very complimentary, to put it mildly. I believe the free market, for all its flaws, is the economic system that is not only the fairest, but is also the economic system that best conforms to our human dignity. But the market must be seen not as an end, but as a means to an end....

...By this standard, I cannot see how a system that allows so many people who work in finance to grow so spectacularly rich while so many others struggle to get by can be reconciled with Christian truth. But honestly, that is the least of my concerns about Wall Street now (by “Wall Street,” I mean the financial sector in general). What I find far more worrying is the power these men have to control by their actions the fate of the nation. No, I’m not talking about conspiratorial nonsense. I’m talking about the fact that because our political system has given them so much freedom to do what they want to do, our fates are tied to theirs in ways that are incredibly unjust and harmful to the common good. We all know about “too big to fail.” Ever thought about what that means? It means that TBTF institutions cannot be allowed to be responsible for their actions, because if they fail, they take all of us down with them. Wall Street, broadly speaking, has immense power, but no responsibility. Alessandro Rastani may or may not have been real, but he’s telling the truth about global finance: these men don’t care about their countrymen, they only care about making money for themselves and their clients. That is their prime directive....

...It is hard for many American Christians, especially we conservatives, to think of Christian morality as applicable to money. Personal sins — lust, immorality, the usual — we understand. But we shy away from thinking in a Christian way about money, and the way our society is structured economically. I wonder: Do we Christians not fear a reckoning in all this...?

...And so we come to the Occupy Wall Street movement. I have not been impressed by the things I’ve seen and read about them. I don’t know for sure, but I doubt very much that I would be at home with that crowd. Some of the quotes I’ve read from those people are obnoxious and offensive. Many more are just foolish. I don’t look to OWS for any relief, except comic.
But I have to say, I am impressed by this line from Almond’s piece: “They want the traders who work on Wall Street to face the human consequences of their machinations.” Maybe the way they’re calling Wall Street out is silly, pointless, and foolish in a thousand ways. But at least they are there. Where are the Christians? Where are we conservative Christians, who claim to really believe what Scripture says, and look down on liberal Christians for picking and choosing what they want to believe on sexual morality to suit their desires? Do we not have a blind spot when it comes to wealth? Why does the immense power Wall Street wields over the fate of the nation because of its wealth not trouble us enough to bear public witness? Why does it not trouble us much at all? It troubles me, but I don’t know what to do about it. This won’t do.

In that sense, I’ll give Occupy Wall Street its due, as a guilty Christian bystander. There’s a tale about Billy Graham, possibly apocryphal, in which he met a stuffy Anglican prelate on one of his first crusades in England. The story goes that the bishop sniffed to Graham, “Sir, I must say that I do not approve of the evangelism you do.” Graham supposedly replied, “Sir, I prefer the evangelism I do to the evangelism that you do not do.” Quite.

WYSIWYG

2011-10-05T23:27:00.007-04:00

The first computer I ever owned was a Macintosh 128k. I saw the famous commercial at the Super Bowl and ran right out and bought one. Later on, I got another...the one pictured here. A 512k which I souped up. I got a couple of hard drives as big as small phone books and was doing serious writing and graphics work. These two machines got my wife through grad school at Columbia and me through CPE at Hartford Hospital and post grad work at Andover-Newton. Consider that I finished seminary in 1979 with my wife using an IBM correcting Selectric II and me using the mighty Royal from World War II...this was quite a change.

Both my kids used these machines. They played games, drew pictures, did their homework on them. We got a program that had a very rudimentary voice synthesizer...it could read simple stories. This, along with the first video game systems of the day, I think got them thinking about the world differently that I did at their age.

I got out of the Mac world somewhere around System 9, which was a dog, but kept those first two machines.

My first new Apple product...after more than ten years...was an iPod that I got for Father's Day one year. And a few months ago I was given an iPad2.

I have to say that the iPad has probably changed my computing habits almost as much that first Macintosh did 27 years ago.

I suppose that most us of learned of Steve Jobs' death the same way: by text, twitter, or FB post. The first thing I thought about was that old Macintosh and the new iPad. I am thankful for the imagination that took us into a new way of connecting our world. Our world is profoundly different because of all that imagination unleashed.

The real sign of Jobs' impact is apparent in what that picture does not show: I took the picture with an Android phone, wrote this post on a PC. The point of all this imagination is not the product but the vision of creativity and connectivity made accessible to the ordinary person. This changed the world as much as the printing press did in its day.

Read Nick Knisely's reflection here.

Church or jail?

2011-09-25T07:06:00.004-04:00

Watch out if you go to Bay Minette, Alabama, and are caught doing some sort of minor crime because you will be given a choice. Church or jail.

According to WKRG-TV, starting this week authorities will give non-violent offenders in that community a new choice: Go to jail, or go to church every Sunday for a year. It’s called Operation Restore Our Community and fifty-six churches have signed on.

If offenders select church, they will be allowed to pick the place of worship but must check in weekly with the pastor and the police department.

If the one-year church attendance program is completed successfully, the offender's case will be dismissed.

Bay Minette Police Chief Mike Rowland says the program could change the lives of people heading down the wrong path.

We’ll see if this idea works. Church or jail? Which would you choose? Personally, I’d have to ask which church. Jail might be preferable.

Jesus tells a story about two sons who are asked by their father to go out into vineyards to work. The first son is the one who "I will not go," but later changes his mind and goes. The second son is the one who says he will go but does not go. He then turns to his critics and asks which one of the two does the will of the father? They of course say that the first son, in the end, does the will of the father. In their answer, the super-religious show that what is really important is what a faithful person does that’s important, not just what they say.

A bishop and teacher of the early church named Chrysostom wrote that the Christian is like the son who at any hour turns and chooses to do the will of the father; to go out into the vineyard and work. The Christian is the son who is the missionary.

But I think there is a deeper message that Jesus is offering. While it is certainly true that God wants us to go out into the world—the vineyard—and do God’s work…that is, to do mission… there is something else going on here.

The Good News is that it is never too late to follow Jesus and to do God’s work in the vineyard. God will embrace the son who turns and chooses in the end, no matter what they have been doing, to become a member of the community of faith.

Today’s Gospel story only appears in Matthew, and it reminds me of another one of Jesus’ stories, the one about the prodigal son that is only in the Gospel of Luke. That son squandered everything and came home expecting to grovel and scrape as a slave but instead is welcomed with open arms. Today, the son in Matthew’s Gospel who says “no” but then turns around choosing to do “yes.” He is a prodigal, too. He comes to his senses. He does the work he was asked to do. In both Gospels, a son turns around. In both cases, repentance—turning around—shows that the life of faith is as much an act of the will as is act of the heart. Living faithfully is depends on the deliberate choice to live in concert with God—especially when we don’t “feel like it.” Faith it turns out is both an act of the heart and an act of the will. And that means that we choose not only to believe but we choose how to act on those beliefs. Before long, we learn that our faith is not faith until we choose to act faithfully.

That’s something the Alabama police chief and judge may, in their good intention, may have missed. Or maybe it’s what they hope for. But try as we might, you can’t force people to believe—and the vineyard is not just for sitting and listening to the farmer talk about grapes. They’ve solved the “will” problem—church or jail—but the “heart” and the “action” part--what people do with their belief—they can’t control that. And that makes all the difference.

I wonder about the 56 churches that signed on this program. I wonder if they are ready for the local check-kiter, petty thief, or the chronic “drunk and disorderly” to actually be sitting in their pews. Because, I don’t know about you but I notice that sometimes we get nervous when someone who once said “no” and who now says “yes” to God and is trying to walk a new way comes and sits among us. We are not sure if we can believe it and we have a hard time forgetting that original “no.” And how we act towards people who are new to church…let alone faith…makes all the difference in that person’s success in living out a new-found, but hard-won, faith.

Have you ever noticed that there are two doors in many churches—ours included—a front door and a back door? Both are painted red…for welcome…which is good. And many of us come in the back door because it’s near the parking lot. But there are some people—actually quite a few—who come through those back entrances all the time who would never think of coming in the front doors…the nice carved ones that lead to this sanctuary. They are people who come to the four twelve-step groups that now meet here every week or who eat in the soup kitchen. They are people, especially in the AA groups, who are attempting one step at a time to turn their lives around. Who are attempting after a life of saying “no” to finally say “yes” to God. And yet… sometimes we “front door” Christians have a hard time accepting that those people who have come in another way really belong with “us.” Which makes sense, because they are not so sure either they are worthy to sit in here with us.

Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel that we are all of us sent into the same vineyard. Sooner or later, we all have to come to terms with the fact that all of us in word or deed have said “no” to God somewhere along the way, and all of us have had to come to our senses and choose to follow him anyway. When you get right down to it, our stories are not so different after all.

Don’t be shocked by this: everyone sins. That’s because we are human. We promise that we will strive to live faithfully and we know that we will fail. We will say “yes” and do “no” At the same time, in our baptismal covenant we say that "when" we sin we will return—we will say “no” and then do “yes.” Christians more than anyone know (or should) that we are not perfect. At the same time, we Christians rejoice when the sons and daughters of God who have led life unconscious of God, or who have led lives saying "no" turn and join the other workers in God’s vineyard. It should not take a local judge to tell us this, but we, the church, exist for those who do not yet belong. We exist so that the vineyard is there ready for the latecomer and for the newcomer to join in God’s gracious harvest.

I smell a gift subscription....

2011-09-16T20:20:00.003-04:00

h/t "Friends of Jake"

A table turning experience

2011-09-16T14:22:00.000-04:00

Thirty-five years ago today, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church passed the legislation that made possible the ordination of women to the diaconate, the priesthood and the episcopacy.

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a family who are church shopping. It was a tables-turning experience. Here's why:

This husband and wife first came to Trinity while I was on vacation. They are both Roman Catholics who have reached their tipping point with the church of their birth. They are distressed about the decade-long scandals--in particular, the continued inability of the hierarchy to "own up" (as they put it) to their responsibility in the continuing problem. They spoke of the inherent sexism within that polity. These were former RCIA instructors who realized they could no longer tow the party line nor continue to raise their children there. They had been to some Lutheran churches, but felt that the Episcopal Church might be more their cup o' tea..

They really liked Trinity. They started visiting during my vacation. They came once or twice after I came back. Then they stopped. I happened to call them to invite them to our parish picnic and this was when the hemming and hawing began.

You see, when I was away, my supply clergy were all women. The couple realized that I would be the only priest for the bulk of the year. They didn't want to offend me, but after some patient coaxing they finally fessed up that one of the things that they want to demonstrate to their daughters and son is that women can serve at the altar, that priesthood is not reserved for men alone and that in the baptized life men are not privileged over women. They wanted to show their children a church where priests could be moms as well as "Fathers." So they were looking for a church with at least one woman priest on staff.

Ah, I said, I understand.

When I was a child, my parents--having grown up in the South during the Jim Crow era--wanted my brother and me to experience a church where racial integration was the norm and not a novelty. We lived in an all-white suburb that was fighting any hint of integration. They did not want to relive those battles. So they changed churches. (Eventually, we'd change towns, too.) To do that, we drove past two or three suburban Episcopal churches to get to my home parish in the city. So I appreciate what these parents are trying to do.

Looking at their address, I suggested three other parishes in the area which are multiple staff parishes with at least member of the clergy staff is a woman...one of these is a parish where all the full-time paid clergy are female. I told them that there are many parishes in the diocese where the only priest is a woman, some within driving distance. If their desire was to convey to their children a church where it is normal for women and men to serve together as equals, they had lots of choices. I'm curious if any these places become their new church home.

So, there it is. I have now had the experience of a family choosing not to come to my church based, at least in part, on my gender. But there is a difference: They didn't hiss at me, spit at me, claw my hands during communion, or tell me that my orders weren't real--as my sister clergy experienced in my seminary days and beyond. But the tables were indeed turned, and it was a blessing.

A North Korean cruise ship.

2011-09-14T08:51:00.009-04:00

I am trying to imagine what a trip on a North Korean cruise ship would be like.

Everyone sleeps in a giant hold, except the captain, who gets his own room. And there is not enough food to go around, except for the captain and the armed marines who are there instead of the ship's stewards. Since the ship is also a giant freighter, there is a lot of room for group calisthenics. If you don't like it, there is an alternative: down in the bunkers where you may get a good cardiovascular workout shoveling coal. And when the cruise ship makes a port of call, no one can get off or even look outside, except the captain, who will come back and tell everyone what he saw.

Everyone will be grateful.

How many Muslims will have to say "I'm sorry" before we will forgive?

2011-09-11T06:53:00.013-04:00

Proper 19A- Matthew 18:21-35

Today on the tenth anniversary of the terrible attacks in New York, Shankesville, and Arlington, there will be many virtuous words spoken at ceremonies all around the country. There will be words like honor, courage, sacrifice, duty, community, and, yes, remembrance and hope. But it takes Jesus to use the word many dare not—or cannot—say: forgiveness.

Leave it to Jesus—through a strange coincidence of lectionary, calendar and culture—to say the unmentionable word. He reminds us on this most solemn day that the heart of the Christian faith, the whole purpose of God’s redeeming work—God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ and his ministry, suffering, death and resurrection—is forgiveness.

But how can we forgive? Can we forgive 9/11 anymore than our parents and grandparents could forgive Pearl Harbor? Maybe not but do you remember who were some of the first people to come to New York within weeks of the attacks and offer a word of condolence to people devastated by terror and destruction? Elderly residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who survived the explosion of atomic bombs over their cities 56 years before, that’s who. They came to the City in later in the fall of 2001 to meet groups of survivors and loved ones. Their explicit message: we survived; we lived; now we offer you both comfort and wisdom from what we have learned. Their implicit message: If they can forgive, perhaps…?

We have come to think of forgiveness as a ritual act of letting someone off the hook. When we are caught with our hands in proverbial cookie jar, we expect a little finger wag and a knowing smile with a firm but winking “don’t do it again.” But applied to anything really, really big--where lives or fortunes or egos are at stake-- we find ourselves saying “You’re not going to let them get away with that, are you?”

To which the reply is—who said that forgiveness is letting anybody get away with anything?

William Loader, a Uniting Church pastor in Australia, wrote about this Gospel lesson: “The reduction of the gospel to forgiveness of sins misses the point of the gospel which is about making people whole." Forgiveness is not about scores kept and scorecards being wiped clean. Forgiveness is about making whole.

When God forgives, God makes whole. When we forgive, we participate in God’s wholeness.
Today’s Gospel is the classic story of Peter asking his Master how often we should forgive. What’s the upper threshold of forgiveness? Jesus’ answer: there is no upper threshold of forgiveness. No ceiling. No tipping point. Instead, the question is: what can we do to participate in God’s wholeness?

The Owner who forgives the slave in Jesus’ story, is already something of a sap. He must have been a person extravagant in lending, because the slave has amassed an impossible debt. Ten thousand talents is a sum great than all of the holdings of King Herod in Jesus’ time. And when he has reached his tipping point, when he can bear no more debt, he decides to throw the slave, and all his family, into debtors prison and auction off the goods. The slave pleads for mercy, and receives it.

But, perhaps thinking that he’d better start paying down that principle, he goes and shakes down another slave to whom the first slave lent about 100 days of wages—throwing him in the same prison the first slave escaped.

Of course, the Owner catches wind of this and throws the first slave In jail and tosses away the key.

The problem with the Slave in Jesus’ parable is that he thinks that forgiveness is only about having the score card wiped clean, about being let off the hook. He was free to be as selfish as ever because he saw forgiveness as an escape from punishment. What the Slave did not learn was that forgiveness changes us. As he was forgiven for an unpayable debt, so he was to forgive extravagantly.

The lesson in Matthew is that as we Christians have experienced extravagant forgiveness in Jesus Christ. Now we are to share that same extravagance with others. Not just the ones who we catch with their hands in the cookie jar—everyone. Forgiveness is at the heart of living the Gospel.

Bishop Andy Doyle of Texas notes how Christians love to talk about “the Grace of God and how we are exonerated from our own sins and slavery to them;” and yet, the most obvious part of the passage is also the most difficult. We are to act with others as God has acted with us. We are to be as magnanimous a forgiving agent as Jesus Christ was upon his cross: "Forgive them for they know not what they do." It was not for nothing that Jesus put at the heart of his model prayer that we are supposed to pray all the time: “forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.”

Since this part of Matthew’s Gospel is all about life in the Church, we might be tempted that the only people we are supposed to forgive are other Christians. Well, looking at the last ten years, we’ve done a really good of that haven’t we? No, on this point Jesus gives us very little wiggle room.

You see, we focus on the person who wrongs us. Jesus is much more concerned that, instead of keeping score of wrongs that we live in the way of Jesus. “Be humble Jesus tells us. Do not despise others. Do not allow anyone to be lost or to stumble. Seek after the one who walks away. If another person sins against you go and be reconciled with them. You go and find them. Take others and find them. Go out and find them. Be careful what slavery you cast on others as it will bind you. Receive the forgiveness of debt and likewise forgive others.” (Doyle)

In the run up to this afternoon’s Interfaith Service of Remembrance and Hope, I have had the experience of being chewed out by people telling me that they can’t bring themselves to take part in the service because (a) it was not patriotic enough or (b) we invited a Muslim to take part. While I would state my case, in both cases this was not a moment to change minds because the pain that dwells behind the anger was too great. One person's major complaint to me--coming from a first responder who was there--was this: The Muslim's never apologized. Never mind the Islamic religious leaders who condemned the violence. Never mind the Muslims who also died innocent victims of the same attacks and worked the pile and cared for the injured. These were good people, who live good lives and try hard to be faithful. Their losses were so great and their experience on 9/11 so intense, one must not attempt to convince, one can only accompany. And for that, I'll take the chewing out. Because for them, I had crossed some line. We both knew it. And they were not going to let me off the hook--and their responses haunts me.

But if I were Jesus—which I am not—and if I were faster on my feet, I might have asked a question that comes to me in my dreams: “How many Muslims must say ‘I’m sorry’ for you to forgive? Seventy-times seven? Seven? One? One million? How many?”

You see we have a choice: we can organize our whole lives around the injury, we can build our own existence around either re-living or avoiding past hurts. We can live under a constant state of threat. Or we can face the truth of the injury, walk through the pain and the grief together, hear our conflicting and over-lapping stories and we can build our lives around reconciliation. That may mean facing the person who has injured us, not letting them off the hook, but doing whatever we can to seek out reconciliation.

Nation-states and communities will do what they do to keep us safe, but at the end of the day peace does not rest on safety. It rests on reconciliation. And because we cannot do what God requires of us without God's help, we have to rest on that extravagant mercy, that extravagant forgiveness to shape us, changes us and direct to bring that same realistic, sharp-eyed forgiveness to each other.

As we once again look at the image of the burning towers and the towering smoke of their collapse, we have the same choice as our forebears did in the desert as they followed that flaming pillar of God’s presence. We can walk the path of revenge and retribution, holding to ourselves the right to judge and inviting God to do things our way. Or we can journey into the desert, repent of our own need to exact vengeance and enter God’s way, God’s kingdom.

Christ brings us a different covenant. Not a land to be conquered, but a life to be lived and a creation reconciled to God. Jesus forgives. And to do that he walked into the maw of human sin and darkness, all so that we might know the extravagance of God’s generous love and share that mercy as extravagantly with all God’s people.

God for President?

2011-08-31T08:34:00.002-04:00

H/T MadPriest and all his minions.

Radical prayers, radical declaration, radical theology

2011-07-02T22:09:00.005-04:00

Easton, Pennsylvania was one of the first places to hear the Declaration of Independence read in public, on the Sunday after its' passage. So the first Sunday after Independence Day is celebrated in our town as "Heritage Day." Trinity, Easton does a ton of activities for Heritage Day: after an ecumenical worship service, we go hear the Declaration read. Trinity will hold a Festival of Patriotic Songs...and we'll open the church for tours, we have a concession stand on Center Square and in the evening is Sitgreaves Coffee House in the parish hall followed by fireworks.

So for us in Easton, our celebration of Independence Day is a kind of tip of the hat to mass communication, 18th Century Style...acknowledging how long it took for the document to make it's way up the Delaware from Philadelphia.

What I did not know was that "The first reading of the Declaration of Independence outside of a governmental setting was in William White's living room, to the vestry of Christ Church, Philadelphia."

My bishop, Paul Marshall of Bethlehem, included this factoid in a reflection on the special and radical nature of the Episcopal Church's inclusion of Independence Day as one of our main feasts of the Church as well as the radical nature of the Declaration itself.

Here are some excerpts:

Monday is a red-letter day in our calendar (=holy day of obligation), although sadly, it is not observed by some rectors.

I BELIEVE THAT THE PATRIOTIC OBLIGATION of our time is return to Stoic values of character rather than epicurean characteristics of greed, narcissism, or entitlement, as the defining mark of an American citizen. We are really not called to be an extension of the British bourgeoisie, the Gilded Age notwithstanding. If you want to observe the long weekend meaningfully, deny yourself something big, spend time relating to your loved ones, and do not purchase anything except food and a little fuel. If your town has a patriotic exercise of some kind, attend it--with your children and grandchildren. If you possibly can, make something by hand or personally pack a box for Good Will.

If you don't have a church service available on Independence Day, you might set aside a moment to give thanks for this extraordinary land and to contemplate for a moment the collect for the day:

"Lord God Almighty, in whose Name the founders of this country won liberty for themselves and for us, and lit the torch of freedom for nations then unborn: Grant, we beseech thee, that we and all the people of the this land may have grace to maintain these liberties in righteousness and peace, through Jesus Christ our Lord," etc.

What I like about this prayer it that it assumes that the perception of liberty (as opposed to mere freedom) is an evolving concept, and one that needs diligent preservation as it develops and spreads. Democrat or Republican, the last two administrations and five congresses have trod heavily on our liberties and need a bit of patriotic smacking down. (I imagine a sherry- not a tea-party here.) Politics is about the acquisition of power; democracy is about its dispersal, and there is no middle ground. I predict that my grandchildren will live under a kind of plutocratic fascism (with small hints of socialism as a sop to the masses) unless our citizens have a spiritual and social revival. The Koch brothers and the tax-and-spend people all need to be controlled. The legislature needs to reign in a rogue Supreme Court. A thoughtful church could lead such a movement toward self-control...

...Those of us who have lost loved-ones, or seen them maimed, in the defense of our national values cannot let our nation further decay into hedonism, socialism, or oligarchy. Unlike most of the UK's former colonies, we were formed as a nation on theologically self-evident principles. We need to insist that those whom we elect begin once again to honor those principles without sensational rhetoric or scapegoating.

In a post-script, Bishop Paul reflects on the Declaration of Independence itself.

Of course, the writers of the Constitution weren't quite happy with that "abolish" part--it is illegal to speak of overthrowing our government the way we overthrew the colonial oppressors, no matter how far the government strays. 'Twas ever thus. Thus the need for the sherry party. Or Harriet Beecher Stowe. Or both.

Conservative Christians of course choke on the idea that government gets its power from the governed, rather, than directly from God (so much for Paul and Luther). To be an American patriot is to be a theological revisionist. And we all know what that leads to.

Read it all here.

It's simple. What he did was harassment.

2011-06-17T17:02:00.006-04:00

Okay. This is the first and last time I am going to weigh in on this. Now that Anthony Weiner has resigned...after one of the weirdest three weeks in American politics (and that's sayin' something)...I am amazed that all these writers, pundits and politicos have missed the core of what the former congressman did wrong.

Everyone, including Mr. Wiener, agrees that what he did was sleazy, wrong and stupid. Most think it was sleazy. Most put the wrongness in with the stupid because he both left a trail and got caught. But I have only heard one commentator and only one blogger (granted, I can't read them all) say clearly why Wiener needed to resign--if not go to jail.

It was not just the "sexting." Nor was it the pictures. It wasn't even lying after being caught. None of these things were "the problem" for which he needed to step down.

One can debate if he broke his marriage vows (I think he did) but even that is not the issue.

The problem was sexual harassment.

How did the congressman get the e-mails or twitter addresses of the women to whom he sent his pictures? They contacted him with a note saying "I really liked your speech" or "I really admire your stand on health care" or "Thank you for taking this or that stand on the House floor." And his response? A lewd text, tweet or picture.

He had access and opportunity to do what he did because of his position of power, and he abused that power for his own gratification.

A week ago, Wormwood's Doxy said it much better than me.

Anthony Weiner is a sexual harasser. He sent 21-year-old college student, Gennette Cordova, an unsolicited sexual photo of himself.
Unsolicited.

That’s really important—because it goes to the heart of what so many people do not seem to “get” about sexual harassment.

I’ve had this argument with more than one person over the last couple of days. I’ve argued with intelligent people—intelligent women, no less!—who have basically said to me, “I like his politics, so what he did doesn’t matter.” Or…even worse to me, in some ways: “It’s not sexual harassment unless you tell him to stop and he refuses.”

No.

NO.

HELL NO!!

Unless that young woman sent him a message saying “I want to see pictures of you naked,” he had no business sending her suggestive photos. She says she didn’t. Even he admits she didn’t. He says he sent the photo as “part of a joke.”

That makes him a sexual harasser.

That's why Weiner needed to resign.

How's that again?

2011-06-16T13:50:00.002-04:00

I always thought it was "the Dali Lama walks up to a hot dog wagon and says to the guy...."

h/t to Church Mouse.

Joy!

2011-06-15T12:59:00.004-04:00

I am, as some of you may know, a real fan of Rube Goldberg-type devices. This one is deceptive in its simplicity, and a strangely meditative take on an old favorite.

Spiritual energy put to work

2011-06-14T07:51:00.007-04:00

The other day I passed a convoy of trucks driving north on Route 33 towards the Poconos. Each flatbed truck had a huge white piece of machinery on it. Soon I realized that these trucks were carrying the finished parts for a huge wind-turbine…we used to say wind mill. If you drive south out of Wilkes-Barre, you catch a glimpse of a few of these huge white propellers on towers that slowly turn producing electricity. Amazing, isn’t it? We can take the energy of the wind and turn into electricity.

Everyone is talking about energy…where to get it and how to use it. When I filled up my car the other day, I was aware that the cost of energy has gone up. I notice that there a few homes and businesses around that use the energy of the sun to heat or cool their buildings or make electricity of both.

One thing that separates humans from other creatures is that we are pretty good harnessing energy. One of our ancestors took the potential energy in wood and turned into a campfire for cooking. Someone first harnessed the energy of the wind to sail a ship or used a rushing river to turn a wheel to grind grain into wheat or drive a loom for cloth. We’ve unlocked energy from gas or coal to make things go. Now we’ve come full circle, with these great wind turbines that use the wind to make electricity.

Energy is all around us. The challenge for us is how to put it to work.

We have three pictures of Pentecost today. In one, we see potential spiritual energy. In another we see spiritual energy put to work. And in another we hear about the engine that makes it all go “vroom!”

In the Gospel of John, the disciples are in the upper room on that first Easter evening, and the Risen Jesus gives them the breath of the Holy Spirit and the authority to use it. That’s the first picture.

In Acts, we see the second image. The disciples along with other people from throughout the world were gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate the Jewish festival of Pentecost when “Fiery tongues appeared on them, and all of them were filled with the Holy Spirit." The Spirit ignited a new movement and a new people. The energy of the spirit was released and suddenly these people had power to overcome the former languages of division and competition with a new language of God's love and Spirit. The potential energy of the spirit was released and the church was born.

One of the most ancient hymns of the church goes like this, "Come, Holy Spirit, our souls inspire...and lighten with celestial fire." It is a prayer that the energy released on that first Pentecost day might continue to burn within the church. It is a prayer that God's spirit will continue in each of us and in the whole Body of Christ, so that we might live our faith with zest and commitment and do the work of mission boldly and imaginatively.

All the time, everyday Christians in everyday places are turning the potential spiritual energy we all have into amazing acts of courage, hope, and compassion that makes a real difference in the lives of people and communities. All of us can take the wind and fire of the Spirit that is burning in us—that started in our faith and baptism and is fed and banked as we practice the sacramental life—and put it to work guiding, inspiring, directing, renewing, advocating, re-making us in the very likeness of God, bringing mercy and compassion and hope to God’s people everywhere.

And that brings us to today’s third image of Pentecost in Paul’s letter to the Corinthian Christians. Here we learn what makes the whole thing go “vroom!” What makes the potential energy of John’s Gospel become the spiritual work of that first Pentecost in Acts is this turbine called the Body of Christ. “There are varieties of gifts,” Paul teaches, “but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.” We are what God uses to turn spiritual energy into God’s work, and we are the ones whom God uses to make the lights go on in people’s lives.

Today is another busy day in the life of Trinity Church…a day that shows us how the wind of the Holy Spirit has turned the turbine of this parish to on lights in people’s lives. In a few minutes, we will give thanks to God for the leadership of Mike and Dotty Viglione who for over ten years chaired our Mission and Outreach committee and helped make this parish a remarkable powerhouse of compassion and imagination. With their faithful, prayerful leadership Trinity has come to be known as a place of caring and hope, where the potential spiritual energy of many in this parish is unlocked in ways that have made a real positive difference in the lives of people in Easton, in the diocese and around the world.

We will give thanks for the ministry of our choir who have in their prayer, their hard work and dedication enriched our worship and opened the creative, musical and poetic heart of God for many of us. So often this year, I have heard stories--and some of you have told me of stories you've heard or experienced-- of people whose hearts have been warmed in that strange way of the Holy Spirit and drawn people into closer relationship with God and each other in Christ.

And today we use for the first time two new chalices bought with All Saints Funds in memory of Helga Farrell who died and entered the larger life a year and a half ago. This gift will beautify our worship and tangibly feed and nourish us sacramentally. The potential energy of memory and story and will be weekly unleashed as God’s people are fed and nurtured and sent into the world renewed.

And that’s not all: Today groups will gather to continue work towards the fall bazaar and another group will plan next year’s children’s chapel. We have completed another Unbinding the Gospel group, with people who have discovered new ways to pray, and have shared their faith stories with one another. We are getting ready for a very active Heritage Day. This summer the Property Committee, led by Andrew Brodt—a Boy Scout working for the rank of Eagle—will renovate and repair the choir room. And there is so much more.

In these and many other ways, we show that what Paul told the Christians in Corinth is true: we have a variety of gifts, activated by the Holy Spirit to build up the body of Christ. This is how the real power of the Holy Spirit is unlocked and becomes new vision, new energy and new hope.

The ancient prayer is still "Come Holy Spirit, our souls inspire and lighten with celestial fire...." We all have in us the energy, the power of the Holy Spirit. The Risen Jesus breathed on the disciples on that first Easter and gave them the Holy Spirit. That same spirit comes to us and is sealed in us at baptism. But our prayer is that this spiritual energy will be unleashed. We yearn for God’s power to be let loose and light up our hearts and all creation, and make a real difference in the world. It turns out that God has a turbine, an engine, to make that work real and alive. We, the body of Christ, are the ones whom God uses to let loose God’s energy and make it all go “vroom!”

Pentecost, Year A: Acts 2:1-13, I Cor. 12:3b-13; John 20:18-23

Not "good-bye." A beginning.

2011-06-04T23:34:00.010-04:00

This is not “good-bye.”

Jesus’ ascension is a moment of culmination and fulfillment and promise. But it is not good-bye.

At first blush, it sure looks as if Jesus is leaving… in our lesson from Acts, we hear about Jesus being taken up into heaven, and todays Gospel from John shows us Jesus talking about going back to the father…it sure sounds like “good-bye!”

When we hear the Ascension, especially as described in Acts, we can’t help but think of movies with a dramatic departure scene. Remember E.T. The Extra-terrestrial when he tells Eliot to “be good” before the tearful (and light filled) farewell? I like Casablanca when Rick and Lt. Renault walk off into the fog of what could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Jesus’ ascension is not “good-bye.” Jesus’ ascension is in a very real sense only the beginning.

Have you ever noticed how many Christians find ways of focusing on Jesus’ absence? A few weeks ago we were all caught up with the misguided antics of Pastor Harold Camping and his absolute certainty that the rapture would come on May 22nd. The whole silly ruckus reminded me of the disciples in Acts who look up at Jesus and say “now?”

Instead, the followers of Jesus are called back to earth and given a job: starting close to home in Jerusalem and then gradually spiraling out into the rest of the known world, they are to tell the Good News. Matthew’s Gospel says that they are to baptize and teach. This is not good-bye. It is a commissioning.

John’s Gospel, like the other three, is written to a resurrection community; a community to whom Jesus has given the reigns. John's is the last and the latest of the Gospels, written to a group of Christians who are more than a generation past the ministry of Jesus and even the apostles. The original witnesses are passing away and the church is now in it for the long haul.

So in the Gospel today, we hear Jesus praying a farewell prayer. John is teaching us about what Jesus is up to and what our job is. And he frames his description in terms of how estates were owned and run in the first and second century. God, in this prayer, is a patron—the owner of everything—like the owner of a farm or estate, to whom everything produced and sold belongs. Jesus is like the steward. He is the one to whom the job of doling out the master’s resources and seeing to it that everyone is on the job. As the steward of the estate, he is also the one who takes care of the people doing the work. We, the disciples for whom Jesus prays, are the ones who live on the estate and do the work. We receive the resources to do the job and benefits of being under the master’s protection.

To understand grace in the New Testament, one must understand that this was how life was structured in the first century. Someone owns. Someone oversees on behalf of the master and takes care of the ordinary folk. And the ordinary folk pay tribute the master and do his work. That’s how it was in the first century and for much of human history.

Today, we work differently. Today, we do not see ourselves as beholden to anyone, but to understand what Jesus is praying in John’s Gospel, we must recognize that this is how it worked in the first and second centuries. It was a world in terms of interdependent relationships where everyone had a role and a job.

Knowing that, we can now see the radical thing about Jesus’ prayer. In his prayer Jesus changes the relationships. He is going back to the father, and he will care for us. But now we disciples are now the stewards of creation. We are the people who represent the master. We are the ones in whose hands God places the estate.

The ascension is not “good-bye,” it is an Easter appearance and most of all a commissioning of God’s people to do God’s work in God’s world. The ascension is a beginning because now it is possible for Christ who reigns to fill and transform all creation.

Here is how we do that:

We are a praying people. We are a people that Christ prays for. Imagine if we understood ourselves as a people that Jesus prays for. That means we know that we are not alone and that we are able—not self-sufficient, but competent to do God’s work. We are a people who pray because we are being prayed for. Our pattern of worship and prayer shows us again and again that we are a people being prayed for and cared for. We become mindful of our relationship with God in Christ.

We are a witnessing people. What we do points to Christ. Ever notice how many Christians point to an angry, vengeful, judging God? These folks take all their fear, anger and disappointment, dress them up in divine clothing, and then in God’s name tell us what we are doing wrong. Being a witness for Christ is entirely different: being a witness when we show off how God empowers us for justice, changes people at their core, and builds up our gifts.

Witnessing is also something the community of the faithful does. Each of us alone witnesses to the resurrection and ascended Jesus who fills all things. And all of us together are witnesses, too. People see Christ in each of us and in all of us. No one of us expresses the fullness of Christ, no one of us shows off the power and transformation of Christ. We all do. Each of us whose lives God touches show off Christ together.

We are a compassionate people. Being the stewards and being the workers of God’s reign means that we see the world more and more as God sees. We acknowledge and are present to the real pain in this world. And we confront the things that divide us knowing that we are already one with Christ as Christ is one with God. And we look out for those that no one else cares about. We find that when we listen for God in the voices of the weak and the poor we find ourselves walking with Jesus. We find that the God who has lifted our burdens is also lifting the burdens of those around us.

In these ways we are present to the world and the people God has given us.

It is not “good-bye.” It is a beginning. Everything is completed. All preparations are done. The incarnation, the crucifixion, the resurrection means that God and creation are reunited. Christ reigns victorious. Now Jesus has invited us—called us—to share in the job of stewarding creation. We are the living signs of Christ’s presence in this broken world. We are the visible sign of God in Christ filling all things and making them whole. We participate in Christ’s healing of the cosmos one relationship at a time. Not “good-bye,” a beginning.

The Seventh Sunday of Easter: Acts 1:6-14; John 17:1-11

Image: h/t Liturgy. Info here.

Time to get out of the bubble

2011-05-31T14:26:00.014-04:00

It was for me an Areopagus moment. Maybe you have had one of those? No, huh? I'll bet you might have, and didn't know it. My moment came when I was forced me out of my religious bubble and into the real world.

Last year I had an encounter that I still think about. Some of you may remember me talking about it. It happened one day last summer when I was walking through the mall. I was wearing my "official" clerical garb. I went to the cell phone kiosk to do something or other, and while I was there both another customer and the clerk treating me with a noticeable deference and even with good humor. After a lot of banter about phones with some religious humor thrown in, we parted company smiling.

As I was walking out of the mall, I saw a group of high school aged young men. One of them made eye contact with me and would not let go. This was not a friendly connection. His friends noticed his stare and turned to look. They all folded their arms and watched, waiting to see what would happen next.

He was wearing a black T-shirt that had on the front a red circle and slash over a cross over the caption "no bad religion." I decided that his stare and his shirt were connected. He was clearly trying to draw my attention. Maybe he wanted to stare me down. Instead, I decided to stop and ask about the shirt. After all, if I am going to wear the symbol of the church’s ordained ministry in public, I had better be able to take the brickbats as well as the bouquets.

I complimented him on his shirt. Then I asked him, “Tell me. What do you mean by ‘bad religion’?” What he said was "no bad religion, man!"

“Okay. I hear that. But what makes religion to you?” My hunch was that if the two of us could compare our lists of what constituted "bad religion", our lists would be more alike than different.

My list would start with violence and persecution perpetrated in God's name. I would also add the many examples of hatred that some justify on religious grounds. I also think that "bad religion" is religion that is uncritical or reactive or which puts institutional life ahead of people's well-being. Religion that excludes or belittles people based solely on race, gender or sexual orientation would be on my list of “bad religion.” Religion that doesn't drive us to leave a world better than how we found it is to me "bad religion".

Most of all, I wanted to know his story. What were his encounters with bad religion and what would constitute good religion to him? My hunch was that we probably shared a lot on that score, too--maybe more than he might have expected.

But we never got that far. His answer to my follow up query was only this: “Bad religion stinks.” (That’s not how he said it, but you get the idea.) And then he and his friends walked away. I guess he was not ready to step outside of his bubble, either. Which was a shame.

I thought of this as I read about the Paul’s encounter at the Areopagus, located on a place called Mars Hill in the ancient city of Athens, debating the philosophers in this religious marketplace. As I thought about the young man and his t-shirt in the mall—the Areopagus of our day—I realized that Paul stepped out his religious bubble and entered into a new world to share good news in a new way.

Paul had gone to Athens, the center of intellectual and religious life in Greece, and, for that matter, in the whole Roman world, to meet some friends. This was the place where Greeks worshipped their pantheon…their line-up of gods…they had a deity for every purpose…rain, war, fertility, you name it. To hedge their bets, they set up a temple to the god they had not discovered yet, the one that covered some reality that had not yet occurred to them.

In terms of religious experience, Paul may as well have been from another planet! Paul was a Jew—a Hellenized, cosmopolitan Jew, trained in both Greek philosophy and Hebrew tradition—and that meant that for him there is only one God. And the first commandment says that Jews only worshipped the one God and did not use idols of any kind. But he thought he knew who that Temple of the Unknown Deity might have pointed to.

Problem was that any one from the Greek and Roman world would have considered Paul at best strange and at worst a crazed zealot. Believing in only one God was foolhardy, narrow-minded and sacrilegious. They has strange and strict rules about food and things. Like all Jewish males, he was circumcised which was considered both gross and barbaric.

And Paul was one of those Christians who believed that God not only became human but that he died and rose again. He believed that everyone would experience resurrection someday.

Paul has some choices here.

He could have stayed away from Idol Central and stayed with his own kind. Which is what happened a lot: in many cities right up to our own day, people who think and worship alike often end up living in the same neighborhoods, or hang around the same pubs, or friend each other on Facebook.

Or he could have started trashing the place. Tearing down false idols certainly would have attracted attention! But he would have simply turned his space into an attack bubble...kind of like that thing that used to chase down Number 6 whenever the Prisoner tried to leave The Village. But he didn’t go there.

He could have just gone along to get along, as some of the folks back home in Jerusalem accused him of doing.

Instead, he chose to leave his bubble and engage them. He decided to tell them about Jesus of Nazareth, the messiah who lived and died and rose again. He decided to talk about how God was at work through Christ and wanted a relationship with everyone.

And if any kind of real meeting was to take place, everyone would have to step out of their bubble...at least a little bit.

Where do we start? How can we communicate the Gospel with any kind of effectiveness when we are all floating around in our own little bubbles? Paul’s encounter teaches us a few things.

The main thing is that all of us—each and every one of us—communicates the Gospel. Like it or not, once someone figures out that you are a Christian and that you take your religion even a little bit seriously, then you are communicating the Gospel. You don’t have to ring doorbells. And you don’t need to wear a clerical collar or a habit. Every day we all communicate the Gospel.

That’s good because, as Paul noticed about the Athenians, everyone is on a search for God. Know it or not, every one of us seeks meaning and purpose for their living. And when we do that, we are seeking to fill a God-shaped space in our hearts. And since that search is not always conscious, it affects our choices and behavior. So our quest for intimacy is also a quest to be known and loved. Our quest for more stuff is also a yearning to have our hearts filled. Our quest for recognition reflects a longing to be understood and valued. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Just as Paul looked around and saw in all the idols and temples a religious people yearning for meaning, purpose and connection, we can look around and see a lot of spiritually hungry people.

Today's Aeropagus is everywhere, not just on Mars Hill and not just in the mall. Only 17% of Americans go to church, synagogue or mosque, and yet the Gallup people tell us that 90+% of Americans think of themselves as spiritual. 78% say they pray and three quarters of Americans say they believe in God. So, just as we always communicate the Gospel, there are people all around us who are searching to fill a god-shaped space in their lives. We could rest on advertising or Facebook to get out the message and hope people step into our bubble. But as important as marketing is, it is not really what tells the story.

What fills the God-shaped space is when one person meets another person who is also on a journey of faith; because Jesus shows us that Godself is best shown in relationship.

God calls each of us—seeker and believer—to step out of our safe zones and to explore discovering God in the real world.

That means that, sooner or later we will have to step outside our bubble. Maybe you won’t encounter the stares of young men wearing t-shirts the way I did. But you might encounter a thank you from a person you’ve cared for, or driven to the hospital, or brought a meal to. You might have helped fill a God-shaped hole when you listened to a person when they were sad, or comforted them when they were alone. Maybe you have communicated the Gospel as you have been present to a person in trouble or as you have taught a child.

And you’ll know you’re out of the bubble when you have to name who it is you are serving and why. Maybe you’ll be asked why you did that small act of kindness. Maybe someone will tell you of a need and you will offer to pray for them. Or maybe in some small way you’ll be asked about God who animates and fills that space in your heart. Maybe you will have a talk about how you can have both strong faith and big questions at the very same time. Whatever happens, we all have the power to be a messenger of good news in the middle of God’s hurting world. Whether they ask you why you’re doing it or not, it will help you be and live the Gospel when you know the story of how God is filling your God-shaped space.

Sooner or later, you’ll have to leave the bubble.

6 Easter A, May 29, 2011 - Acts 17:22-31

The Slee memo and the Feast of St. Augustine of Canterbury

2011-05-26T10:56:00.013-04:00

Yesterday, Andrew Brown wrote a report in Guardian describing a memo from the late Dean of Southwark Cathedral, the Very Rev Colin Slee, in which Slee describes the machinations of the House of Bishops in the Church of England over the question of whether a gay man can be elevated to the Episcopate.

It is not a pretty picture. We see the Archbishop of Canterbury, a man who can be given to great kindness, as well as the Archbishop of York, brow-beating, intimidating and threatening other members of the nominating committee who disagreed with him. We see Williams' throw a friend, the Very Rev. Jeffrey John, under the bus--not once but multiple times. (Even though Williams' claims to have "no problem" with celibate gay men being bishops.) We hear how England's Equality Law is manipulated and parsed for the state church of England. We see how Episcopal appointments happen in back rooms and in secret. (Which makes me appreciate our sometimes messy electoral system with the checks and balance of Standing Committees and/or General Convention.)

It appears that Williams and Sentamu will apply the same technique to the ordination of women to the Episcopate. They plan to ignore the General Synod and continue Flying Bishops after female bishops are regularized, ensuring at once the continuance of division and the demeaning of women clergy.

Let's assume for just a moment that the motivation for this behavior is a passion to hold the church together. Let's assume that this is done to allow those who don't agree with the ordination of gays or the blessing of same sex unions (or the ordination of women) room to stay in Communion. The way to do that is not to give into bullying, neither is it to bully those with whom you disagree.

Over the last decade, we have seen Williams' approach to this whole crisis. We have seen that it has made everything worse by rewarding bad behavior and consistently promoting a legalistic solution to a pastoral problem.

Every time he has given in to the folks most angry at "these issues" they have not only demanded more, they have participated less. At the end of the memo, Slee wrote the Archbishop about the Jeffrey John fiasco in 2003: "I still believe that had you stood your ground at the time, all that has followed would have been a short-lived blip instead of a deeper and deeper morass."

He has ignored the power dynamics--and the reality that the division in this country was funded by outside right-wing political groups--as so much "conspiracy theory" and still has given in to them. He has rarely refused a chance to insult or ignore the Episcopal Church.

I used to think that those who sowed division counted on Williams' good intentions to be used against him. I used to think that he "understood" the obscure levers of power in Lambeth and was really working for a good outcome, but in secret. But no more. What may have started as a failure of nerve has now become the ground he chooses to make his stand.

This memo demonstrates that the task of preserving the institution is not the same thing as preserving unity. He is choosing institutional stability over the hard work of Communion every time; and, sadly, it only makes the problem worse.

I don't understand how it is that a smart guy like Rowan apparently can't grasp that Communion is neither the same as conformity nor dependent upon agreement. Christ's promise that we all will be one has in fact been accomplished--on the Cross, in the resurrection and in the gift of the Holy Spirit. Our communion is built on common role the baptized share as disciples of Jesus Christ. The fact that we follow Christ and carry out His mission even when we disagree, that we share in His body and blood even as we differ, is the real sign of our unity.

(Lesley's blog talks about this, too.)

Today I found this reflection by Lowell Grisham, on the feast of Augustine of Canterbury (which is today), which describes well--and in thoroughly Biblical terms--what it really means to be in Communion and how the earliest Church handled clashes over apparently life-or-death theological and pastoral issues.

On the day we hear about the ugliness inside Lambeth, this comes as a useful corrective:

Paul wrote to a mixed community of Christians who came from different backgrounds and who had strongly held opinions. The major conflict in Paul's churches was between Jewish and Gentile Christians. Jewish Christians observed the sabbath and the kosher laws of their tradition and of the Hebrew scriptures. For Gentile Christians, every day was a workday, the sabbath was no better than another day.

Gentile Christians did not observe kosher dietary laws. However, for some Gentile Christians, their conscience was bothered by meat sold in the public market, for that was meat that had been dedicated to Apollo or one of the gods that they formerly followed. For others, there was no bother because they now believed there was no such thing as idols.

"Let all be fully convinced in their own minds," said Paul. Diversity in many of these beliefs is fine. Everyone does not have to come to the same conclusion about everything. Honor your conscience, and live together in unity with charity toward one another, Paul advised. "Those who observe the day, observe it in honor of the Lord. Also those who eat, eat in honor of the Lord, since they give thanks to God; while those who abstain, abstain in honor of the Lord and give thanks to God.... So then, each of us will be accountable to God."

Pope Gregory gave Augustine great flexibility when dealing with the various traditions that he encountered when he arrived as "Archbishop of the English Nation." Augustine was not charged with enforcing Roman customs on the indigenous Celtic churches, but rather he was to honor whatever he could "profitably learn from the various Churches." People are more important than things.

Later in Romans we will see Paul urge those whom he calls the "strong" to be especially flexible with those whom he calls the "weak." He urges those who have a more mature freedom in the faith -- those whose consciences are not bothered by kosher laws or scruples about meat from the public markets -- to be charitable toward their more scrupulous brothers and sisters. When you are eating at home among your own family, feel free to eat what you wish. But when you are eating among the scrupulous, the "weak," refrain from eating what might trouble their conscience, even though your conscience is free.

Yet elsewhere, Paul does draw some strong lines. Especially over circumcision. Jewish Christians, following their tradition and the requirements of the Hebrew scripture, were certain that circumcision was a required sign and practice for those who would be acknowledged as God's people. They pointed to the testimony of scripture and tradition, and demanded that uncircumcised Gentiles be circumcised in order to be incorporated into the community of the church. Paul was vehement in his opposition. "No!," he said. Life in Christ was liberation from such legalistic traditions. Jewish Christians could not require circumcision from their Gentile brothers and sisters, regardless of their convictions, their traditions, scriptures or beliefs. For Gentiles to do so would nullify the glorious freedom that Christ has gained for us through the cross.

Paul did not say that Jewish Christians should refrain from circumcising in their own families, nor did he say that they should remove the signs of circumcision, as some Hellenized Jews did. But he also did not say that the Gentiles should be "flexible" with regard to the scruples of their Jewish Christian neighbors a be circumcised themselves for the sake of the scruples and conscience of their brothers and sisters.

I think these discussions and controversies are helpful guides for the present church and our own Archbishop of Canterbury. We are in a discussion in the Anglican Communion over the scruples of those whose consciences are troubled by the grace and fruitfulness that others have found in the faithful committed relationships of their gay brothers and sisters. "Let all be fully convinced in their own minds," seems like good counsel from St. Paul.

Those of us who recognize God's blessing in gay relationships may believe that heterosexual marriage is "no better than" the lifelong commitments of those of homosexual orientation, while other parts of the church may not. Let those who observe their commitments, observe them in honor of the Lord. Let those who are strong, whose scruples are not troubled by heterosexism, be charitable toward those whose consciences are troubled by the freedom Christ gives us. We need not require an acknowledgment that violates their consciences.

But, there is a line, as Paul insisted in the controversy about circumcision. Those who have scruples about their tradition of heterosexual-only relationships may not require "circumcision" of their gay brothers and sisters. They must not force their gay brothers and sisters to be circumcised "like them" in order to be welcome in the church's fellowship. Heterosexually oriented Christians cannot demand of homosexually oriented Christians to be either celibate or married unnaturally to someone of the opposite sex in order to be part of the Christian fellowship. To do so would nullify the glorious freedom that Christ has gained for us through the cross. To do so would ignore the fruits of the Spirit that we recognize in the committed, loving relationships of our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things." (Galatians 5:22-23)

Heaven comes to earth

2011-05-21T23:10:00.017-04:00

It is the silly season in the religion world again.

I am assuming since you are reading this then you were not taken up at the appointed hour. By now, you have no doubt heard about the Rev. Harold Camping, the radio preacher who said that the world was going to end starting at 6 pm Pacific Time on May 21, 2011. Everyone has been having fun with this…including me. Late night comics, satirists and columnists, reporters and commentators and clergy have been making all kinds of jokes out of this.

It’s easy to see why. But I have to admit that as much fun as I have been having making fun of those who have been buying billboards and radio time to tell us about the end of the world, I had mixed feelings about all this. The media makes it look like every Christian believes like Camping…or at least every evangelical…when the truth is that Camping and his follower represent the tiniest sliver of Christian believers.

On the other end of the spectrum came an interview with physicist Stephen Hawking. He said that there is no heaven at all and that in his view those who believe in one are only in denial about death.

Somewhere between these two polls—one of total denial and one that envisions a dramatic and violent end at the hands of an angry God—is perhaps where most of us live.

Every week, we say together that line in the creed “We believe that he will come again….” And then comes today’s lessons. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells us he is going to prepare to a place for us and that God’s house is made up of many rooms. And in Acts we hear Stephen, the first Deacon of the Church and the first martyr, as the crowd is about stone him that he has a vision of Jesus coming from his throne in heaven to come get him. When he proclaims his vision out loud, it is the last straw for those who have seized him and they pick up stones and kill him.

Acts tells us that the Church was growing in leaps and bounds. Stephen got into trouble for doing "wonders and signs." He is hauled into court for telling people about Christ. You can read his testimony in Acts chapter 7. But before he launches on his re-telling of the history of God and Israel and the story of people’s response to God—a not too flattering picture--we learn but before he speaks, "his face was like the face of an angel."

But an angelic countenace did not save Stephen from trouble. In those days, when someone said something outrageous, they did not drag him before John Stewart and the the internet for ridicule. Nope, in those days when someone said something like “God requires us to change” they did not make jokes. They took him out and killed him in the most up close and personal way they could think of.

In Acts, Stephen’s message of salvation through Jesus Christ was intimately tied to the mercy he helped the Church give to widows and orphans--people who were tossed aside to fend for themselves with no family, no identity and no hope. His vision of Christ coming in glory was also a vision of God ready to forgive everyone, even those who were about to kill him.

There is another vision of heaven in today's lessons. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is talking to his disciples, in particular Thomas and Philip, about where Jesus is going. Jesus moves the conversation from GPS coordinates to the way we make the journey...and what God has in mind for us when we make it. Jesus says something outrageous: that when we see Christ, we see God. If we want to know what God is like, see Jesus.

But wait! There's more! Jesus also says that we can do what Jesus does...and more! In other words, if we are following Jesus on the way to God, people can see Christ in us on their way to God. And where is he and we going? To the place God is preparing for us. A home inside of God's home. When Jesus says "in my father's house there are many rooms" he is saying there is room for all us. God looks at humanity and has a vision...a vision where there is room enough for all of us in God's home.

So the lessons today give us two startling visions of God who comes to us: Jesus saw God making room for us. Stephen saw that God is ready to forgive. In both lessons we learn that God is present to us even when things are going wrong. This is the vision of God coming to us in today’s lessons. God is bringing heaven to earth.

One of the problems the radio preacher has is that he thinks that God is out there somewhere faraway and has to come down and rescue us and take us to that faraway heaven before he destroys everything. This misses that the whole point of Jesus’ coming to us was to bring God down to earth…that God is with us.

Retired Bishop of Durham, Tom Wright, in responding to physicist Stephen Hawking, described heaven this way:

… in the Bible ‘heaven’ isn’t ‘the place where people go when they die.’ In the Bible heaven is God’s space while earth (or, if you like, ‘the cosmos’ or ‘creation’) is our space. And the Bible makes it clear that the two overlap and interlock. For the ancient Jews, the place where this happened was the temple; for the Christians, the place where this happened was Jesus himself, and then, astonishingly, [in] the persons of Christians because they, too, [are] ‘temples’ of God’s own spirit.

In Christ, heaven comes to earth. God’s space and our space meet. And as Christians, as God’s people, we are the ones who show off God’s presence in the world. As people who are baptized into Christ’s body, we are ones who discover and communicate God’s transforming love.

This is a very different vision than either Pastor Camping or Professor Hawking. God is not out to destroy an irretrievable creation, as Camping says, and heaven is very real…it’s just different than what Hawking assumes Christians believe.

As we meet Christ in the sacramental life, as we yearn to know God more and more, as we look for Christ in the face of the people we meet, we develop a different kind of vision of heaven; vision that knows that God is with us in Christ, and see Christ at work in us and in the world we live in, a vision that changes us and makes a real difference in a world desperately in need of healing.

Instead of waiting to be snatched up to heaven in a second, most believers do great things and often unnoticed things that show us how heaven and earth intersect every day.

This week I heard the story of Mary Johnson and Oshea Israel . Their story shows off how God is at work redeeming creation. The story begins in 1994 when Oshea killed Johnson's only son during a scuffle during a party. Oshea went to prison for murder and toward the end of his sentence, he and his victims mother made peace.

The NPR story says:

Israel recently visited StoryCorps with Johnson, to discuss their relationship — and the forgiveness it is built upon. As Johnson recalls, their first face-to-face conversation took place at Stillwater Prison, when Israel agreed to her repeated requests to see him.

"I wanted to know if you were in the same mindset of what I remembered from court, where I wanted to go over and hurt you," Johnson tells Israel. "But you were not that 16-year-old. You were a grown man. I shared with you about my son."

"And he became human to me," Israel says.

At the end of [that first] meeting at the prison, Johnson was overcome by emotion.
"The initial thing to do was just try and hold you up as best I can," Israel says, "just hug you like I would my own mother."

Johnson says, "After you left the room, I began to say, 'I just hugged the man that murdered my son.'

"And I instantly knew that all that anger and the animosity, all the stuff I had in my heart for 12 years for you — I knew it was over, that I had totally forgiven you."

Here is a woman doing what Jesus did…and more. She forgives, yes, and then she took on her son’s killer as if he was her own, and then she founded From Death To Life: Two Mothers Coming Together for Healing, a support group for mothers who have lost their children to violence.

What did Mary Johnson see when she looked into Israel Oshea’s face? What changed when they hugged? Whatever changed…it is a vision of God making room in two people’s hearts. It is a vision of God who is present to us even at the darkest moments ready to receive us and ready to forgive.

If you think that Johnson’s forgiveness of her son’s killer is, well, crazy then let me ask you this: which kind of vision of God do you prefer? The empty vision of no-God, or the fiery vision of a vengeful God? Or can we see God's vision for us? Can we see like Mary Johnson? I think her holy, naïve, risky vision shows us that it is possible to see the face of angels anywhere. It is possible to know right now the place that God prepares for us. When she finally found the place of forgiveness it changed everything.

Over and over again, we see the faces of the holy. It often comes to us in strange unexpected ways. When people saw Stephen, they saw the face of an angel. When Jesus saw us, he saw that God makes room for each and every one of us. In Christ, heaven and earth have come together and when people see us—we baptized, forgiven, people of God--I believe that it is possible, in fact even likely, that they see the face of angels. And as Christian people it is possible for us to see God's vision of making room for everyone, of everyone having a place in God's home.

And this is how heaven comes to earth. This is how God transforms creation. One vision at a time.

The Fifth Sunday of Easter– Acts 7:55-60, John 14:1-14

Holding our breath

2011-04-22T18:15:00.003-04:00

Good Friday Sermon - April 22, 2o11

Christ is reigning from the tree. Come let us adore him.

When I was a kid, my brothers and I used to play a game as rode in the car.

If we drove past a cemetery we’d hold our breath. Where did that game come from? I don’t know. Maybe we got it from an old superstition, not wanting to breathe in bad spirits or the spirits of the dead. Maybe it was a way for the young to flip our noses at death. Maybe it was a way to take our mind off of the fact of death itself. In all honesty, I think we just wanted to see how long we could hold our breath. But I think there was more to it than that. I say that because I have done a lot of breath-holding in my life...especially around death.

Games in the car are one thing, but the time came for me to confront death head on.

Still, breath-holding happens, sometimes in strange ways. I remember once being asked kindly but firmly by a physician not to go around the hospital wearing my clerical garb of black shirt and dog collar. “People might think when you come in that they are dying,” he told me. I didn’t ask if he held his breath whenever I walked past as I used to do when driving past a cemetery.

There have been moments in my life when I have been witness to death, where I have been called in to be the priest, the witness to God’s grace and the church’s representative to a person who is dying or has died and to loved ones. Sometimes I’ve been present when the person who has died is surrounded by family and friends and we prepared for that moment in prayer, in story-telling, and in tears.

There have been other moments when the person was alone, virtually unknown except for perhaps a name on a license in a wallet or purse. People who have died violently, or suddenly, or was suddenly stricken with no one to help, for whom the only witnesses were an EMT or a nurse or a police officer. It is these people I think of when we say the Great Litany and we pray “From dying suddenly and unprepared, Good Lord, deliver us.”

For some of these, frankly, I would still hold my breath. I’d keep these deaths at arm’s length with a cool clinical eye. Yes, my heart would tug, but these—especially in hospital ministry—I would attempt to keep at a safe distance. If you don’t, you go cuckoo.

But sometimes you can’t hide and you can’t hold your breath. The ones that took my breath away were the deaths of people close to me: my parents and family members, my friends and people in my parish. These were different to me. These were stark in their immediacy and impossible to hold at a clinical distance. This was when I could not hold my breath because there was no breath to hold.

We will all face death—and not just our own. We are told death is part and parcel of living.

Jesus died.

That is why we are here tonight. Jesus died.

It is important for me to say those two words in all their stark brevity. The bumper sticker tells us that Jesus died for our sins. We say that in our collects, prayers, scripture and story; and that is true. That is why he died. But when Jesus died there were no slogans, no anthems or hymns, no bumper stickers. In that moment it was just this simple fact: Jesus died.

We are tempted to jump past this moment and go straight to Easter. We are tempted to hold our breath and drive around this truth. It is like whistling in the dark—that nervous act of apparent confidence in the middle of the unknown. We do that when we are faced with a hard fact of life that we do not want to deal with. We hold our breath. We whistle in the dark. We cover our ears and hum. But no amount of avoidance can dodge this fact: Jesus died.

Jesus did not pretend. He did not hold his breath and wait till it went away. He died. If we forget that he died, or if we hold or breath or whistle past it, then we forget that Jesus lived, breathed, ate, loved, worked, grew as much as he taught, healed, preached and touched. Jesus had family and he had friends. He had enemies as well as people indifferent to his existence. He lived. Just like us.

And he died.

I am told that in earthquake ravaged Christchurch, New Zealand…whose “Big One” happened about a month before the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan…that many churches are uninhabitable. Many are so damaged that repairs, if they can be repaired at all, could take years. So there are a lot of congregations without homes. These communities have had to learn to improvise.

The big Presbyterian in Christchurch called Knox Church will hold their Easter day worship in a nearby funeral chapel. Their pastor, the Reverend Dr Geoff King, said "I guess it is ironic to be having a resurrection service in a funeral chapel."

I don’t know where they are holding their Good Friday services, but whether they go to the funeral chapel or not, they will find themselves in the same place as Jesus on the day of crucifixion…in the place of the dead.

I sure hope they don’t hold their breath to keep death away.

Whistling the dark won’t make it go away.

Jesus died. And so we live.

Christ is reigning from the tree. Come let us adore him.

If you were Queen, what would you do?

2011-04-22T18:14:00.000-04:00

Maundy Thursday sermon, April 21, 2011

If you had all the power in the world, what would you do? If you had all the money in the world, how would you spend it? If you were King or Queen, and could by your mere command, make something happen, what would you make possible?

As we enter this special short season called the Triduum: now that we’ve left Lent and are on the way to the cross, watch what Jesus does. Notice how Jesus uses his power.

He has come into the Jerusalem riding on a donkey. People have spread branches of palm and their coats in his path. They have cried “hosanna” and hailed him as their king. Now the tide is turning. He has taught and preached in the Temple. He went to the temple and turned over the tables of the money changers and the animal vendors. The leaders of the Temple and the government of Rome have decided that this would be king must die. Say what you want about the Passion and Jesus’ role in it, what is happening here is a struggle for power.

Power happens. Power is. People are all the time looking for ways to get or keep power, and I don’t just mean political power or the power of wealth and fame. People struggle their whole lives to gain, keep and exercise power…power to make their own choices, power to influence others, power to make things happen. But power doesn’t just rise from within. It is all around us. Sometimes we are on the receiving end or, maybe, we are on giving end. Many people who study the psychology and behavior of people see this theme over and over again--how do we get, keep and use our power?

Much human struggle—both in human history and in our selves—is taken up with what to do about power.

Jesus, who could change water into wine, who could make the blind see and raise Lazarus from the dead, is about to walk into the full force and might of human power. He is about to go to the cross.

But first, he will gather with his disciples in the upper room and give them a lesson about God’s power versus human power. He will break bread and pour out wine and tell us that the broken bread is also his broken body, given for us. He will pour out wine and tell us that this is his blood which is poured for humanity for the forgiveness of sin. And then he will do something really strange: he will get down on his knees, assume the role of lowliest of servants, and wash the feet of his disciples.

He will tell us that in God’s economy, the way God’s power is expressed is in service to the least, the lowest and the lost. God’s power is not hoarded, but it is shared.

The word “Maundy” is an old-English word that grew out of the first line of the Latin form of Jesus’ words in the Gospel of John, “A new commandment I give to you that you love one another as I have loved you.” Many Christian traditions call this “Holy Thursday” instead or “Great Thursday.” Maybe we should think about this feast as “New Commandment Thursday.”

In England there is the custom of the Maundy that continues to this day: today Queen Elizabeth II gave out 85 bags of coins to 85 people on her 85^th birthday. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury talked about the Queen’s Maundy money and what Jesus was up to in the upper room. He reminded listeners in Britain that once the kings and queens of England would not just hand out bags of coins but actually stoop to wash the feet of the poor.

They didn’t all do it because they were lovely humble people – some were, and some definitely weren’t – but because they accepted one great truth that needed repeating over and over again, the one big thing that Christianity had brought into the world of human imagination.

And that was – and is – the truth that power constantly needs to be reminded of what it’s for. Power exists, in the Church or the state or anywhere else, so that ordinary people may be treasured and looked after, especially those who don’t have the resources to look after themselves. The Bible is crystal clear that this is the standard by which the gospel of Jesus judges the powerful of this world.

It is not just monarchs, or presidents or titans of industry who have problems with power. We do too.

Have you ever noticed how when someone tries to grab power, to attract attention to themselves, to hoarde to themselves what they think they are entitled to, that the people around them tend not to trust them very much. People who are least at home with themselves, often try to get and keep power.

And isn’t just as true that when we feel the most out of control is when we do everything we can to stay in control? We try to manage other people’s feelings or to fix things so that everyone is happy or to make so that everyone will like us? The question is not if we should have power…we all do. The question is how we should use it. What is our power for?

Jesus’ lesson to his friends and followers is that real power comes only when we use it for others. That we will never know what it is like to be truly powerful until we discover what it is like to truly serve.

Our money is our power for good…if we choose to use it that way.

Our talents and gifts are our power to make the world a better place…if we choose.

Our relationships—our family life and our friendships and our encounters with strangers—is our power to heal and to lift up the dignity of others.

Jesus teaches us tonight that we will never know or have real power until we learn how to be served. If we cannot allow ourselves to be served, we cannot serve—which is why it’s important for you to risk a little embarrassment, a little discomfort, to allow your feet to be washed. It puts us in touch with the place in us that needs to be cared for; the place that we often hide because we don’t want to seem weak.

And it is important for people who lead to remember that we are in fact servants.

If you had all the power in the world, what would you do? If you were Queen, what would you do? The model and heart of the Christian faith is this: that the creator and maker of the universe, the One who spoke creation into being, took of his cloak, rolled up his sleeves, knelt down and did the humblest thing a person can do. This is how God treats the world…treats us…this is why Christ goes to the cross. So that we may have the power to do the same.

Speaking of charisma and order....

2011-04-19T14:19:00.000-04:00

H/T to the Episcopal Cafe:

Where charisma and order meet

2011-04-15T11:31:00.003-04:00

A Sermon for Chrism Mass
Diocese of Bethlehem
Cathedral Church of the Nativity
Thursday, April 14, 2011
John 3:1-17

There is a little boy that I know who loves gadgets. He loves to learn and understand how they work. He loves to watch them in action. When his family buys a new appliance or tool, he will want to know all about how it works, and think up reasons why he should run the air conditioner with the remote or vacuum something or wash a dirty towel.

Lest you think that this a housekeeping Godsend, every mother’s dream, consider this: he disdains picture books and the usual children’s literature and would much rather read the instruction—or better yet, the service—manuals for all these contraptions. Out loud. Right now.

He especially loves the troubleshooting guides in those manuals. And when you try to distract him from his need to tell you or any of his siblings in graphic detail all the possible solutions to any potential problem by saying something like “when something happens, you will be the first person I call” he will say to you in all seriousness “But if you wait until it’s broken, it will be too late.”

Don’t ask me why, but I really identify with this kid…and not just because I am A-V kid emeritus. I really love his enthusiasm when something new, shiny and fascinating comes along. I love that he wants to know how things works…he wants to understand. It is not enough to know what button does what but how each function happens. And I love how he wants to tell everyone about the new gadget in great, energetic, fascinated detail.

This wonderful little boy and the family he inhabits dramatize a truth about Christian community. When we “get” something, we want everyone to “get it”. And when we have found what works we want to understand and manage it.

Jesus, of course, offers both a description and an antidote of this phenomenon. The Spirit blows where it wills, he tells Nicodemus during their night-time meeting. It is like the wind…we don’t know where it comes from or where it goes, but we are always trying to catch it and hang on. So behind every enthusiastic rush is our need to understand and capture the Spirit—to make it ours. And behind every need to contain and make orderly our insights is a need to preserve what the Spirit has taught us—again, to make it ours.

In this Gospel, Jesus teaches us that where charisma and order meet is where we are born again.

In many ways Nicodemus is the perfect icon for the mainline Christian believer in the 21^st century. He is learned. He is pious. He knows his stuff and has been given responsibilities to match his knowledge. He is a leader. At the same time, Nicodemus has real, honest spiritual yearnings that he is not afraid to investigate but on his own terms. He is not afraid to follow the thread to its logical conclusion, but he is nobody’s fool. Before he goes public with his spiritual side, he wants to make sure he understands what he is getting into.

When Nicodemus makes his late night appointment, the question at the tip of his tongue is “what’s your secret? How do you do all that cool stuff? How do we get what you’ve got?” But Jesus answers him with talk about being born from above. In John 7, we see Nicodemus speak up for Jesus in the Sanhedrin… a word of caution to a nervous and reactive group who are trying to preserve what’s left of their nation and religion in the face of occupation and change out of their control.

I wonder if he ever regretted hanging back for so long; if Jesus’ words about being born from above did not ring with a kind of hollow disappointment as he and Joseph of Arimathea took Jesus’ body to that new tomb, as described in John 17. As he prepared Jesus’ body for burial, did Nicodemus wish that he had spoken up sooner? I don’t know. Nicodemus does not appear on anybody’s official list of witnesses to the resurrection, but I’ll bet that there is a reason that John’s community remembered him. Somewhere in that journey from the garden to the cross to the tomb, Jesus took him right to the heart of the tension between institutional survival and spiritual longing, and I suspect that it was at the cross or in his friend’s empty tomb where Nicodemus finally understood what it meant to be born from above.

We who are called to serve the church either as ordained persons or as lay leaders contend with this all the time. We serve God through a strange and arcane thing called the church. We seek to bring life, direction and hope to congregations of everyday people following Jesus that are at once institutions with traditions and budgets and sometimes squirrely family dynamics; and, at the very same time, we are a gathered people on a spiritual quest. One need not cancel the other.

In a day where we don’t trust institutions much and where people tend to describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”, it is tempting to see the institutional as being in necessary conflict with the spiritual. We are tempted to chuck the details, make it up as we go along call that living in the Spirit.

We also live in a culture that loves to manage things, that assumes that for every problem there is a quick fix. So we are also tempted, when we find the spirit at work powerfully in many wonderful, moving and useful ways, to package it, organize it, manage it (and if we are really ambitious, sell it)…so that what works for us now can be easily accessed for the future.

In the face of these temptations, just when we think we’ve got it a handle on it all, God’s spirit has a way of bringing on the next contraction of our continuing re-birth.

Once upon a time, I had it all figured out. Yes, I did. There was a time in my life when I had undertaken a romantic quest for “pure” pastoral care without any of the distractions of parish life—without the messiness of Christian community. So I set out to do this as a skilled solo practitioner. I had done several CPE units and came to belief that insight was key to spiritual growth and that they way one brings about spiritual growth was to sit with a person using various techniques of listening and reflected insight, that I would watch as a person—through their own insight—would come to a new level of spiritual awareness. So I had the tools, I had the training, and I was on a mission.

Then came Lois. She was in her eighties. A widow, she spent her whole life on a dairy farm in rural northeast Connecticut, except when she taught in a two-room school house. She was in for surgery, I can’t remember what, but she was in for a long recovery before going home—this was in the days when hospitals normally kept patients around for a long time until they could walk out. Anyway, I met with her several times during her stay. Looking back, I know I picked her because as patients went, she was easy. Even though we had different religious traditions, she was a fiercely independent Congregationalist, she knew all the stories and all the symbols. We shared a common faith language. I heard more and more of her story: growing up on a farm, marrying a farmer, raising several children on the farm, teaching school in a small town. Eventually the conversation kind of ran out of steam. Not unpleasant, but there was a kind of a lull. Then she turned to me and said, “you are a chaplain, aren’t you?”

I don’t know what I said, but I suspect it was probably something lame like “You’re wondering if I am a chaplain.” She told me that I was very nice person, a good listener and not a bad counselor, but she wanted to know if I ever did anything that she thought chaplains should do. Like what? I asked.

She said, “You know, I am 80 years old and someday I am going to die. Can you help me out?”

In other words, she needed me to be her priest. So for the first time in our relationship, we prayed. This lay person taught me something that I have been discovering for the first time ever since: that when we pray together, that’s when the real work begins.

Lois taught me something else: Just when I want to shout “eureka!” and start singing “All you need is prayer” to a John Lennon tune, God gives me a dope slap in the form of an insightful lay person who reminded me that the training, the skills and the discipline did not go away just because I prayed. No—the prayer made all those tools incarnational! The prayer made the tools make God real.

It is not a zero sum game, where we have to choose between being spiritual or being competent. That’s world’s meme, not ours. We are an incarnational people following one whom we believe to the fullness of God and the fullness humanity in one person undiluted. That suggests that God needs from us both our skill and our spirit.

When we pray together, that’s when community becomes Christian community.

When we learn together, that’s when praying Christian community discovers whose they are and begins to explore what that means.

When we begin to reflect together and share our stories that is when we discover that God is at work in all of us and that all of together have a job to do.

When we discover that our common life is also what communicates Christ, then we begin to think about what we do as a congregation communicates Christ which deepens our worship and drives us to mission.

And when we begin to ask how what we do in everyday life communicates Christ, we driven to prayer to listen more deeply to the movement of the spirit in the people—in and out of the church—that God has given us.

How we organize our common life matters. The time we take to pray before we decide how to fix the roof matters. A good roofer at a fair price is still important, but without the prayer we forget why the roof is important in the first place. Isn’t it just a little silly that while we wonder why our congregations aren’t more spiritual, we sit down as vestries or a program committees to decide how to use the resources God has given us without first allowing ourselves to listen for God? It is silly…but we do it all the time. We call it being practical and efficient, but there is danger in compartmentalizing ourselves too much.

God needs us to have our different passions—the different ways we all “get” it—and our multitude of gifts because all of it—pastoral care, worship, mission, formation, evangelism—is put to best use serving God and each other in a praying, listening community. Every single one of at one time or another “gets it” and that becomes the organizing principal around which everything falls. It’s human. God made us that way. It’s how we learn and one of the ways life has meaning and purpose. The choice is: do we spend all of our energy trying to change everybody else’s mind to think as we do? Or do we direct our energy towards what it takes to play in concert? The latter is the creative work of God.

We often make a false choice between order and charism. God needs both from us: God needs us to be competent, clear and useful. God, who made order out of chaos in the first place, wants us to be good at what we do.

At the same time, God needs us, as the collect says, to rest in his eternal changelessness. To listen for God in the silence and in the people God gives us, to be ready for the spirit because we don’t where it will come from or where it will take us. God calls to be a people in prayer together.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I am like that little boy who wants to understand how things work and get everyone to understand how to do it right.

And sometimes I am like Nicodemus, resting on my competence but on a spiritual quest and coming to Jesus by night and to the foot of the cross.

We, in our baptisms and in our holy orders, as God’s gathered people, have chosen to stand at the place where charisma and order meet. It is not always easy but it is always like being born again.

Thank God for Bishop Christopher

2011-03-11T17:37:00.001-05:00

H/T to Episcopal Cafe.

Telling stories

2011-01-16T10:03:00.005-05:00

The Second Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A Sunday, January 19, 2011
John 1:20-42 (43-51)

“Let me tell you a story…” “Once upon a time…” “I remember when…” “Daddy (Mommy, Grandpa), tell me a story…”

Something happens when we tell a story. The people who study this kind of thing tell us that when we start a story off like this, something happens in our brains. With the right equipment they can see it happen right before their very eyes. They say that when our brains are scanned in a certain way, and we start to tell a story, the researchers looking at their screens see whole parts of our brains light up with color that had just a minute before been dormant. It is as if a different part of the brain from what we use every day is activated. We are not just talking about facts; we are painting images in our minds.

Once upon a time, when I was a kid, my father had a study with a drafting table, and in this was a old tabletop AM/FM/SW radio about the size of a modern-day microwave oven. He set me up with my own little drafting table, and he would work on these great big drawings of electrical gee-gaws that did I-don’t-know-what except that I was sure he was drawing plans that would one day land a man on the moon. On Saturdays, when he would work in the study, I would sit at my little drafting table and we’d listen to the baseball game together over that big radio, and he during those times, he taught me keep the box score. You did not need television to visualize a baseball game, just a careful ear, imagination and a yellow number two pencil.

When my children came home for Christmas a month or so ago, they asked that we hold off putting up the tree until they were both there and then we scheduled a time when we all could work on decorating it together. I don’t know about you but we have a very eclectic collection of Christmas ornaments. Very few are store-bought anymore. Lots were made by our children as they grew up. Some are associated with special events: Our First Christmas, 1979. Baby’s First Christmas, 1981 and 1988. And they love to hear the stories connected with each one.

Sometimes they tell them to each other. They say, “Hey, this is your ornament. Remember when…?” “Remember when…?” is another phrase that takes us to a special kind of imagination.
Stories are important parts of our living. They tell us who we are, what is important to us and how we understand ourselves. The stories could be from books or movies or plays or shows, or they could be something as simple as telling about a picnic or a day at work or funny thing that happened at the store.

Have you heard a group of people who have all seen the same play in the same game tell each other exactly what they saw? “Did you see that?” Or how many times have you seen a group of people talk about a really great movie? They recall scenes, repeat memorable lines, and talk about emotional moments. We are not just sharing information or confirming what the other person saw. We are experiencing the story over and over again with someone else. Telling the story is like shining a light down a dark path and then walking along that way together.

I particularly love today’s Gospel story. The first half of the first chapter of John’s Gospel is that great liturgical hymn to the Logos, the word of God. We heard that on Christmas Day. Today, we hear part of second (much longer) half of that first chapter. It is one of my very favorite Gospel passages because it is all about how people tell the story of the Logos. Think of the first chapter of John this way: first comes the idea then comes the story. The Word, the Logos is real, but it is the story that makes God’s Word, Jesus, real.

The gospel story today consists of a whole sequence of people telling each other they have seen Jesus and who they think Jesus is. So John the Baptist points to Jesus and because of that, the Beloved Disciple and Andrew decide to peel off from John’s band and follow Jesus. Then Andrew goes and tells Peter who then goes to Jesus and, after meeting him, follows him too. Next, in a part of the Gospel we don’t get to hear today, Jesus calls Philip, who then goes and tells his brother Nathaniel, who—while scoffing—goes to see to Jesus anyway and because Jesus knows him, he follows too. And it not just John the Baptist, or Andrew or Philip pointing to Jesus: it is also the Beloved Disciple, who through his Gospel is telling us that Jesus is the Messiah and bidding us to “come and see” and to tell what we have seen and heard.

So what does this all mean? It means that the Logos, God’s Own Best Expression of Godself, Jesus, is made known through people who tell the story. At the end of the first chapter of John, Jesus says to Nathaniel that this process of hearing, telling, of coming and seeing Jesus, is just like Jacob’s vision of angels ascending and descending to earth from heaven. God comes to our world, but no one knows it until, after we come and see, we then go and tell. This is how God’s word breaks into our world and changes everything: when people who have discovered God’s love and learned God’s love have also shared God’s love.

When we tell the Gospel story it becomes a part of us. We find that the telling of how God came to us in the past makes us more conscious, more aware, of how God is at work in us now. God calls us to be story-tellers, we are wired to tell stories because we are also wired to be at home with God. And this, finally is what we are looking for. The stories point us to what is really pulling us, calling us, attracting us. We are looking for a home. Looking for a place to be.

In the middle of the Gospel lesson today we hear Jesus ask the two disciples "What are you looking for?" That question is for us, too. "What are you looking for?" He doesn't ask "What do you want?" or "Who are you?" He asks “What are you looking for?” The heart of the story is that the disciples don’t just tell the story, they don’t just point to Jesus. They stay with Jesus. They meet him and he meets them.

The thing about telling a Gospel story is that people who hear and respond it are not looking for information. Anyone today can look on Wikipedia or watch the Discovery Channel or go to the library and find all the information they want. We don’t lack for information. The story is compelling for other reasons that have to do with people’s hearts much more than people’s minds.

In the Gospel today, two disciples did not ask Jesus “what are you doing?” They asked, "Where are you staying?" They go and see "where he was staying and they stayed with him that day." Yes, the disciples were curious, but what they are looking for is not information. They are looking for a place to be, a place to rest, a place—and a person with whom the can “abide.”

What we are all looking for—often without knowing it—is a place to stay, a place to remain always, a place to be. Jesus is that place, a person who is himself a home, who is himself a place to belong, a person with whom we live a whole way of life. Jesus knows that what the disciples really want is a place to belong. He meets them at the point of their greatest need and invites them to "Come and see." They go with him. They end up staying, and his story becomes their way of life. And after they came and saw, they invited someone else to that home, too.

We have people in this congregation who have been Gospel story-tellers, who have pointed the way so that others can find a home, a place to be. There are a lot of you but I will call out one of them out because she is not here to defend herself (and when I’ve told this to her face, she didn’t believe me): I’ve always been impressed with MJ’s ability to point the way; the way in which she shines that light down a dark path and then walks with people. She is a natural: most of the time she doesn’t even know she’s doing it. For a while it seemed as if the whole radiology department of a local hospital came to Saturday night service. And today, Shaun and Tracy and their son Connor are part of our community because their friend said to them “come and see.”

MJ is not alone. There are more of you. We are all story-tellers. Because we are also ones who have found a home, not just in a parish, but in God’s Best Expression of Godself, Jesus Christ, and we point the way. When we welcome a person to AA or treat a Soup Kitchen guest with dignity or when we bring a meal to the home of a home-bound stranger through Meals on Wheels or go to the Keystone Blood Bank and say “I’m from Trinity Church, Easton” when we give our pint of blood, we are beginning to tell the story. Our deeds say much, but like John’s Gospel, the way the Word is really made known in when we move from idea to story. From concept to invitation. Maybe we haven’t found the words yet to go with our actions, but make no mistake, we all have a Gospel story to tell. And it is through story-tellers like us that God’s power, God’s love, God’s peace breaks into the world and changes everything.

"What are you looking for?" says Jesus to people who were told by someone else where he could be found. To people who wondered if they had a place in Jesus’ story, he said “Come and see.” The thing that moves people from one question to the other, from "What are you looking for?" to "Come and see" to “We have found the Messiah!” is the story the church is called to tell. In fact, the only story the church has to tell! For all the things we do, for all the activity and program and worship, the only thing we have to offer is the story of our home, from which we draw hope and strength and power. That place, that home to which we invite people to “come and see,” is a person, Jesus Christ, and the best way to tell his story—perhaps the only way—is with our lives.

My beloved

2011-01-09T16:36:00.010-05:00

First Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord.
Sunday, January 9, 2011

Maybe you saw them? During the run-up to Christmas there were these billboards over the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel and they a part of a strange sort of war of words and images.

Last Christmas a group called American Atheists put up a billboard in that can’t miss spot over the entrances to the tunnels on the New Jersey side where all the cars are funneled through the toll booths. It pictured a stylized nativity scene complete with star and wise men, with the words “You know it’s a myth.” Well, on the other side of the tunnel—in not nearly as prominent location, because it depended on which tube you used to enter the city--the Catholic League put up an identical looking bulletin board that said “You know it’s true.” Another Christian group bought up the choice billboard spot on the Jersey side and replaced the atheist billboard with a Christian one.

This is the level that most people experience religious (and for that matter political) discourse: harangue and counter-harangue. Spin and counter-spin. Vitriol piled upon vitriol. And look at where it has gotten us.

This morning we come together in this strange mix of fear and uncertainty on the one side and hope and wonder on the other side. We are mindful of the news that yesterday someone attempted to assassinate a sitting member of Congress in her district and killed 6 other people, including a Federal Judge, in the process. (Read this.) And this morning we will be baptizing Mikaela and Brielle, initiating them into the Body of Christ and welcoming them into our community of faith.

You know, every time a person who has not walked into a church for a very long time and makes their way up those front steps through those red doors and makes their way into one these pews requires a remarkable degree of courage. We have done a lot to make this church barrier-free, but there are some barriers we can’t fix with ramps because they are in the heart. For the seeker or the person returning to church, even if it is for a baptism, wedding or funeral, I suspect that there is a certain hesitancy in the hearts of some of those people.

About a month ago, I had a small taste of this when I went to Florida for my daughter’s graduation and walked into a strange church in civilian clothes. What to expect in the service? What will they expect from me? Will I hear words of comfort and empowerment or will they be words of judgment and defensive exclusion? Will I experience nostalgia or a flash-back? Will they make me stand up and introduce myself?

And this experience put me in touch with the deepest question of all: Does this faith community have the capacity to hear our deepest concerns and questions? Will we be listened to and valued? Can we take each others questions seriously or dismiss them as an annoyance?

There are other people, the ones who have grounded their lives in their faith and in their faith community, that I am also thinking of. These are the ones who find great peace in their faith, and who are able to connect the dots between their faith and their everyday living. We know of people of faith who have shown incredible mercy, done incredible good, and put themselves at incredible risk. These are the people, whether we are people of faith or not, whom we look at and wish we could be like when we grow up.

That's because if we are at all engaged in life, we are always looking for something more. Something that gives us hope and meaning. Something that tells us that God is present and at work. And sometimes we see it in each other. Sometimes we see it when we least expect it. Our hearts keep drifting back, if not through those red doors, at least in the doors of our hearts, because our spirits long for a connection, a relationship with God and of a faith can give us grounding, purpose and direction.

In this community, we have been nourished and taught by people of prayer and commitment to Christ's mission in the world. They hang in with communities of faith like ours not because we are perfect but because they know that, despite all our foibles and failings, God is at work through ordinary humans doing extraordinary things. These everyday Christians come back, with a kind of clear-eyed, realistic hope, because there is no other places they’d rather be. They know that we are beloved.

This room is filled with both kinds of people and every one in between. And so I ask us, we who come to the waters of baptism: What is the message will we bring? Will it be a harangue or will it be hope?

A long time ago, I found myself as a chaplain to a residential mental health facility where people were dealing with everything from addictions to schizophrenia to chronic mental illness, and I was asked to run a spirituality group. The goal was to help these wonderful yet profoundly fragile people work on the spiritual side of their emotional and mental health. The person I followed ran it like a church service and I was told that the response was either passivity or near-riot. I decided that, following the lead of the author and spiritual director Henri Nouwen, I would lead with one message and one message only: God’s words at the baptism of Jesus: “This is my son, my beloved.” My question was always: “Do you know that you are beloved.”

One of the things about the John the Baptist is that he sure could yell. In the popular imagination, he is the epitome of the religious prophet who stands in his camel-skins, holding his staff, with wild look and he tells the powers that be exactly who they are---a brood of vipers—and exactly where they can go. There is a certain emotional satisfaction is being able to shut off the super-ego for just one minute, open the window and yell, just like Howard Beale in the 1976 film Network, “I am mad as hell and I am not going to take this anymore!” But as cathartic as that may feel, it will take one so far. We may like the idea of a John the Baptist—telling off the powers that be—but we don’t want to be on the receiving end, and it is a terrible thing to live life where the only thing you have to say is a harangue, or anger, or a cry of frustration.

Into this mix comes Jesus. Isn’t it strange that Jesus even chose to be baptized at all? I mean, if Jesus is who we say he is, someone like us in every way yet without sin, why would he need to be baptized?

Well, let's re-imagine repentance. We tend to think of repentance as turning away from something—giving up something bad. Okay, but let's go a little deeper. Another way to look at repentance as turning towards something—towards God. A life of repentance is a life of continual reorientation towards God. Jesus lived a life oriented towards and constantly re-oriented towards God. And in his baptism, he joins with us in our desire to be oriented towards God.

And in his baptism, Jesus ends up turning John’s message on its head, or at least re-orienting it. When the voice of God is heard, when the voice that can split the cedars of Lebanon and make mountains skip is heard, is it a voice of condemnation? No. Is it a voice of judgment or divine vengeance? No. When God speaks, and the Spirit descends, here is what we hear: “This is my beloved ”

If we start with the notion that at the root of it all, and despite all the evil that humanity can dish out, we are beloved, then everything changes.

Instead of living life trying to adhere to all the rules so that we might earn God’s love, we discover that we already have it.

Instead of trying to convince ourselves and others that we are lovable, we find that we are and always have been loved.

We find that God’s work in coming to us in Jesus Christ, and the work of the church in our common and sacramental life is not to try to fix a mistake, our common life and our sacraments give us the tools, the power, the support to live as the people God made us to be.

Because we are beloved, we find that God goes to incredible lengths to overcome the evil, the fear, the violence that marks our lives. We find that God comes to us as one of us, and dies so that we might live. All of this is to restore what God has in mind for us and all creation. God does all this because, God believes we are worth the effort. We are beloved.

We've learned yesterday in a tragic way the consequence of the loose and careless way we use words. We see that the price of a religious and political discourse built on harangue and spin leads to both spiritual and physical death and violence. But God also gives us tangible signs of hope.

Across the globe, our brothers and sisters in Christ, our neighbors, in Southern Sudan are finally trading the legacy of 50 years of civil war for a future determined in the ballot box. Our partners in mission in Kajo-Keji are joining the rest of Southern Sudan and voting on independence. They are voting--not fighting-- for their own future. So far, from what I’ve heard and read, it looks like whatever the outcome, it will be a peaceful one. What happens after that is neither easy nor predictable. But they can do it, if they can make this transition without resorting to violence, then it will be a welcome hallmark in the history of that troubled nation.

And here is another sign of hope. Today, we bring two children, named for guardian angels, to the waters of baptism. We will as a community promise to uphold them in their life in Christ. So we have a choice. It's not that whether we will convey to them values. We can’t help that. It’s a given. Just what values will we bring them? What Good News can we bring them in a world of violence and beauty, war and community? A harangue or a message of hope?

These two children come to a family who perhaps only dreamed that this day might come but worried that perhaps it was not to be. But like some biblical parents of old, they have here signs of new life, new hope, and a new journey. Words make a difference. God spoke words of hope and affirmation and redemption that continue to break open our hearts today. If we, as family, friends, and as a community of faith, can say one things to each other and to these girls, let it repeat God's words at Jesus' baptism, over and over again:

“You are my beloved.”

“You are my beloved.”

“You are my beloved.”

The dark side of Christmas

2011-01-04T09:38:00.009-05:00

The Second Sunday after Christmas, January 2, 2011
Matthew 2:1-12

As we wind up Christmas this week, we are reminded that the world Jesus was born into is dangerous and unpredictable world. Jesus’ mere appearance, even as a helpless infant, reveals the a conflict between good and evil and the lengths God goes to both defeat evil and rescue us from sin. It sounds strange to us but In this conflict, where light and dark collide, Jesus is a displaced person. He is a refugee.

According to Matthew’s Gospel, as soon as news of this newborn “king of the Jews” reaches Herod, the Roman appointed King over Judea and Palestine; he does whatever he can to kill off the competition. He tries to trick the Magi into disclosing Jesus’ location so—he says—he can pay him “homage.” In fact, Herod wants to kill the regent king. When the Magi are warned in dreams to go home another way, Herod orders that all the infant boys 2 years old and younger be killed to be sure that this king will never grow up.

But Joseph is warned by an angel in a dream to flee to Egypt. Like Moses being launched in a basket to avoid the massacre of Jewish babies by Pharaoh a thousand years before Jesus, God intervenes—with the help of caring, faithful people to save Jesus. In Moses case, Moses' sister makes sure Moses is found by Pharaoh’s wife. For Jesus, Joseph rescues Mary and Jesus by fleeing to Egypt. But the way that God will rescue us from the depth of human sin and evil, the exodus from death to life, from sin into righteousness will be through the cross and resurrection.

We don’t know if the massacre of the innocents really took place. The only record of the event is here in Matthew. But we do know that Herod routinely killed off his opponents, even his own sons, to preserve his seat of power. He planned to do the same at his own death, we are told, kill off dozens of people in dozens household so all of Judea will have reason to mourn.

The fact is that human history is filled with just this kind of cruelty. It was only a decade ago that we watched in horror as genocide on the most cruel scale took place in Rwanda. We remember the killing fields of Cambodia. And we remember the holocaust and we enter into a new series of anniversaries of our own civil war, the list goes on and on and on. The roster of human atrocity is almost too long to recite. The Gospel reminds us that Christ is born into this kind of world. It is into this kind of world that God intervenes.

As I have said, the temptation to fight evil with evil is very strong. It’s natural to us. And people will use the tools of evil--violence, aggression, hatred--to get their way and then tell us they do it for God. The popular media in America portrays Islam as driven by these forces—and certainly the attacks against Christians in Egypt, Nigeria, Pakistan and the Philippines seem to bear this out. But the other day, I learned that no one has a monopoly on this market when someone sent me a video of some Christian “warriors” executing a plastic Santa by firing squad—I am not making this up--to make the point that they want us to keep Christ in Christmas, or else! These people—these Christians—said it was a joke and all good, clean fun, but I found the whole idea pretty chilling. So what Matthew tells us about Herod’s massacre is telling us the truth about how things are.

Anglican priest Joy Carol Wallis writes:

Herod represents the dark side of the gospel. He reminds us that Jesus didn't enter a world of sparkly Christmas cards or a world of warm spiritual sentiment. Jesus enters a world of real pain, of serious dysfunction, a world of brokenness and political oppression. Jesus was born an outcast, a homeless person, a refugee, and finally he becomes a victim to the powers that be. Jesus is the perfect savior for outcasts, refugees, and nobodies. That's how the church is described in scripture time and time again - not as the best and the brightest - but those who in their weakness become a sign for the world of the wisdom and power of God.

God chooses to push back evil by doing the opposite of what evil does. And more than that, God comes to us precisely at the moments when we are least strong, least capable, least in-charge. God identifies with our weakness, and shows us divine power. God reveals our essential dignity in the midst of our weakness. If there are moments or times in your life when you feel yourself, outcast, Christ has come for you. If there are periods when you have been afraid, Christ has come for you. If there are times when you are uncertain as to which path to take, Christ has come for you.

Our epistle today picks up on this: Ephesians 1:3-14 is one long sentence, a blessing to the readers of the letter, reminding us that because of what God has done in Jesus Christ we have been adopted and made holy and part and parcel of God’s new reign. Not because of anything we’ve done but because of what Christ has done. The work of this rescued, refugee infant will rescue us from our sin, our brokenness, our fear and make us into a new people.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King once wrote about the lengths that God has gone to restore us to proper relationship with God. He says that the Christ’s incarnation is a real, practical confrontation with evil but one that does not resort to evil to overcome it. He says that the cross, in particular, is:

"...the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community. The resurrection is the symbol of God's triumph over all the forces that seek to block community. The Holy Spirit is the continuing community creating reality that moves through history. He who works against community is working against the whole of creation."

What drives God’s resistance to sin and evil? Love. God’s divine (agape) love for us and for all creation. This is why King advocated non-violent resistance as the means to end injustice. Nonviolent resistance brings an end to hate by being the very embodiment of agape—God’s divine live.

Last week, I finally got to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I. I read the book back when it came out a few years ago and a few times since, so I was eager to see how the movie handled the story. I am convinced that those Christians who condemn the Harry Potter books because of the magical story line have it all wrong because I think J.K. Rowling has written a profoundly Christian story, just not in the overtly evangelical and allegorical way of C.S. Lewis and his Narnia books or his space trilogy. (I think she is more in the tradition of Charles Williams…but few people have heard of him.) Rowling has created a world where ordinary people have power, and the forces they must contend with are at once practical and spiritual. Harry is the “boy who lives” because love stands up to and finally destroys evil. He lived because his parents love stood between him and evil. He becomes a strong wizard because he learns to love others. He gives his life for his community and his friends. He discovers that to live is to embrace all of life including death, while it is evil that attempts to control life because it fears death.

We live in a dangerous, unpredictable world. Christmas reminds us that the struggle between light and dark, death and life, fear and faith takes place in the everyday places where ordinary people choose love, dignity, hope and community instead of choosing to circle the wagons in fear. Christmas reminds us that God is with us every step of the way. Our God comes to us as a refugee who will go to the cross, but in that very journey God rescues from death and gives us the power to embrace life.

See Also: 1st Sunday after Christmas and Christmas Vigil

Last days of Kodachrome

2010-12-29T18:44:00.001-05:00

When I think back
On all the crap I learned in high school
It's a wonder
I can think at all
And though my lack of edu---cation
Hasn't hurt me none
I can read the writing on the wall

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away

If you took all the girls I knew
When I was single
And brought them all together for one night
I know they'd never match
my sweet imagination
everything looks WORSE in black and white

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away

Mama don't take my Kodachrome away
Mama don't take my Kodachrome away
Mama don't take my Kodachrome away

Mama don't take my Kodachrome
Mama don't take my Kodachrome
Mama don't take my Kodachrome away

Mama don't take my Kodachrome
Leave your boy so far from home
Mama don't take my Kodachrome away
Mama don't take my Kodachrome

Mama don't take my Kodachrome away

--Paul Simon