Dust

Think about dust.

We think about dust as something you clean up. If something sits around too long, it gets dusty.

My grandmother kept a really, really clean house. Not spec to be found anywhere. And I can remember that even in her house, on a bright sunny day, when the rays of light just poured into the room, I could see little bits of dust floating around in the air. I was little, so I didn’t get it but when I would point this out, she was not a happy woman. To her this was bad news, these little points of light floating around. To me, it was wondrous.

Think about dust.

It’s everywhere. Not just on our bookshelves but in the air. Have you ever seen a forest fire or a brush fire? What one notices is the smoke rising in the air and eventually the wind dissipates that smoke, but the ash and the unburned material in that smoke is blown about and goes everywhere.

Archeologists can look at layers of rock and find whole epochs that change from one era to another. And those dividing lines in the dust are defined by layers of ash.

It is said that the very building blocks of life might have arrived on this planet as dust that hitched a ride on some comet or meteor that then struck the earth. The meteors and comets themselves are nothing more than the dust and debris from the big bang itself.

When you think about dust, the image in Genesis of God forming us out of the dust of the earth and animating us with the breath of life is not so hard to imagine. We really are made of dust.

Typically on Ash Wednesday, Christians put ashes on our foreheads. But not this year. Everywhere the drawing of ashen crosses on foreheads is discouraged because of the COVID-19 pandemic. In some places, people are sprinkling ashes over the head and shoulders of penitents (in manner once done in the middle ages), in other places the celebrant draws the cross on her or his own forehead on behalf of the people, and in still other places, people are given little containers filled with ashes to impose on themselves.

I am kind of taken with the last choice. It seems to me that if we are going to sit, even for a day in the ashes of our truth, then it seems right that we should own it and do our own smudging. 

But the idea of dust raining down on us puts me in mind of that cosmic dust ball that may have caused life itself to spring up, and this intrigues me, too.

Ritual notes for this day aside, putting on ashes is an old custom. At one time, not everyone in the Christian congregation placed ashes on their head, but only those who were acknowledging and confessing egregious sins. They made public their confession with these ashes. But in the Middle Ages, it became the practice for every Christian to submit to the ashes. The season of Lent became a time of public penitence for the whole church.

Today, the ashes mean these things, but many more. The ashes are a reminder of our origin from the earth. “Remember,” we say, “that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” We are not the self-assured, comfortable, live-forever people that we try so often to look like. We are going to die, all of us; we know that. Ashes are a sign of that ultimate reality.

The ashes are also, of course, a sign of sin. We are tainted, stained, by our constant falsehoods and wrong actions. We are a people who know better, but who make wrong choices. It was not someone else who made us do it. It was not the fault of Satan. We were not possessed by demons. It was not the fault of our parents. It was not the fault of society. It was not our peer group or the culture around us. It was us.  

We are responsible. We have sinned by our own fault in thought, word, and deed; by what we have done, and by what we have left undone.

But today, I propose another meaning for these ashes. Out of these ashes, these signs of our mortal nature, comes something else. Once we recognize our own responsibility for wrongdoing, once we acknowledge our mortal and dusty nature, the ashes also become a sign of fertility.

If we are truly repentant, and truly cleansed, and open to the reality of God around us, then we are also fertile, ready to give growth to greatness.

When fires rage through a forest, everything is devastated. After a bad fire, everything is ruined. But over time, something miraculous happens. Trees that were thought to be dead sprout branches. Ground thought to be dead, brings out flowers and ferns and mosses and animals and birds. Soon a forest or a grassland devastated by fire becomes even more fertile and prosperous than before. The very ash makes for a richer soil. What was destroyed becomes the food for new life.

Ash Wednesday and Lent are, likewise, the burning and clearing of our Christian lives. We enter a time for confession, for penitence, for realization of our earthly nature. But this is also a fertile day, a time for self-examination and self-preparation. Today is getting us ready for something.

Just as ground is prepared in the Spring for luscious growth, today the ground of our lives, the soil of our souls, is being prepared. Maybe through our confession and mortal acknowledgement, we are emptied, opened, made ready for something. We will mark our lives with ashes, but they also point us to the resurrection we are preparing for this season. These ashes point to death. They also point to new life.

We are preparing our souls for the presence of God. We are going to do that by walking with Jesus to Jerusalem, by sharing in His passion and death, by sitting in the darkness of the tomb, and we will prepare for the new life to come.

But it takes time. It takes cultivation. The dense forest of our complicated lives is too thick. It is time to burn it away and make ready the fields for new growth.

Our God awaits our openness, our fertile ground. God comes into our lives with forgiveness, with deep love. Christians walk to the altar twice on Ash Wednesday.  Once when we receive ashes, signs of our mortality and penitence. And Christians receive bread and wine, the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands, the signal and presence of Christ who has risen from the dead. We receive the sign of our mortal nature, but we also receive the sign of fertile and abundant life.

"Call" is trickier than it looks

“Call” is a tricky subject. We take the words for granted in the church, but the whole idea is a mine-field of expectation, vision, and self-image that can bring beautiful vision to life, motivate us to do grand things, send us on journeys of faith… or lead us to do incredible evil. To paraphrase religious writer Frederick Buechner, “[Call] is like nitro-glycerin. It can either heal hearts or blow-up bridges.”

If you don’t believe me, just wait around this week and watch the news.

This week we commemorate The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and there is no doubt that he was called… called to lead his congregation, his people, his nation, to the civil, economic, social, and spiritual liberation of African-Americans from a 400 year history of enforced servitude and oppression… and that this call cost him his life.

And this week, we’ll inaugurate a new president, whom we hope will bring out our better angels instead of encouraging what we saw eleven days ago, when the countervailing forces of fear and evil were at work when thousands of mostly white men and women turned what seemed like a protest into an attempted insurrection so that they could overturn an election they lost at the behest of a president who came to power on the very resentment fear and anger that these people have harbored since well before The Rev. Dr. King first came on the national scene in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 and 1956.

Now here’s the thing that serious Christians, serious people of faith, must come to terms with: both the civil rights movement and the capital rioters last week used the language of “call”--- of adherence to something higher than themselves—to justify and explain their actions, to motivate their followers, and find energy for their cause. It’s just that one was after a common good and the other perpetrated an evil.

As I said, “call” is a tricky subject.

How do we know if a “call” is from God or is coming from someplace else… someplace contrary to God?

Today we hear a snippet of scripture that sounds wonderful, even whimsical, at first: the call of God to Samuel. Samuel is considered a prophet in Jewish and Christian tradition, but he was the last of the Judges. Before Israel was governed by hereditary kings, they were governed by Judges. These were not people in long robes presiding over courtrooms but were senior religious figures who governed the nation. They not only took on the rabbinical role of settling local disputes, but it was thought that they—being especially attuned to God and particularly holy—could govern the nation.

Samuel was being raised by another Judge, named Eli, but while Eli might have been a person of great faith, and wise in the way of faith, he was a rotten judge of character when it came to his sons, Hophni and Phinehas. Hophni and Phinehas were lazy, drunken, and spoiled. They were sexual predators and thieves. Worse, they thought that because their Dad was a Judge, they could do pretty much as they pleased, and they did not pay Eli any mind when he would mildly rebuke them for their bad behavior. To top it off, these two neer-do-wells assumed that they’d inherit the family business and be the next Judges over Israel. When it came to his sons, Eli was a softy and a push-over

One night, the boy Samuel—who was the only child of Hannah, who had dedicated him to God, and so was being raised by Eli the Judge—was trying to get some sleep when he hears a voice calling his name. Samuel assumes it was Eli, and goes to find out what’s up. Eli, shaken awake by his young student sends him back to bed. Three times this happens! Finally Eli, realizes that it is God who is calling Samuel, so he says to his young padawan, “the next time you hear that voice, say ‘Yes, Lord, your servant listens.’” And that’s what happens. Samuel listens and finds that he is called by God to be a Judge and a Prophet.

Sweet, right?

Well, not so fast. The thing that Samuel learns from God is that God has pretty much had it with Eli not being able to discipline Hophni and Phinehas—and worse, putting up with the evil they did in Eli’s name abusing God’s name and authority in the process! And so, Eli is not only going to lose his job as Judge but will die in the process. When Eli presses Samuel to tell him what God said to the boy, he learns his fate and says “The Lord must do what is right.” Or, as we might say today, “it is what it is.”

So… you see what I mean, right? Call is a tricky thing!

And, that is before we get to what we talked about before… that sometimes we attribute some pretty horrible ideas to “being called by God.” How many tyrants, opportunists, and even everyday insecure people fall back on the language of “call” to justify their actions?

I mean, going back to the Rev. Dr. King, how many segregationists and white supremacists justified their active evil, or their passive acceptance of an obvious evil, by blaming their actions on the “call” or “will” of God. How many could not distinguish between “the way it’s always been” and the will of God?

In today’s Gospel, I can see why Jesus liked and called Nathaniel. Because he was as faithful as the day is long… and he was nobody’s fool. When Andrew and Philip come running to him about having found the Messiah—his response was “yeah, right.” But his friends persisted, and they invited him to come and see. Nathaniel’s call came through his skepticism and Jesus knew not to shower him with sweetness but instead to bust his chops. Nathaniel could take what he dished out and seeing that Jesus knew him in a different way, followed Jesus’ call to discipleship.

But sometimes “call” takes us beyond ourselves and these very human, very ingrained, ways of thinking.

To hear a call is to take one above and beyond oneself. A sense of call is a heady thing but it can go to your head, so one must be careful. And most calls, truth be told, are not specifically religious or to a religious vocation. The other day, I saw on Facebook, how a young woman who grew up in this parish, Keri Appleman, will start her turn as a student teacher, fulfilling what her mother Shae says is a lifelong dream… to become a teacher in a classroom! To undertake this calling in a time of pandemic will be a daunting task, but Keri is up to the task and we both congratulate and pray for her as she lives out her baptismal vows and her calling.

This weekend, Peg and I have been hosted by the Rev Can himself, Father Dale Grandfield and his husband Brad, as we get ready to move to Florida this week. It was this congregation that raised up Dale and sent him off to Seminary to pursue and test his call to ministry. He was our music director, and any parish would have assumed that this was enough, but Dale knew there was something more, and this community nurtured and encouraged that in him. Hearing and pursuing a call may take us in unexpected places.

This parish undertook a call to share in the feeding and sheltering of the poor, the hungry, and the homeless, and we know this ministry today as the Ark Community Meal. But way before Easton had Safe Harbor and before the revival of Easton’s downtown, this parish took turns with other churches in sheltering the homeless from the cold. This parish community’s heart for ministry, led by the vision of Fr. Jim Gill, Janet Charney, Fr. Cliff Carr, and so many others, attuned us to listen for God in creative ways that this led not to only Safe Harbor, but also ProJeCt of Easton, Cops’n’Kids, Turning Point, Third Street Alliance and so many other local agencies and ministries that serve the poor, the outcast, women, and children, and the elderly and those with special needs. Listening to a call can draw out from out amazing, holy, creativity.

This parish chose once and for all to repent of our past ambivalence (and resistance) about whether to welcome LGBTQ persons into our parish, and were so led to embrace the ministry of Sr. Helena Barrett, the first openly gay person to be ordained in the Episcopal Church, and encourage her along with Sr. Alison Joy to form a new Benedictine religious community. After the Pulse night club shooting, we as a parish decided to proudly proclaim that welcome publicly in both word and deed.

This parish hosted a pilot of the Episcopal Church’s “Becoming a Beloved Community,” and worked with Lafayette College and other community agencies to speak out about the sin of racism, held community workshops, and decided through the Vestry, that this parish—as a whole—would be life members of the NAACP through the Easton Branch.

During my time here, we have experimented in many ways responding to the call of God in a variety of ways. Our concerts and artistic endeavors, the founding the Chautauqua of the Two Rivers, our choral scholars—two of whom came to faith and were baptized as young adults in this community—our work with Lafayette. We adopted a school in Kajo-Keji, South Sudan, and made audacious decision to tithe our capital campaign to build that school.

My experience of this community over the past nineteen years that this is a community that strives to listen for the call of God in big and little ways. Even our bike rides, our picnics, and partnerships with other parishes were living responses to the call of God to “discover, share, and live God’s love as friends and apprentices of Jesus Christ.”

Now, the time has come to listen again to the call of God. God is taking you to a hope-filled future. It is a heady thing, this business about call, so be careful not to get ahead of yourselves. Time and again, I have learned the hard way that good intentions become pavers on the road to perdition when we let ourselves think that we know better than God what God wants. So stop, pray, listen, discern, pray some more, and—above all—don’t be bamboozled because the evil one wants our good intentions to lead us someplace else. Meet your calling with integrity, inquiry, and, yes, even humor, and God will honor you with great things and trust you to follow him as friends and apprentices of Jesus Christ.

Listen for God’s call. Respond to God’s voice. Be discomfited by God’s urging. And may God go with you in all you do.

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Epiphany, Year B, January 17, 2021, at Trinity Episcopal Church, Easton, Pennsylvania. This was my final sermon as 13th Rector of that parish.

Preparing the way

How do you get ready for Christmas?

Well, I don’t know about you but for me, certain things that have to happen: the tree goes up. The box of decorations comes up from the basement. Certain recipes are brought out. And we break out the Christmas music. I love it.

Don’t tell the Advent Police, but I think it’s kind of cool to go into a store and hear some pop singer sing “hear the news the angels bring.” I want to shout “Yay, team!”

Just the same, I must admit that, it is hard for the Good News to rise above all the noise about dancing snowmen and sleigh bells ringing. One of my antidotes to endless arrangements of the same old secular holiday fare is to drag out my CDs and find the Messiah by George Frederick Handel (1685–1759).

Handel composed the oratorio in just three weeks, from August 22 until September 14, 1741. He put the music together with the libretto prepared by Charles Jennens, which is nothing more or less than Old and New Testament passages from the King James Version of the Bible—then only 130 years old. It opens with poetry from Isaiah—the same passage we just heard today:

"Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry unto her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her iniquity is pardoned" (Isaiah 40:1–2).

This is also where Gospel of Mark begins.

“The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” are the first words in the Gospel. From there Mark heads straight to the prophet Isaiah, who speaks of one who would come to make straight the paths before the coming of the Lord.

The Good News of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God begins with John, the one who is preparing the way. He brings words of comfort and hope: `Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight,'"

Words of comfort imply that there are people who need comforting. Words of hope mean that there were people without hope. When John spoke those words, he was speaking to first century Jews and he quoted their own scriptures. He reminds them of something that God has already done.

About five to six hundred years before John the Baptizer and Jesus, in 587 BC, the Jewish people experienced a devastating trauma. The Babylonian Empire came and conquered Israel and razed Jerusalem, including Solomon’s Temple. They sent the Jews into exile hoping to wipe out all memory of this once-great nation.

But 50 years later, along came Cyrus, the ruler of the Persians who conquered the Babylonians. Cyrus allowed the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem and Judea and resume their customs and traditions. This is where we get the words that Mark uses to open his gospel. We hear these words of hope in Handel’s oratorio.

Prepare the way for the Lord! This is the message of John the Baptist brings more than five centuries after Isaiah. John prepares the way for Jesus, who through his incarnation, life, death and resurrection closes the gap and restores all of us to unity with God, each other and creation. But keep in mind: John knew he was preparing for something, he just didn’t know what. He would not live to see what he was preparing for unfold but would only catch a glimpse. John brought a message of forgiveness and hope. And he brought a message of change. He called people to turn away from sin and turn towards God.

A few years ago, I heard an extraordinary story of a person who leveled the way, who showed off the reign of God and the possibility of new life. When I heard it was like music to my ears. Maybe you heard too. It begins with a subway trip in New York City.

Every night, Julio Diaz, a 31-year-old social worker rode the subway to his home in the Bronx. And he always got off one stop early so he can eat at his favorite diner. But one night, his evening took an unexpected turn when Diaz stepped off the No. 6 train and onto a nearly empty platform. He was confronted a teenage boy who pulled out a knife and demanded money.

Diaz gave him his wallet, but as the teen started to turn and run away, Diaz called out, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."

The would-be robber looked at his would-be victim strangely and he asked him 'Why are you doing this?'" Diaz told him that "If you're willing to risk your freedom for a few dollars, then I guess you must really need the money. I mean, all I wanted to do was get dinner and if you really want to join me ... hey, you're more than welcome.”

So the teen and Diaz went into the diner and sat in a booth, where, of course, Diaz knows everybody. The manager, the dishwashers, and the waiters all come by to say hi. The teen is perplexed. “You know everybody here,” he asks. “Do you own this place?'" Nah, Diaz says, he just eats there a lot.

“But you're even nice to the dishwasher.'"

Diaz replied, "Well, haven't you been taught you should be nice to everybody?"

"Yeah, but I didn't think people actually behaved that way," the teen said.

As they talked, Diaz asked him what he wanted out of life. The teen was silent, answering only with a sad face.

When the bill arrived, Diaz told the teen, "Look, I guess you're going to have to pay for this bill 'cause you have my money and I can't pay for this. So if you give me my wallet back, I'll gladly treat you."

Without hesitation the teen returned the wallet. Diaz paid for dinner and then gave him $20 figuring maybe it'll help him. There was only one thing Dias asked for in return: the teen's knife.

We don’t know what happened to the teen who tried to mug Julio Diaz. But we can see from this moment—from this risky, “kids don’t try this at home,” outside the box, moment—that we all have the power in how we live to cooperate with God and herald the coming of Christ.

To prepare the way, people must change. And if we are going to, with God’s help, fill valleys of imperfection, level mountains of selfishness, and make straight the crooked ways of every one for themselves, anyone who brings a message of hope, anyone who offers a vision of God at work among us, anyone who stops to care for another all heralds of the coming of Christ and his redeeming work. It turns out that we have taken the mantle of John the Baptizer and we are the ones who are leveling the way and making ready for the coming of the Messiah.

It’s a wilderness out there!

It’s a wilderness out there! It’s wild, crazy, full of contradictions and confusion. If we’re not careful, it could eat us up!

Which is why we are looking for shelter, a way station, for comfort. And that is why we cry out for justice and freedom and safety. This advent, we’ve been hearing both kinds of stories.

This season we’ve been hearing on kind of voices forecasting good news. It had been forecasted by media who sent out word well in advance.  People made their way from their Thanksgiving tables (some at midnight) to the malls and stores and worldwide web. They cried out in the wilderness for deals. The way was cleared and stores made ready, the paths for savings and deals galore were opened so that all could find the perfect gifts for loved ones.

Out of the wilderness commercials, advertisements, and emails proclaimed savings and people from the whole countryside, in fact the whole developed world came out and bought and charged. You should have seen some of the people, in all kinds of clothing, ragged by the days end. They looked and they looked, so the story goes, until at the close of the day Black Friday (the shopping day after Christmas) and Cyber Monday (the online shopping day after the thanksgiving weekend) saw the sale of over 53 billion in merchandise goodness. 

There is a wilderness within our own hearts, a hedge of brambles that too often separates us into opposing camps and allows us to justify casting off and discarding each other. 

It sounds like the two voices are worlds apart. But both the annual shopping frenzy and the recent protests arising out of violence—the cry for justice and the quest for gift –are deeply connected.

They are connected by "human desire." We humans are wired to desire and long for that which is outside of ourselves.

In the long lines and the great deals, there is a part of us seeking to purchase and make real our own image of life and relationships. We longs to somehow fill the emptiness that is inside with something that is outside of us.

And in the present political and social turmoil, in our of world of us vs. them, we cry out, we long for, a justice that both eludes us in the face of force that both defies and protects us.

We are built that way. God has made us people who long for more. Christians understand that human desire is created within us so that we will long for that which is outside of our selves - in particular God in Christ Jesus. We are created to be in relationship with God. We are created to long for God. And, we are created to long for one another.

It’s a problem as old as humanity because it goes with being human. We long for something so big and we fill that longing in all kinds of ways…none of them by themselves can do the job.

So we try to meet that longing by purchasing massive amounts of gifts to show we care. We fill that longing with goods and products that promise beauty and normalcy. We fill that longing with media and fill all the quiet moments with playlists and social media that demands our attention. We know there are empty spaces so we try to fill them with food, or things, or sound, or busy-ness.

Every now and then something happens, something that is just so wrong, just so out of kilter, just so unjust, that we get angry, we get up and we march, we fight, we agitate. We want society and the people who govern and our institutions to act fairly, to reflect compassion, to be just and restrain evil.

Advent is a season for longing, for looking for something better. And all the good ways we do good things—our homes, our gifts, our work, our voices, even our governance and our politics—all point us to the ways in which we long for something more.

The message of Mark's Gospel today really is good news. The message is that God is the one we are longing for and in his incarnation Jesus Christ came into the world to fill all the missing pieces of our own soul for the sake of the relationship God desires to have with us.

Not only do we desire God in all these ways. God longs for us.

Ireneaus, the second century bishop and saint, once described the whole reason for God's creative and saving work is God's own deep longing to walk with us, his creation, in the garden at the eve of the day.

The incarnation of Jesus helps to mend that hole in us, and fulfills God’s longing for us. Jesus’ incarnation, cross and resurrection all happens so that we may find our longings transformed and fulfilled in the community of friends called the church. Our sacramental life, our prayer, our companionship, our compassion, all point to the fulfilling of our deep longing and God’s desire for us.

Which is why in today’s Gospel John the Baptist does not point us to a perfect place, but to "The Way." The Gospel of Mark is “the Gospel of The Way.” And The Way leads to the cross and to resurrection. In the Gospel of Mark, John proclaims, Jesus leads us, and the disciples follow.

Walking the way is how we meet our deep longings every day. Walking the way means continually making room in our lives for the God who chooses to make us companions.

What I love about today’s passages is that on the one hand—in Isaiah—God is the one making the paths straight and the valleys low. On the other hand, in the Gospel of Mark, it is we who are to do the work of clearing the path, filling the valleys, to make room in our lives for God. Think of two crews building the same bridge, but one is one bank and the other crew is on the opposite side and they work their way towards each other. And somewhere in the middle, they meet. And people can cross from one side to the other.

As we in Advent, not unlike the inn keeper in another Gospel, create space in our calendars, at our tables, and in our lives (privately and publicly) for God, know that in Jesus God has made space for us!

It is a wilderness out there! It is our wilderness. We live in the wilds of consumer goods, complex lives, poverty, injustice, and, above all, longing. It is a wilderness and the voice is crying out beyond all the noise and the media and all the news. It is a voice that proclaims, "Stop! Listen! Make room for God! Clear away the obstacles!" The God who longs for us is coming to meet us who long for God.

Being Trusted by God for God's Work

So, what the heck is a talent, anyway? I’ll tell you one thing: it won’t win you a spot on America’s Got Talent, or Dancing with the Stars, that’s for sure! You know those giant lottery billboards … the ones that tell you the current jackpot in great big letters? That’s a talent. If you suddenly had in your hand enough money to equal the average annual salary times twenty…. That’s a talent.

So imagine if you hit the jackpot. What would you do?

The trusted servants in Jesus’ story did not hit the jackpot. Instead, they were people their master had come to trust with what amounted to a winning lottery ticket—but there was a catch. They had to make it grow on his behalf!

Imagine if someone gave you a big pile of money and said “I am going away now, you take this big pile of money and make it grow and when I come back I will collect what you’ve made.” What would you do?

This is what happens in the story Jesus told about three servants who were told to grow their masters money. Only two did, but one did not. He trusted them all, he believed them all to be responsible. And he gave them only as much as they could handle. Two of them did something to make their money grow. But not the third.  Remember, the master believed that the third slave had some skills, some gifts, some ability—because even though he was given the smallest amount, it wasn’t chump change! He gave the guy twenty years of average daily wage! That would be about a million dollars by today’s standard. Cha-ching!

But he was afraid of the master and knew he’d be angry if he lost, so he kept it safe…and that’s all.

Thinking about that third slave reminded me of a news story from a few years ago, where a young couple bought a house in California from the estate of an elderly man who had died alone, having outlived his wife and whose grown children lived far away. As the new owners began to renovate their home, they found envelopes full of cash squirreled away in nooks and crannies. Soon these envelopes became a pile and that pile amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The old man didn’t trust the banks. He didn’t invest the money. He kept it a secret so no one would steal it.  He hid them for the day that, no matter how dreary and wet, was never rainy enough. His children said he lived in near poverty his whole life while working every day he could.

Now the new owners had a dilemma. Their lawyers told them  that all that money was theirs to keep. The contract on the sale of the house said so…all the contents of the house were theirs. But the new owner and his wife knew that the man did not save all that money to go to some stranger who happened to buy a house. Sure, they thought, here is a windfall but what kind of lesson shall we teach our children? So, instead of keeping the money, they gave it back to the man’s children for them to use.

Heart-warming story. But what made this man hide all his money in the first place? What made him keep it a secret from even his children? What made him live as a pauper while riches were only an arm’s reach away?

Fear. Fear and a kind of backwards faith that says something bad is always just around the corner.

That’s why today’s Gospel is so very important. Matthew’s church was trying to figure out how to live in that very long time between the resurrection and Jesus’ return. They remembered a teaching of Jesus and applied it to their own church and that lesson was never to bury or hide what we have been given.

Think about it. Here they were, fifty or so years after Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, and already there has arisen a disturbing tendency for the community to stand pat and let things work themselves out.

They, like us, had to be reminded of the bounty God has showered on his people; and, most of all, on the trust Christ has placed on us to carry out his mission…to be Christ’s people, Christ’s representatives in the world. And so Matthew included this lesson of Jesus into his Gospel… because his church was stuck in a kind of inertia—whether it was out of fear or simply stuck in complacency, we don’t know. But they had to be reminded that God in Christ trusted them with a great gift to do God’s work.

But being trusted can be scary. We don’t want to disappoint. We are afraid of messing up. We don’t want to lose what we’ve been given. And if that fear takes hold…if that worry about what might happen becomes front and center…if thinking about potential disapproval or judgment or concern over what people might think takes hold of our hearts…then we become helpless. If we are overwhelmed by worry then we become helpless. No wonder the third slave buried his treasure and hunkered down!

That is our challenge even today. We live in a strange time of uncertainty, caution to the point of fear, sometimes resulting in irrational defiance. We have just been through a strange, stressful election season, and even still some people cannot let go and trust the process they claim to love enough to accept the outcome. We think we hang on out of conviction, but really we are hanging on to dear life out of fear. In this environment we are tempted to hunker down, get belligerent, hide our gifts, and so become helpless.

I am reminded of the words of blessed Pope John XXIII—who risked it all for the sake of the Gospel in calling together the Vatican II Council in 1963. He said we in the Church are not the curators of a museum; but instead we are the cultivators of a garden. Gardening is hard work and requires planning and preparation and attention, and our hands will get dirty. Because gardens are for growing, not for burying.

Jesus’ parable says that the master gave each slave a gift in proportion to their abilities. I believe we have all been given what we need and the place to act on those gifts.

While we tend to focus on the poor guy in the Gospel who gets thrown in the outer darkness, we forget about the rest of the story: don’t forget the two servants who are complimented for their work, and more than that…they are welcomed into the joy of their master. What they receive is not a promotion with a fat paycheck but something much more important. Their faithfulness means that they enjoy a deeper relationship with God.

The fundamental difference is how they saw their gifts and how they understood their master in the first place. The master trusted all three and that trust was a gift— the ones who saw abundant possibility were the ones who returned that blessing to their master many fold and received blessing in return.

But too often we are like the third servant. We are often tempted to see God first and finally as a hard judge—as someone very scary—and this can blind us from seeing the gift we are entrusted with as an opportunity and calling but as a time-bomb. The third servant led with his fear, and so lost out.

The lesson here for you and me, the average friend and apprentice of Jesus, is this: receive what God has given you with joy, and use it—even it means some risk—in a way that returns that blessing to God. Don’t stand pat—do something big and audacious and risky for God.

We live in an uncertain time. We are asked to wear masks and wash hands and not go into crowded places. This is an important work of love and I commend it to you, not out of fear but out of care. We are tempted to get angry and stubborn and do something stupid. We are tempted to go for the familiar, instead of the imaginative and new. And I am not just talking about money—or even masks! I am talking about our tendency to organize our living around what we are afraid of, and that is when we bury what we’ve been given.

The antidote is to live joyfully in the blessings God has given us in Christ Jesus; to use the abilities and resources God has given us to be God’s hands and feet in the world; and to build on the blessings and assets we have to cultivate our lives in service to God and to the world starting right here, right now. We are being called upon to think of church and community in new, imaginative ways.

In Christ, we have been a given a gift beyond expectation or imagining. Now, how do we use what we have been given?

A Sermon for the 24^th Sunday after Pentecost (28A), Matthew 25:14-30

Another pesky kairos moment

There has been a lot cynical eye-rolling and snide remarking about President Trump's recent comment to the press which amounted to an attack on Governors in those states observing strict physical distancing guidelines including the closing of non-essential businesses and organizations. He said that they ought to "let" the churches be open.

Several religious leaders respectfully cleared their throats stepped up to the mic and said "we got this."

Of course, this was a typical off the cuff remark without reference to the actual guidelines the states have put out, completely unconscious of the guidelines most religious leaders have set out which are often more stringent than the governmental regulations. 

In our parish, this has meant that we have not met for formal corporate worship in our church since the Fourth Sunday in Lent... we are now (as I write this) in the Seventh Sunday of Easter. 

Those remarks raised a host of legitimate questions about church-state entanglements and the role of the president in encouraging expressions of faith, and so on. But that is not what caught my attention.

When I heard the President remark that governors ought to allow us to reopen, my first response was "Wha? You call this closed?" 

That is, after I looked up from whichever screen I was on while interacting with a parishioner or having a meeting or Bible Study or putting together worship or holding an on-line prayer service or writing something for one of our parish electronic or dead-tree publications.

Of course, and I am not the first to observe this, the problem is with an understanding of what "church" means. If you read the New Testament accounts and pay attention to history of what the Church does best-- heck, if you look at the soup kitchens, food banks, pastoral visiting, on-line & televised worship (even before the pandemic!) and small groups you discover that we Christians are a magnificent hybrid. We are hard to pin down.

That's because we, the Church, are a community that is at once gathered and sent. We are tight knit body that meets in time and space, and is also dispersed into society and the cosmos. We form institutional expressions of every size and shape--from magisterial to town-meeting to face-to-face-- and we are intimately personal and relational. 

What do you expect from a community simultaneously founded on incarnation and eschaton? Where we journey through parted seas, wander in the desert, revel in God-with-us while looking forward to meeting the Lamb at the Throne -- all at the same time! From the immediate, intimate relationship between the holy and the human; that balances a rich history, the immediacy of the present, and the vastness of unfolding future, Christians travel in the places where kairos (God's time) and chronos (our time) meet. 

So how can a virus close that?

There is a little line in the Episcopal Church's Burial Office that always catches my breath. I always try to put a little extra "oomph" into my spoken delivery hoping that it will not be a throw-away or bounce off the emotional armor that grieving people must necessarily build. It found in the Proper Preface of the Holy Eucharist for "The Commemoration of the Dead" and it goes like this:

"For to your faithful people, O Lord, life is changed not ended...."

We generally interpret this in much the way it's seen in a Tom 'n' Jerry cartoon. You know, when Tom uses up one of his nine lives and out floats a ghostly version of himself and he will be issued either a harp or a fire extinguisher.

But the Christian Hope is that in Christ all things will be filled, fulfilled, completed, and made whole. This is much more than harps in heavenly clouds; but when God, who has overcome sin and death in the incarnation, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, gathers to Godself all creation and finally and fully heals all the breaches between us and all humanity, creation, and God's own self. I believe that this is not just a once and done deal, but an ongoing, always unfolding experience. It is at the same time wondrous and bewildering, because we are stuck in chronos while participating in kairos. 

This epidemic has caused all kinds of disruption. The business leaders and economists who preached disruption theory as the key to innovation must be getting impatient-- maybe even eating their words?-- because right now disruption doesn't come in an explosive moment of insight and energetic invention. 

Nope. Disruption has arrived in the requirement that we do... nothing. In a society built on progress or innovation which is understood to be dynamic and in motion, being still and being solitary is at best weird and at worst painful. The novelty has worn off and we are getting antsy. 

Still, we must "sit and stay" before we can get our treat. So let's use our antsy feelings and turn that energy into something. There are active things to be done: walking, running, excericising; and also bringing food to the homebound, to soup kitchens, and pantries; making calls to the lonely or isolated; sending cards; and so much more. And there are the things we never had time to do, or could not clear the decks to get around to: contemplation, prayer, writing or journaling, painting or drawing, learning new music, even trying new radio or video experiences. This disruption of our rhythms is also a chance to re-set.

And in all this, the Church doesn't just happen, it is. We are. We have another moment of free grace-- that used to just arrive when we stood in line or was stuck on hold-- where we can choose between exasperation or presence, between impatience or appreciation. Between profanity (in the truest sense) and holiness. 

So for those whose notion of church has not yet grown past the big gathering in the big room, this is a chance to experience something more. Of course, for those who never really delved into the meaning of things, for whom life is nothing more than reactivity and chance, this will seem strange, even laughable. Their impatience is understandable. But, as Scrooge would eventually learn after his own Christmas pilgrimage, it's better that they have their malady in laughter than in more disagreeable forms. 

I can't wait for the moment when we can all gather back in our big rooms and beautiful churches and have worship with all the loud singing, proclamation, and praise we can muster. For now, though, here is our chance to revel in the mystery and wonder of living in an in-between time.