The lengths that God will go to restore community

Easter Sunday, 2021

I don't know if you noticed but once again, the Triduum landed on another holy feast: Maundy Thursday was also April Fool's Day. So during this octave of All Fooles Day, I am reminded of these sage words which come as both a proclamation and a warning: “Seeing is not believing. Our senses can deceive us.”

What? We are talking about Easter here, aren't we? Certainly!

“Seeing is not believing. Our senses can deceive us.” This is not advice that Yoda might give Luke Skywalker, but are words spoken by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in the TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. “Seeing is not believing.”

He goes on: “The cosmos … is stranger than we ever could have imagined. Light, time, space, gravity conspire to create realities which lie beyond human experience.”

He proceeds to reflect on the incredible discoveries of what the night sky has been telling us that until very recently we could not hear, let alone comprehend.

MIT physics professor Max Tegmark wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times a few years back in which he reported on what he calls “the bombshell announcement of the discovery of cosmology’s holy grail: telltale signature of ripples in the very fabric of space [from] our cosmic origins.

“If this discovery holds up,” he goes on to say, “it will go down as one of the greatest in the history of science.

“It teaches us humans that we need to think big,” he says, “because we are the masters of underestimation.”

We need to think big, because we are masters of underestimation.

I like that.

Our gathering on this Easter Day in and of itself is evidence of a ripple in the very fabric of reality. And this ripple invites us to more than think big, but to imagine and trust in the impossible. To put aside underestimation.

It all began early on the first day of the week. The women were confronted with the news, “He is not here, but has risen.” And that's where Mark's Gospel ends.

But they must have told somebody, because for one thing, we here we are today! Singing , hearing and proclaiming, and standing in awe of the power of God in the Risen Jesus.

Madeline L’Engle, who wrote A Wrinkle in Time, reflected on how God works through the impossible:

“The first of the gloriously impossible things that Jesus did was to be born — the power that created the universe come to live with us as one of us.  And now his time on earth was over, and in the eyes of the religious establishment of his day, he had failed and they had triumphed.  True, he had healed a few cripples and lepers, given sight to a few blind people, driven out a few demons; but he threatened the religious establishment and they killed him.  Or thought they did.”

This was hard new to digest. Even Jesus’ closest followers at first resisted the reports that “he is risen.” Because for all kinds of good reasons, such news was beyond their comprehension. They were still reeling from the horror and the terror of crucifixion. They were rattled, afraid, grief-stricken, demoralized, devastated -- undone.

In the months leading up to that first Easter, whenever Jesus brought up the question and manner of his death, his followers refused to accept it. The idea of death, let along crucifixion, was too much. They didn’t want to hear it. And if they could not imagine or contemplate his dying, then they would surely have tuned out any talk of resurrection.

Jesus told them -- but they could not hear it. They could not comprehend it. It was too big. It was too good to be true.

And all of the Gospels all agree on this point. Luke tells us that when they first heard the news from the women, it “seemed to them an idle tale.” You know what that means: empty talk, a silly story, a foolish yarn, utter nonsense, sheer humbug. We just heard in Mark how the women who came to the tomb could not process the news, even when delivered by angels.

Many of you here know what it’s like to live in the wake of death. You know it firsthand. It’s engulfing. We feel it in our bones. Death ripples through time and rips through our lives -- it tears us apart. We know it well, all too well.

All of Gospel accounts in the New Testament, the one from Mark this morning and all the other Gospels, were written at least 30 to 40 years after the events took place but by then the memory was well seated into the community's memory. And common to all these accounts is that no one saw it coming. They were completely blindsided by the resurrection. 

Then, as now, talk of resurrection sounds too good to be true. Too big. And even after they touched his wounds, ate with him, heard him teach the Scriptures, and watched him ascend to heaven, that memory of that initial surprise stuck with them.

Notice that public relations and spin control was not at the forefront of the minds of Jesus’ followers. You would have thought that 40 years after the events, when the Gospels were finally written down, the leadership of the early church would have ever so slightly shaped the stories to boost their own authority and legitimacy -- especially if one assumes that the original accounts were essentially fabricated in the first place. I mean, if you're going make something up as audacious as the Gospel, wouldn't you want to make yourself look good in the process? 

In today's world, it is easy to imagine Peter, James and John, for instance, going over the final edits of the accounts and proposing a rewrite something like this: “Yes, we were there on the morning of the third day, waiting for the stone to be rolled away, because he had told us it would be so! Sure enough, when the glorious news came: ‘He is risen!’ we, his closest trusted and most loyal companions, met up with him in Galilee as planned. And well, the rest is history!”

No, that’s not what happened! Not by a long shot! For whatever reason, they did not re-edit the story. Jesus’ first followers all admit that they were overwhelmed by his death -- confused, perplexed and deathly afraid.

These accounts ring true, precisely because they line up with what we know to be true about death.

It makes perfect sense that resurrection would be, on the face of it, nonsense – that the reality of it would take a while to sink in. It makes sense that it would be remembered as utterly inconceivable, unbelievable. As too big. As too good to be true. But at the same time, so undeniably true that the experience pierced through all their wonder, disbelief, and skepticism.

The apostle Paul wrote the first letter to the Corinthians twenty or so years after the time of Jesus, and it is the earliest written record of the resurrection we have in the New Testament. By that time, we read, it was regarded as “of first importance” in relation to the message about Jesus: that he died, was buried and was raised on the third day, and that he appeared to Peter, the 12 and then to 500 others at one time. And, Paul says, most of them are still alive, though some have died.

By that time, resurrection had become the explanation for their whole existence. Jesus’ resurrection had become the reason for hope for all who had died and will die. It had become a matter of first importance not just about Jesus but also about us -- all of us -- subject as we are to this human condition.

By then, it had become the cornerstone of the Christian message. They called it Gospel, or “good news.” The good news about Jesus, about God, about humanity, about life. The fabric of death that enshrouds all of humanity has been ripped open, and there is light. Undying light.

They understood that Christ did indeed harrow hell, because their own thinking and way of seeing and being was utterly transformed by encountering the Risen Jesus!

Before long, those early Christians had learned to think big. In Jesus, God had conspired to create a reality that until then had been beyond human experience and comprehension. There was something deeper than death. There was a love stronger than death.

I don't know if you noticed, but The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was martyred on this day 53 years ago in 1968. He 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.

The evidence of this ripple in the fabric of time -- the evidence of resurrection -- lies not in just these accounts, whether from the Gospel writers or from Paul. The evidence of the ripple of resurrection lies here with us, some 2,000 years beyond its origin.

So go ahead. Be astounded once again! And don't be afraid to "think big" – because we are now, as the disciples were then, “masters of underestimation!” In this time of strife, epidemic, and re-appraisal, allow yourself to be startled by the good news of Easter. And as you encounter the Risen Jesus, share that startling hope with everyone you meet!

"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.

So, what's the rush?

We’ve all done it. It is a trait we all share on one level or another. We’ve all found ourselves shifting our weight from one foot to another, folding and unfolding our arms repeatedly checking our watches or phones, sighing deeply and asking ourselves inwardly (or even out loud) “what’s taking so long?” We may teach our children and even our puppies “to wait for it.” But we can’t wait! We peek to see what’s under the gift paper as the presents sit beneath the tree, we peer into the simmering pot before it's ready, we push ourselves to lift that too-heavy box instead of using good body mechanics or asking for help. And why?

Because we can’t wait. We are impatient.

So, what's the rush?

Advent is said to be the season of waiting. But because it is also the season of our society’s Great Winter Festival—you know, from the Macy’s Parade to the Super Bowl—waiting is not an option. We want what we want when we want it. God help us!

This past weekend, I read a post from a mother who put on her Facebook page a picture of the wreck of dirty dishes after Thanksgiving dinner: “eight hours to prepare, twenty minutes to consume, an hour to clean up,” she wrote. 

But if you think she has it bad, look at the farmer that gave us our feast: the one who prepared the ground in the spring, planted the seeds, watered and tended the plants, dealt with bugs, critters, and weather, and then harvested the crop and brought it to market. The farmer teaches us that waiting takes patience—which is not the same thing as twiddling one’s thumbs, but it is the wise use of time, hard work, and resources.

So, what is the rush anyway? Why are we so impatient so much of the time? 

What makes us rush to control and manage things just so we can get what we want-- in our relationships? In our work? In our churches? 

I believe that the rush comes when our deep inner longing meets our deep-seated inability to allow things to unfold.

The culture doesn’t help us one bit in this department! Everything is designed around getting us to want something and then get it as soon as possible. We’ve become so impatient that we can’t even go to the store anymore: we insist that it come to us! We buy our gadgets (and our groceries!) from Amazon in exactly the same way that the Coyote bought his rocket sneakers and bat wings from Acme.

Which brings us to Advent. As waiting seasons go, Advent is really not all that long. Four Sundays…that’s it! And often the season is not even a full four weeks, especially if Christmas lands on a Monday or Tuesday. But we light the candles, measuring either how long we’ve waited or how far we have to go before we can sing Christmas carols.

And you want to know what the really silly part is? After waiting those four Sunday, we rip through Christmas like a whirlwind and move right on to the January sales and New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. This year, the Christmas season covers two Sundays before we get to the Epiphany and the Magi. Already I can hear the sighing on that Second Sunday of Christmas, January 3^rd… because two days after New Year’s some well meaning person will say to me, “are we still doing Christmas…?”

Impatience is at the heart of the human condition. Just look at the classic seven deadly sins: they all have in common the impatient desire to give in to our impulses now. Don’t believe me? Take a look:

According to the standard list, the big seven sins are pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony, and sloth. Pride, in this construct, is not healthy self-esteem or self-worth but what happens when we place ourselves above others, when we overestimate our importance; greed—getting what one wants at any cost; wrath—uncontrolled rage against life’s limits or against another’s dignity; envy—resentment over another’s good fortune; lust—sexual (or other) satiation without vulnerability or relationship; gluttony—devouring and hoarding everything one wants (not just food!); and sloth, which is not mere laziness but living in expectation that that one will receive benefits without any effort at all. Sometimes sloth is called “acedia” which the habitual absence of interest or deep resistance to do one’s own emotional work—the temptation to give up altogether. Personally, I’d like to add impatience as the eighth deadly sin, but I don’t need to-- because all of these classical sins share in one way or another the trait of impatience.

Mahatma Ghandi put it well when wrote about the seven blunders of the world that lead to violence; which, again, share the trait of impatience: 1) Wealth without work; 2) Pleasure without conscience; 3) Knowledge without character; 4) Commerce without morality; 5) Science without humanity; 6) Worship without sacrifice; and 7) Politics without principle. 

Both these lists tell us that there are no short cuts to virtue; and even our deep yearning for justice, and our longing for the coming of God’s reign require waiting, and, yes, patience.

Now, to be clear here, I am not saying that patience is the same as acquiescence. Patience is not the spiritual act of kicking the can down the road or assuming that someone else will do what we don’t want to do. “Patience” is not a synonym for “fear.” Actual patience requires trust, knowledge, effort, humility, and relationship. It requires a calm heart, clear thinking, and a non-anxious stance. Early in my ministry, when I worked with recovering addicts in a residential facility, the hardest lesson in recovery was for the residents to learn patience and with it the managing of one’s impulses.

“Yes, but…!” I hear you cry, “but what about justice?” Isn’t God impatient for justice? I sometimes hear preachers compare the sleeping disciples in today’s gospels to the church, asleep at the switch when it comes to justice. Jesus tells them to “wake up! Stay alert!” Why must we put up with oppressive and unjust systems for any longer than we must? 

To which I reply, who says that patience is “giving in?”

True, there are folks who disguise their discomfort and fear of change behind an argument for patience; just as many mainline clergy (including some then-prominent Episcopalians!) told the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King to “be patient” as he sat in a Birmingham jail, or who tried to stall the full inclusion of women into the Church’s ordained ministry asking for more patience. Personally, my tendency is to agree with Mother Jones, who organized coal miners in 19^th century eastern Pennsylvania, when she said “Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” On my wall hangs a saying, a kind of prayer, given to me at my ordination. It’s a quote by Elizabeth Cady Stanton who said, “Please don’t let me grow conservative with age.” 

At the same time, while we need to be wary of confusing patience with acedia, we must also be careful to not let one’s impatience doesn’t grow into pridefulness. Remember, how Rosa Parks changed the world with her focused, targeted patience?

So, what is the rush?

In Advent, we repent from our impatience while we wait for God's salvation history to unfold.

We acknowledge our sin that we often assume that we know better than anyone… even God… about how to get things done for God. Look at the Christmas narrative and see the lengths people go to snuff out the Incarnation. In the Passion narrative we see what happens when the impatience of the religious authorities caused them to try to stamp out Jesus’ ministry, and what Judas’ impatience to rush along the coming of the Kingdom does to him—even how his impulsive impatience made him unable to accept forgiveness! The Gospels, and especially the Passion, show us in stark detail the heart of human sin, which includes our inability to wait.

For me, the heart of Advent waiting is being present. Living in the here and now, with a stance that learns from and appreciates the past (all of it… the successes and the tragedies, the sins and the acts of redemption) and looks to the future of with hope (you know, "faith that looks forward"). Advent reminds us of the saying that John Lennon repeated, that life happens while we’re busy making other plans.

It takes faith to allow things to unfold in their time. We so often want to reduce God’s time (Kairos) to our timetable (Chronos). But, like an experienced cook, it takes a mature faith to cooperate with that process, giving it energy where it’s needed and time to simmer when that’s what’s called for. You need the skill and the know-how to prepare the ingredients, the trust and the knowledge to let the cake bake or food cook, and the confidence—the faithful activity—to do the right thing, at the right time, in the right way to get the right result.

As we long for God’s promised future—as we yearn for the establishment of God’s justice, God’s redemption, and for the maturity of faith which comes from grace and for faithful community that comes through the action of the Holy Spirit—allow this Advent time to teach us how to cooperate with God in the unfolding of God’s reign, to do the work God has given us to do, and to teach us the virtues and tools we need to bring Christ’s healing to our broken, confused, and impatient world.

Finding faith in unexpected places

Have you ever stopped to ask for directions?

These days, I depend on the GPS in my phone which suits me just fine because (I have been told) that I have to be in complete desperation to finally break down and admit to a total stranger—let alone my spouse!—that I am lost! When I have asked, I have found that there at least two ways people give directions: one is by landmark and one is by precise distance and direction.

The first is “go the third elm tree, the one at the fork in the road with the hound dog sleeping under it….”

The second is “go ½ mile north, and then at Route 137A, make a left.”

When you’re lost or in crisis, sometimes Mr. Precision is a real comfort: just tell me what to do!

But there are other times when the landmark method is at least as accurate, if not more colorful. The trouble is that you don’t know how accurate the hound-dog-guy is until you round the bend, approach the fork in the road and then see the tree and the dog, right where he said it was.

Either way, it’s an act of faith. One is faith in the precision, and the other is faith in, well, the art of the direction.

So, if you were going to give someone directions to God, which would you be? Would you choose precise, or describe the landmarks? If you shared your spiritual story, how would you describe God’s presence in your life? Or talk about the way you connect with God? How precise would your language be?

While I have been trained in Mr. Precision—to rattle off the Catechism—I am kind of drawn to hound dog and the elm tree approach. Because the truth is, there would be a lot of ‘uhms’ and ‘ahs’ and some foot shuffling. The hesitation is neither shame, nor uncertainty, as it is trying to find the right image.  Because I’ve found out that everyday there is the discovery, and the recognition that we are always at least a little lost, and everyday, there are little signs of redemption.

When Jesus describes God’s reign, the Kingdom of God, and he uses landmarks. He uses simple stories. Jesus, and then Matthew the Gospel-writer, tell us what living under God’s rule is like.

The kingdom of God is like a mustard plant in a wheat field. It’s like a little yeast in a little flour that makes a great big loaf of bread.

It’s like seeking or having a treasure that possesses you.

The kingdom of God is like a net that hauls in all kinds of fish, and other things, too.

All of these parables are about how something useless or out of place becomes the hallmark of God’s kingdom. If Jesus is the rejected stone that become the chief cornerstone, then the stands to reason that the kingdom of God is like, a weed, some leaven, a hidden or longed for treasure, or like being drawn into a fishing net, like it or not.

When Jesus talks about mustard seeds in this parable it’s the size of the plant not the seed that’s important. Mustard plants were considered weeds in the Ancient Near East. Like any weed, you can’t get rid of them and they grow like mad. So the parable says the Kingdom of God is like … a weed that someone sowed in the field. It may be a small seed, but in a garden or farm field it stands out like a sore thumb. And it turns out that the birds like it for shade. In our little garden, this weed might as well be as big as a Cedar of Lebanon! What was once a lamentable eyesore is now a great tree which gives shelter to all the birds!

Think about it… Jesus says the kingdom of God is like…a big weed!

The second parable is equally strange. For Jews of Jesus’ day, leavening bread was a symbol of corruption because they did not have our filtered and purified yeast in those days. Leaven came from moldy bread. So…the Kingdom of God, Jesus says, is like…some yucky leaven that a woman hid in the dough. Something that was corrupted has become the source of abundance. The kingdom of God is like leaven.

The two stories of people with treasure talk about people who find treasure: one finds it by accident, hidden in a plot of land, and the other finds exactly what he is looking for. In both cases, Jesus tells us that the kingdom of God is like that: once the desire for God gets in us, we crave it as badly as the greedy man wants gold. God’s Spirit owns us that much!

Jesus says that God’s grace is a like a fisher’s net. A net that catches fish, sure, but also old tires, and empty cans, and God knows what else! The kingdom of God is like being caught up in a net.

What strange, unexpected images Jesus uses!  If you think that the Kingdom of God is like a perfect earthly monarchy, think again!  The people who thought that the Kingdom be filled with people behaving themselves and being good, and only come when our side wins, are going to be surprised! Jesus has given us some very different landmarks. His parables are like telling us to keep going until we see the fork in the road by the hound-dog tied to a big shade tree.

Why does Jesus talk like this to tell us what the kingdom of God is like? Because in God’s reign, God takes the unexpected, the unclean and the unwanted, and turns all of that into abundance! Like a big shrubby weed with all those birds in an otherwise perfectly sown field.

Life in God’s kingdom owns us, even as we do everything to own it.  Seeking and having the pearl of great price changes us. We are owned by the faith we posses.

Life in God’s world is at once diverse and irresistible. We are all caught up in it as in a net.

I don’t know about you, but I am not so hot at giving—or taking—direction. There are times in my life when I want, when I need, the precision of distance and direction. But much of life lends itself to the poetry of landmark and story. Turns out that God has room for both.

How would you describe God alive in your life? To what would you compare it? Jesus is says is like something we want that is hard to describe, but when we see it we know it.

Our loving, liberating, relational God

To think of and describe a God who is both one in three and three in one is almost impossible to accurately describe, so we fall back on analogies. And that can be… well… embarrassing.

Every year for a few years now, someone will inevitably post on social media (at least in my on-line silos) a Lutheran Humor video showing St. Patrick trying to describe the Trinity to a couple of Irish peasants. It’s like a three-leafed clover, he says, or how water can be ice, or water, or vapor, and so on. And each time, the peasants object, saying how he has just committed some classic heresy (“Oh, Patrick! That’s modalism!” “Oh, Patrick! That’s partialism!” “You’re the worst Patrick! I mean, really!”). Finally, Patrick gets exasperated and blurts out a rapid-fire recitation of the Athanasian Creed, to which the peasants say “Well, okay. Why didn’t you just say so?”

We get ourselves all tied up in knots. Even in our own parish named for the Trinity, there are only two symbols of the Trinity in the whole place… the big window over the high altar which, while lovely and which is meant to invite us through the Sacrament into the Gates of Heaven, also depicts God as the Old Guy, the Crucified Dude, and the Bird. The other image is so high up on the wall at the opposite end of the church that it is out of reach. Which is too bad, because if you think about it—or really, stop trying to overthink it—it is really rather simple.

If you read the scriptures enough, and listen carefully enough, one truth becomes inescapable: Godself is best known in relationship.

That is for me the chief witness of both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. We see it again and again: From Genesis where we hear about God walking in the Garden looking for Adam and Eve who have hidden themselves out of shame, to God’s encounter with Moses on the mountain, to the voices of the prophets, right down to the incarnation of Jesus, and even to the vision of Revelation where heaven comes to earth and God gathers all people. The very nature of God is relational. And we, being created in the image of God, are by our very nature relational beings.

This is why the dual crises we are facing now cuts so deep. They are crises of relationship. The global COVIS-19 pandemic that keeps us apart is a crisis in relationship. We are not made to be kept apart because we are built in the image of a relational God.

And the stark revelations (to white society, that is) of deeply ingrained racism in all aspects of our society reveals an ongoing abuse of power that distorts the fundamental dignity of each person, shows us how deeply the sin of racism is a sin against our relational God.

Bishop Frank Logue of Atlanta writes:

“Before God created everything we see and know, there was a communion of three separate persons of the Godhead who created you out of love, for love. Not just one being, but relationships and communion, before time and forever. This is why you were created: to be in healthy, loving, generative relationship with God and all creation. And out of this web of relationships comes both your salvation and the redemption of all creation.”

The word Trinity never appears in the Bible. Yet in today’s Gospel, the Great Commission tells us to baptize new followers of Jesus in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. We read a different Trinitarian formulation in Second Corinthians, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”

The word “racism” doesn’t appear In the Bible, either. It’s not on any of the Apostle Paul’s lists of sins in his epistles, Jesus doesn’t utter the word from his sermons on the mount, on the plain, or from the boat.

But Scripture tells us a lot about oppression and the work of God to break its power and free people from it From Moses thundering before Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” to Isaiah proclaiming a fast from injustice, to Jesus turning over the tables in the Temple, we see that when God seeks to heal human sin and bring us back into relationship, racism is at the heart of what God seeks to eradicate and heal.

The first Christians weren’t deep theologians, at least not in the academic sense, when they started following the way of Jesus. They prayed and fasted, they cared for widows and orphans, they held everything in common, they told others about the Risen Jesus. Not because of some treatise or manifesto, but because it seemed good to them and to the Holy Spirit. It was the right way to live, and the right way to be with each other.

It turns out that renewed relationship was a key sign to those around them of God at work in their communities. And when they baptized and brought a new person into their community in “the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit” they were speaking of a God who is known in relationship.

The creation story that we heard this morning reminds us  that our very humanity, our very diversity, the qualities we share and the things that are unique, are in their essence part of imago dei, the image of God.

This is why the coincidence of global pandemic and our corporate rage at racism and all kinds racial violence in the deaths of Breanna Taylor, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Alton Sterling, Botham Jean, Atatiana Jefferson, Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and so many more is so very important. Because we are made in the image of our relational God, the sin of racism cuts to the very heart of what it means to be human. Racism destroys and distorts human ecology on its most basic level, by regulating and destroying relationships.

In his classic book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Eugene Genovese describes the lengths to which slave owners would go to distort and destroy the relationships among the people they enslaved. They would break up families, take away children, change their names, regulate what enslaved people could learn, even manage and control how enslaved people would care for their sick and bury their dead. Why? Because they knew if the people they enslaved were to experience unhindered relationships, they would find their dignity, discover their courage, and break out of their bonds.

Every oppressive regime knows this—from Jim Crow to the Holocaust to the Gulag to the reservation system and the so-called Indian Schools, to el los desaparecidos—the pattern has been repeated. And as soon as the oppressors teach people in bondage to read the Scriptures (thinking it would pacify them) it is always the beginning of the end. Because the Scriptures introduces oppressed people to Moses, Jeremiah, Ruth, Micah, Isaiah, Mary, and Jesus. At the heart of the scriptural narrative is a people seeking liberation following a God who is present, empowering, and relational.

Jesus time and again quoted the heart of the Law: Love God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength and love your neighbor as yourself. The great commandment is relational. We love God and we love people in a deeply interconnected web of relationships. When we come to love God more, we find the heart for people that God has, and so the love of God draws us to other people. Loving other people fully means seeing them as God sees them, and so loving people can also draw us to God. And that is how Godself is best known in relationship! God’s people are best known in our communion with one another. That is why we were created: to live in holy relationship with God each other, and creation. It why respecting the dignity of every human being is at the heart of our baptismal promise.

God is a relational God, and God is also a God of hope! Hope is faith that looks forward. The present pandemic and our (apparently newfound) consciousness of the sin of racism is driving us to appreciate and re-evaluate our relatedness and see the ecology of our relationships differently.

Early Christians practiced their faith well before they landed on the language of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They experienced the fullness of God in the communities where they lived. We are invited also to live out our faith now and let our language flow from that. At the same time, we are invited to see the language of the Trinity not as some distant theological concept but as a gift to us from people who have walked this same path ahead of us.

We are God’s people made in God’s image. And just as God cannot be contained to one image, so we cannot be contained to one culture or expression. And as the fullness of God is found in relationship of the Trinity, so the fullness and grace of humanity comes when we discover liberating, life-changing, and loving relationships that overcomes privilege and break down the barriers of racism making us more fully the people God made us to be.




Trinity Sunday worship at Trinity Episcopal Church, Easton, PA may be found here

It's time to leave the upper room!

It’s time to leave the upper room! We have been stuck here too long. We’ve gotten used to the risen Jesus coming to us; to the Holy Spirit coming to us. We are okay with sending someone else out to deal with the consequences of crucifixion and coming back with reports of empty tombs.

But, no. It is time to leave the upper room. 

It’s true that a lot happens in that space: from Holy Week all the way through the Easter Season, we’ve been hearing about all the that that went on in that upper room in Jerusalem. And even though those events shaped the church for years— centuries! —to come, the truth is that it is time to leave. It’s time get out!

I know we’re all a little stir-crazy right now. Zoom and YouTube are great but they are not the same. Many things are different.

I want to get out and travel, even just go out to eat, and while I can do a lot from my little perch, and the grill is wonderful, it’s not the same. I love singing with our choir and how another member digitally turns our separate voices into the choral music for our on-line worship, it is not the same.

The thing is that it won’t ever be the same again, ever!

A lot of people are angry about that. I get it: we did not sign on for this. But here is where the experience of those disciples, those friends and apprentices of Jesus, is instructive.

The disciples did not sign on to be cooped up for weeks on end in their upper room. They followed Jesus as he walked around Palestine teaching and healing. They loved handing out bread and fish that seemed to spring like a gusher from baskets that started with just two donated fish and three loaves. They loved the crowds when he taught from hills, on plains, and from boats. They were astounded when Jesus raised Lazarus and the sick little girl from death and when healed the Centurion’s servant from afar. They probably got a laugh out of Peter’s reaction when some guys cut a hole in his roof to lower down a sick man from Peter’s upper room!

But when things turned sour, the disciples turned that upper room from which they had heard Jesus teach and where they probably planned all their travels around the holy land, into a shelter. A hiding place. A spiritual quarantine. They hid there and hunkered down.

Okay, after the last supper and the foot washing, maybe that made sense. They thought they were marked men and feared being arrested and they had no place to go after Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion. It was their hideout. It soon became their tree-house.

Because after the resurrection, when they decided they could venture out to the temple to pray, they still did not go very far! They always came back to the same upper room! They only gradually became less isolated but only a very little bit. 

God is nothing if not persistent, look at all the ways that God came to them in that little space. The Last Supper happens in the upper room. Jesus washes the disciple’s feet there. As I said, after the crucifixion, that’s where they hid. They agonized and worried and grieved there.

When the two Mary's and the other women left their male companions in the room and dared to go Jesus tomb to do their sad work, it is they who burst through the doors with the first news of the resurrection! It was from the upper room that Peter and the Beloved Disciple ran to see the Empty Tomb, and it was to the upper room that they returned. The Risen Jesus arrives there and gives the remaining apostles the authority to teach, forgive, and heal just as Jesus did.

And it is in the upper room where the disciples received the gift of the Holy Spirit and start to speak in a variety of languages so loudly that even those passing by on the busy street below stop and listen in amazement.

The problem with upper rooms is that they can become hiding places. The disciples could have reveled in their newfound spiritual gifts and insight and stayed home. It could have become a dark, smelly, closed in space.

Instead, it ended up being an incubator of Gospel imagination and the home-base for a brand new community!

In our upper rooms, we will see our best selves and, I hate to say it, our worst selves will be also be revealed. We’ll get tired, bored, exasperated, even angry. And when that happens, we will be showing off our deepest anxieties, rages, and fears. It won’t be right… but it is not unexpected. We will be tempted to get lost in the echo chamber of social media and build our own little silos where only people who share our opinions and who stoke our fears reside. We’ll have to find new strategies to temper our inner impulses and urges.

And that is why it is important to remember those disciples in that upper room. That little space may have contained the disciples— and everything they brought with them—but it could not lock out Jesus or bar the Holy Spirit! It became the testing ground for their own proclamation and power until finally the room was just not big enough… they had to go out into all the world because God’s Spirit, and God’s people whom he inhabits, just can’t be cooped up any longer!

Being cooped up is not simply a matter of bothersome inconvenience, where we bicker about wearing masks. The message of Pentecost is that God has the power to break down walls that we have so desperately and urgently built up between each other.

Pastor & Professor Dennis R. Edwards

Pastor Dennis R. Edwards, associate professor of New Testament at North Park Theological Seminary in Chicago talks about the frustration he feels towards the white church in the wake of the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery, the shooting of Breonna Taylor, the threat of the use of the police by a white woman to threaten Christian Cooper, Minneapolis police officers brazenly and deliberately executing George Floyd with an illegal and immoral (and unnecessary choke hold) and of the fact that COVID-19 disproportionately harms black and brown people.

In his essay in Christianity Today, he talks about the power of God to break down these walls. He says:

“Acts 16:35–40 is the epilogue to a powerful story of God’s deliverance. The imprisoned Paul and Silas were singing hymns when an earthquake hit around midnight. Such was the power of the quake that the prison doors were opened, chains fell off prisoners, and the fear that overcame the jailer resulted in his conversion, along with that of his household.

“We could reflect a bit on God breaking people out of prison, but instead I want to highlight the epilogue, which tends to get overlooked in sermons from Acts 16. The morning after the earthquake, the jailer told Paul and Silas that the magistrates had released the apostles and they could “go in peace.” But Paul and Silas did not peacefully walk away. Instead, Paul replied, “They have beaten us in public, uncondemned, men who are Roman citizens, and have thrown us into prison; and now are they going to discharge us in secret? Certainly not! Let them come and take us out themselves” (Acts 16:37). Some of my friends argue that Paul’s concern here is the propagation of the gospel. Perhaps, but the text doesn’t say that. What we do see, however, is Paul’s agitation over the violation of his civil rights as a Roman citizen (a point he brings up strategically in Acts 21:39 and 22:25–29).

“At the very least we can acknowledge that injustice demands a response to people in power. (For more on this, see Esau McCauley’s theology of policing.) Paul called the magistrates to account for their actions, and we must do the same. We should be outraged over injustice, and people in positions of authority need to feel our anguish.”

Our problem is much bigger than being stuck at home, bored. The co-incidence of pandemic, and of racial and police violence has revealed that we are locked into systems and a way of thinking that assumes that my welfare depends on someone else's servitude; that my privileged place in society must, by definition, come at the expense of another.

When the Holy Spirit comes on Pentecost, it is not simply to make people better pray-ers, church-goers, or even to make people nicer. The Holy Spirit breaks through the walls of disciples hiding place and propels them to suddenly speak in the languages of people other than themselves. 

And not just speak, but to walk with them and to be with them, and to be the Good News with them. Too often we think of Pentecost (and for that matter mission and evangelism) as a process of getting the other to be more like me, or (failing that) to accept their lowliness.

No! Pentecost is the signal and reality that God’s reign is for all God’s people! That in Christ, as Paul would later write, there is no longer “Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male or female.” The miracle of Pentecost is that God values and holds up all God’s people in all their variety and expression.

When the Church participates in racism or racial violence it locks out the gift of the Spirit, and kicks Christ to the curb. When we are silent, it is worse: we condone the very forces of evil that Christ came to overcome. We lock ourselves into to our own upper rooms.

The Good News is that the Holy Spirit is never locked out of our upper rooms, whatever they may be!

In fact, God is propelling us out into the world to confront the powers of sin that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God. And that means we both listen to the science that tells us how to deal with this virus, and we listen to the voices of the marginalized and recognize our part in combatting the sin of racism. And when we get out and confront the evils of race, class, and the abuse of power to favor the few, we are participating in the same work of the same Spirit who  through Christ, heals and renews  us, all people, and all creation.

It is time to get out! It's time to leave our upper rooms.

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.

When will we gather again and when we will receive Communion?

(Updated Tuesday, May 19, 6 p.m.) Yesterday, I got an e-mail from a member of my parish. It raises a number of questions that I know have been floating around my congregation (and others). I have decided to post his note and my response.

We are in this for the long haul.Our pastoral and liturgical response to this unfolding pandemic will require theological inquiry, community reflection, and liturgical creativity. 

Here is part of the letter that started this:

Andrew, 

...Do you plan to celebrate Morning Prayer only until we have in-person worship?  Is there a date for the return to in-person worship?Trinity Wall Street returns June 1.  St. Paul's, Doylestown returns June 14. Why haven't we done online Eucharist?

Here is my response:

Thank you for your e-mail and for your questions. I will try to answer them as best as I can. 

When will we re-open and gather for in-person worship?

Before I start, I would like to refer you to Bishop Kevin Nichols' pastoral letter to the Diocese of Bethlehem "A Phased Approach to Regathering." Following what Bishop Kevin has written, we are still in Phase I across the whole diocese of Bethlehem. As a result, we are limited to the following protocols:

• Gathering for online worship, formation, and community

• Limiting service ministries to safe protocols dedicated to essentials such as feeding ministries  

Bishop Kevin's "Phased" approach roughly corresponds to the Commonwealths Color-coded scale. Northampton, Lehigh, and Bucks counties are all "Red" according to the Commonwealth.  The description that the Diocese of Bethlehem has laid out follows the Commonwealths nearly word for word. 

There are several  questions I don't have answers to. For example, does that mean that the whole diocese will move through the phases together or will we move through regionally depending on how the situation unfolds in different areas? I can foresee the rural northwest of our diocese reaching "green" (following the State's scale) well ahead of us in the Lehigh Valley, but Bishop Kevin could decide to have the whole diocese re-open at once rather than by region as an act of unity and visible communion. That will be up to him in consultation with the Diocesan Council and Standing Committee. 

As for the June 1 date at Trinity Wall Street and June 15 for Doylestown (Diocese of Pennsylvania) that you mention, as I read their websites, these are tentative dates. I can't say what TrinWall's criteria is, but if Doylestown follows the protocol laid out by the Diocese of Pennsylvania, their reopening will depend on how new cases develop in their county.

Even in places that have reopened, the requirements for physical distancing, hand-washing, masking, etc. might rule out Communion as we know it. Many places are also prohibiting (or at least discouraging) congregational singing. (For example, the Royal School of Church Music has suspended the King's College Course normally held at St. Stephen's Wilkes-Barre in mid- to late-July because singing blasts the droplets that might carry the contagion.) 

Keep in mind that the virus is passed along from people who are asymptomatic, and because of the scarcity of testing supplies, asymptomatic people are generally not tested. That means that by the time a person pops symptoms and tests positive, they may have been conveying the virus for 14 or more days before a definitive diagnosis. This is why the isolation and physical distancing is the required (and wisest) protocol. 

As for our own Diocese, when the Lehigh Valley reaches "Yellow" we'll see if that moves us to Phase II on the DioBeth scale. I don't know when that will be, so I don't know when in-person worship will return. (Update: Bishop Kevin has distributed guidelines as to how we'll enter "Phase II" of our COVID-19 response in the Diocese of Bethlehem.)

Right now, at Trinity, Easton, I know of at least five people who have either tested positive for COVID-19 or have been exposed to someone who has. One parishioner has died from COVID-19. So I have opted for an assertive approach to handling this crisis.

Will we only be doing Morning Prayer for On-Line worship?

Right now, we have no specific guidance from Bishop Kevin as to the do's and don't's of on-line worship. If the Cathedral sets the norm for the diocese (and this is the only place where I've seen Bishop Kevin preach and/or lead worship on-line), then the norm is Morning Prayer. I suppose that Ante-Communion is also an option. 

My approach has been to assemble worship with as many people as possible reading or leading prayers from either home or on-camera from church while practicing safe physical distancing. Our virtual choir happens as members record their singing and then the voices are mixed into a single recording and then edited into a Power Point. All of this is saved mixed as an MP4 video and published on YouTube. After publication, it is posted on our web-site, our social media, and a link is sent to folks on our e-newsletter list. 

Again, my goal is to involve as many people as possible rather than have a point-and-shoot worship (which is how we do Wednesday and major Holy Day services via Facebook Live) focusing only one or two clergy in a largely empty room.

This is where my read of Anglican theology of worship comes into play. One Episcopal parish in the LV is doing an on-line Eucharist, but the reception is only by the presiding priest and there is no congregation present either in actuality or on-screen. As you will see below, in my mind this does not meet the minimum criteria for Eucharist 

The concept of spiritual communion in our tradition has been reserved to special circumstances such as those sick or infirm to receive by mouth, or, interestingly, to soldiers in battlefield situations. Older editions of the Armed Forces Prayer Book (an Episcopal document in origin) first set out the prayer that we reprint in the e-newsletter for spiritual communion.

I am also informed by my work in Catholic Healthcare. From 1994-2002, I was the director of pastoral care in a Catholic hospital. We had an extensive ministry by both deacons and extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist. When we had Mass in the hospital's chapel, the LEM's and/or Deacon would fan out immediately after Mass. On days when we did not have Mass in our Chapel, we'd time their work--- utilizing pre-sanctified elements-- so that it would take place immediately after the televised mass on EWTN at mid-day. The point was to connect the communicant with the community in communion. 

Before the extent of our physical distancing was announced mid-Lent, I considered doing something very much like that: small groups in the presence of an LEV or Deacon who would then receive from pre-sanctified elements, while I would lead a liturgy via Livestream or Facebook Live. But this is not possible (nor advisable) in the current situation. The virus is just too virulent and too communicable.

On Private Masses and Distance Consecration

I believe that our Anglican tradition discourages both private masses and "distance" consecration. 

A private mass is when the priest celebrates the mass without a congregation present. 

Another approach, suggested by Dr. Diana Butler Bass (a lay theologian who migrated from Evangelicalism into the Episcopal church) and others, is that I could say the words of consecration on my end of a TV or Livestream broadcast and you could hold a piece of bread and cup of wine, and we could say that it was somehow consecrated and then you could receive... this is what I mean by "distance consecration...." I believe that this pushes us in a direction where we don't want to go: the Eucharist is a Sacrament, and Sacraments are not magic. The prayer of consecration is not an incantation but a work of the people of God in community. 

At the same time, the Sacrament is not a point of personal privilege nor a private possession. It is an act of community that communicates Christ and mediates grace. 

Dr. Butler-Bass has suggested that not having even a televised/live-streamed Mass is an act of "hoarding" by the clergy who are keeping the laity from the Sacrament, a view that I strongly disagree with. Reducing the question into a faux justice issue is, in my view, unhelpful, and misses the point of how sacraments function in Christian community.

Sure, God can do whatever God wants! Who is to say that the One who lives in Kairos (God's time) can't transcend Chronos (human time) and consecrate the elements across a TV or the internet. But Sacraments are not magic and the Eucharistic Prayer is not an incantation. I personally believe that the gathering of community is an essential element at the heart of the Eucharist. 

Short of specific guidelines from the Episcopal Church (except for the general guidance of the Presiding Bishop, Bishop Kevin, and various other diocesan bishops), I have fallen back on the guidance I lived under during my time in Catholic healthcare nearly twenty years ago. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops set out useful guidelines for televising the Mass, (updated in 2007) which in my view covers the issues of televised and live-streamed Mass in much greater detail in a very helpful way. A key passage says:

Since the liturgy is the work of Christ and the work of God's people, the televised Mass should always be celebrated within a living community of God's people whose presence reveals the full, conscious and active participation of the faithful. Even when the liturgy to be televised is taped apart from a regularly scheduled parish liturgy, there should always be a group of people who participate in the liturgy as fully as possible by their prayer, song, and presence.  

Because the present Coronavirus situation precludes the gathering of a group of people who can fully participate in the liturgy, even for the purposes of video recording, I am wary of doing a broadcast mass that would seem to reduce the Eucharist to mere performance. 

This week, I will be meeting with Fr. Raymond (a fine liturgist), Deacon Fran, and members of our parish's worship committee to discuss the possibility and limits of doing Eucharist on line and how we can do that according to the guidelines I've noted above. When Bishop Kevin issues guidelines for Phase II, we'll also meet as a Vestry to make some decisions. 

Fortunately, we have inherited the traditional monastic offices in our Anglican tradition. Thomas Cranmer sought to apply the monastic pattern of frequent daily prayer. Before the consecrations of Samuel Seabury, William White, and William Provost as our first bishops, the Anglican (later Episcopal) Church in America functioned quite well not only without bishops but with very few priests. For almost a century and a half (or more!) before our church was formed in 1789, congregations in North America lived and thrived on the pattern of Morning Prayer, metrical psalms, and preaching (often by lay preachers reading from pre-printed sermons). They did this in a frontier church in a new country building new communities. 

We are in a new frontier right now. We will have to think about mission, liturgy, community, and formation in new, creative ways. I think that we can mine those resources and our Anglican and Catholic tradition deeply and to good effect. When the day comes that we do find a way to more formally express ourselves Eucharistically, I don't know what it will look like, but it will be different and it will be wonderful! Right now, we are in an in-between time of waiting,  experimentation, exploration, innovation, and prayer.