Friend, Come Higher

There is this old routine done by the late puppeteer and ventriloquist Shari Lewis where she is talking with her hand-puppet friend, Lamb Chop, about her (Lamb Chop’s) table manners.

Lewis says to Lamb Chop: I was very disappointed in how you acted when we had dinner guests last night.

Lamb Chop: Why? 

Shari: Because when the food was set at the table, you just grabbed all the food off the plates and ate it up before anyone else had a chance!

LC: Oh. (pause) Well, what would you have done?

Shari: I would have waited to go last.

LC: Well, you were last, so what’s the problem?

And it goes on like that, back and forth with Shari trying to teach little Lamb Chop in vain about how to be a good guest and how to be a good host.

In today’s Gospel, we see Jesus at the home of a Pharisee trying to teach him about how to be a good guest and how to be a good host.

All through his Gospel, Luke shows us Jesus eating and drinking and with all kinds of people, from Matthew, the hated tax collector, right through to his Last Supper at Passover with his disciples.  Luke’s Gospel tells us how Jesus fed the multitudes...twice! In Luke’s Jesus is at table with everyone, rich and poor, men and women, you name it!

But why all this eating and drinking? For Jesus, the meal, the table and the banquet, is an image of what God’s reign in like. He says that being in relationship to God is like being at a feast…where only strangers and the poor are invited!

Jesus says that the kingdom of God is like coming in to the party and not only being greeted but being escorted to the best seat in the house.  We don’t need to bluster, bully or pretend. And we certainly don’t have to reach across the table and grab what we want and stuff our faces. We don’t need to charm the bouncer at God’s banquet, either.  In today’s Gospel, Jesus says that at God’s banquet, we are seen for exactly who we are and—surprise! —we are invited to the head table!

But wait! There’s more! Look at Jesus’ invitation list. His banquet is open to everyone! Typically, we invite only people we like, or people we want to impress, or people who are like us, people we don’t want to offend. That’s natural. But God want us to live beyond the natural, to go the extra step into the supernatural: invite the stranger, the poor, the hungry, the outcast. Now maybe we don’t do that in our homes, but we can certainly do that here.

Jesus teaches us to welcome—and, more than that, to invite and usher in—to the table everyone who hungers, especially those whose hunger is beyond our ability to feed. Look at what Jesus teaches in the Gospels: the banquet, the feeding of the four- and five thousand, the communion table, the cross, all show us that God’s love is for everyone! And God’s grace is better than any heavenly Uber-eats because we don’t so much go to the banquet, but God brings it to us, where we live, as we are.

Are you a fan of old movies? I am! One of my favorite films is called "Places in the Heart." It pops up from time to time on one of the cable networks or you can find on Tubi or Amazon Prime or one of those. Set in Texas during the 1930s, “Places of the Heart” is a film about survival in the face of very difficult circumstances.  It talks about overcoming hatred with love, and how grace happens even among broken, imperfect people. Sally Field plays a poor widow with small children, and she won an Oscar for her role in this film.  Her character takes boarders into her home to help make ends meet on her dirt-poor farm. In the film, the two borders are a blind man, played by John Malkovich, and an African-American man, played by Danny Glover.  Glover is also her farm hand and farm manager and faces overt –sometimes violent – racism from Field's white racist neighbors. Malkovich is blind but he sees the world for what it is. Every meal that is set for the family and the guests becomes a kind of ritual, a meeting place, and a touchstone for whatever else is going on.

What I remember most is the final scene, set in a small country church during Holy Communion.  As Communion is being distributed, the camera shows us the congregation.  There, all around Sally Field's character, are not just the congregants, but also all the people who are and have been important in her life, both the living and the dead.  Despite all the conflict and difficulties of life and all the imperfections of that community, there they are. It’s not just a church service; it’s a heavenly banquet attended by the communion of saints.

Jesuit priest Fr. James Martin, reminds us of how Jesus’ teaching and ministry was all about embracing the outsider, the outcast, the stranger, and the migrant. He says:

‘How often have you been at a social gathering and gravitated towards the most popular, powerful or supposedly “important” person in the room? It’s natural; maybe this person has become popular because of some talent or notable accomplishment. So perhaps the “popular” person seems more interesting. But often we gravitate towards that person because of our own desire to be seen as popular, powerful or important as well. That is, we hope for a kind of “rubbing off” of the person’s importance.

“It’s natural, but it’s not what Jesus asks of us. When I [Martin] was in high school, one of my friends regularly spent time with fellow students who were seen as “uncool.” This impressed me deeply. It was like he had some sort of superpower: He didn’t care if others saw him as uncool. It was more important for him to treat others with dignity and kindness.

“Who are seen as “outcasts” today? That depends on what social milieu you are in, but you might say transgender people, migrants and refugees, the poor, homeless men and women, sometimes the elderly. Most of us aren’t so callous as to shut them out (though some people do this publicly, and even gleefully), but are there times when we could be more welcoming? It’s important to say without irony what we all want to hear ourselves: “Friend, come up higher.”

Jesus takes it a step further. Instead of taking the place of honor, take the place of humility… join with the outcast, the left behind, and the stranger and the host of the banquet, God our Creator, will say, “Friends, come up higher.”

A long time ago, when I was a student at Drew University, a Methodist-related college in New Jersey, I went to chapel every Tuesday night for Holy Communion. And every week, the celebrant (a religion professor and Methodist minister) would recite these words from a hymn written by Charles Wesley, Anglican priest and, with his brother John, founder of the Methodist movement, that went like this:

Come, sinners, to the gospel feast;
let ev'ry soul be Jesus’ guest.
Ye need not one be left behind,
for God hath bid all human-kind.

The Prayer Book has the rubric that when the consecrated bread and wine is presented to the assembly, the words “The Gifts of God, for the People of God” are said by the Celebrant. And over the course of my ministry it has become my custom to say something like to everyone at the offertory, “…this is Christ’s table, and you are all welcome to it.”

And you know what? Whenever I say that invitation, something like that movie image comes to my mind. Here we gather, in Christ’s presence with all the people who have ever touched our lives, some living and present, some moved away and moved on, some who have died, and yet… we are all here, at home, at table, sharing a great and wonderful feast together.

Whenever we come to this table, we come face to face to two truths: we are, all of us, the humble guest invited to “come higher” and we are the hosts, the maitre de, as it were, of Christ’s banquet who invite all comers, even the lowliest, the most unlikely people to sit and feast at God’s head table.

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Scripture for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 17, Year C, August 31, 2025

Website for St. Mary's Episcopal Church, Dade City, Florida

Learn more about the Diocese of Southwest Florida here

Here is the bulletin for the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost, Year C, August 31, 2025, St Mary's Episcopal Church, Dade City, Florida.

It's All About the Shepherd

My mother used to tell me that it was one thing to be ignorant, just don’t open your mouth and prove it. Well, today, all over the Christian world, preachers like me will open their mouths will prove, in great detail and with great authority, that they know nothing about sheep! Myself included.

The truth is that everything I know about sheep and shepherding I’ve learned from old Warner Brothers cartoons involving Ralph Coyote (not to be confused with Wile E.) and Sam Sheepdog who both punch in to work on a time clock before a day of mayhem.

The funny thing is that we preachers who get so distracted by the nature of sheep and their behavior forget that the passages that show up every Fourth Sunday of Easter—traditionally Good Shepherd Sunday—are never about the sheep. They are always about the shepherd!

It’s a classic case of not seeing the forest for the trees, or the not seeing the sheep for the flock…. Oops! There I go again!

It’s all about the shepherd!

Jesus describes himself as the shepherd. The good shepherd. Who is very different than all those bad shepherds, not to mention the thieves and wolves and others who are bad for sheep gatherings.

Jesus says in today’s Gospel that the good shepherd can come and go through the sheepfold. What’s a sheepfold? Okay, I had to look this up. It’s a kind of pen, or corral, used to gather up the sheep at night. And the sheepfold is guarded by a gatekeeper who checks to be sure that only shepherds enter the gate. And I guess in those days, sheep only heard and responded to the voices of their own shepherd, so instead of branding them they’d…. Oops. Sorry. My bad! I forgot. Old habits, you know.

It’s all about the shepherd!

It does not help that not only have modern, urban, preachers been misunderstanding sheep and shepherding, there is also a tendency to make the passage into an allegory that neither Jesus nor the Gospel of John intended.

So the sheepfold in this passage represents… wait for it… a place to keep sheep at night. That’s right. It is not heaven and it’s not really the church. This passage is not about those who try to get into heaven by dodging the turnstiles or entering the theater without a ticket. If it were, he’d be talking about sheep sneaking in over the gate after curfew.

And no, this passage is not about heaven, who’s in and who’s out.

It is about the Church. Specifically about the nature of Christian community. This passage is a riff on Christian leadership and a warning to Christian followers to choose wise leaders.

So the Church is the place where the sheep go for protection and safety. And it’s all about the shepherd.

John’s Gospel teaches us that Jesus is the Good Shepherd. And that we need to be wary of all the things that can distract us, take us away from the church and the life of faith, and cause us to follow the wrong voice. Most of all, the Gospel warns us that some people will pretend to be doing good when in fact they are really looking out only for themselves.

Fortunately, this is only a first century problem, right?  I mean, there is no one out there today competing for our attention, right? There’s no one out there who wants to sway us into doing something harmful, right? There’s no one out there using the language of our faith to trick us into prejudice, fear, and tribalism, right? No! Not in our modern, enlightened 21^st Century world!

Right!

But let’s not just focus on the obvious. The typical American is confronted by over 5000 advertising exposures. Every. Single. Day. From the car logo on your steering wheel to the brand name on your jeans to the ad on tv or on the back of the bus…we are exposed to over 5000 advertising messages a day. And what’s their goal? To make you feel that the only way your heart will be satisfied will be to open your wallet and buy this or that gadget, thingee, or food item.

Anybody raising a kid these days knows that they will know the different fast-food logos are and what they are for long before they can even read…before they can even form sentences. 

In our world, the bad shepherds may not be climbing over the fence, but they have surrounded the sheepfold with billboards and flat screen televisions.  We live in a world of loud, persistent voices vying for our attention… trying to take us away from the main thing. What do we do?

Remember…it’s all about the Shepherd.

The Gospel today reminds a few things about who Jesus is and about what good Christian communities do to stay together.

First of all, Jesus teaches with authority. In the church we hold out a balance of scripture, tradition, and reason as the basis for what we teach and believe as a community. The Good Shepherd…and good Christian leaders…use their authority for the good of the community, based on what the church has learned and known over time and in community.

The image of the Church we hear in the book of Acts today reminds us of the real, practical ways in which from the very beginning, Christians gathered into communities to hear again the voice of the Shepherd and to care for each other.

Second, the Good Shepherd knows us and meets us where we are. The Shepherd guides us as we move around in the proverbial pasture that is the world. Do you experience too many voices, too many distractions in your daily lives? Jesus says that instead of bouncing from one thing to another, go to the place where the Good Shepherd is found. Go to the place where the community of the faithful is gathered. In that community you’ll find the Shepherd…Jesus… who leads us and cares for us wherever we go.

It is the sacramental life, lived in community…a life grounded in scripture, in Eucharistic sharing, in prayer—both alone and in groups, as well as in worship-- is all about the Shepherd. Focusing on Jesus the Good Shepherd will help us sort through all the competing voices in the world.  And together here, in our little sheepfold, is where we learn to know Jesus’ voice and follow him. This is where we learn and do the work of Jesus.

The world is a noisy place, full of distractions. As a people of God, we are not alone, but are a community of people gathered in Jesus’ name. We are a people who are “on the way.” And together we keep an eye out for the Shepherd, Jesus Christ, who knows us, cares for us and leads through our complicated and distracted world and brings us safely home.

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Bulletin for Worship for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, April 30, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Scripture Lessons for 4 Easter A, April 30 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on April 30, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on April 30, 2023.

Believing is seeing

You’ve heard it is said that seeing is believing? Well, I’m here to tell you that believing is seeing.

John the Baptist believed that people were far away from God and needed to repent. John the Baptist saw exactly what the world needed. What the world needed, John saw, was to turn around— people needed a change in direction—away from error, inattention, and imperfection and towards an intentional, deliberate, following of the commandments and traditions of the Law.

Now St. John Baptist was an innovator—he understood that people needed to begin where they were, not where they were not. And for John, the starting place was our sin, our brokenness, and our need for God at the very deepest, most practical level.

He came out from the wilderness and began baptizing people—a strange ritual to be sure, but actually one that was really quite familiar to Jews of 1^st Century Palestine. Part of the process for a Gentile convert to become a Jew was, in addition to learning the Torah and being circumcised, was to be ritually cleansed. But John’s innovation was that instead of going to the temple or the synagogue, he baptized in the river. 

To be baptized is to be “dipped.” Have you ever made a tie-dye a t-shirt? Right! You dip it, submerge it, into the tub of dye to make it color you want. The word for baptism is the same word used to describe this process. In first century Palestine, after wool was shaved off the sheep, it was combed out and but before it be turned into thread for fabric, the wool was  dipped into a tub or a vat of bleach. It is immersed and came out changed: all the dirt and all the various shades of brown and gray in the wool came out, ready to be turned into cloth.

John took the somewhat arcane ritual of conversion to Judaism—something an ordinary Jews may have known about but probably never seen—and combined with something a lot of people knew about in their daily lives. He is saying that if you want to get right with God, you had better be converted in your heart and that is a lot like being dipped and made clean.

Believing is seeing. And for John, seeing meant looking at oneself as needed to be made right, cleaned up, fixed up.

Now when Jesus comes along things get interesting. We know that Jesus is the Messiah, but they don’t know that yet! So Jesus when is baptized, some strange things happen. Matthew describes the heavens opening up and the Holy Spirit visibly descending on Jesus. He also describes that the audible voice of God is heard by everyone there, saying about Jesus “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” The voice of God is a word of blessing, not of judgment.

In the process the fullness of the Triune God in the person of the man Jesus is made known for the first time in public.

Now Jesus and John share a mission. Like John, Jesus is aware of how broken, how cynical, how willful, how blind, how prideful all of us are. He knows that we are broken and need to be healed. He knows we need to be in relationship to God.

Jesus sees us differently than John does. John brings a word of judgment because John believes that we are obstinate, stubborn people who need to straighten up and fly right. Jesus brings a word of blessing. Both know we need fixing, but Jesus starts with the truth that God created us and blessed us with an essential dignity that we all carry around and that Jesus’ redeeming work is going to reclaim that dignity for everyone everywhere.

John saw us exactly as we are, and he was not wrong. He followed the model of the Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures. He thunders at the corrupt leaders and practices around him; he tells us the truth about ourselves and our sin, and John gives us a prophetic sign—baptism—to show us the seriousness of the call to turn around and be renewed.

But Jesus is taking a new, different way. One that begins by his voluntary submission to John’s baptism. He changes John’s baptism from a turning away from sin into a turning towards God. Jesus shows us that God is joining with us: he is walking the way of humanity, he is taking seriously our struggles to lives whole, complete, healthy lives, following the way of the law to love God with our whole being and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Like John, Jesus sees exactly what we needed. But he sees us through the eyes of the Messiah, not a prophet of the old covenant. Jesus believes that we are made by God with dignity, with creativity and power, and he sees that we are a people who are lovely and worthy of redeeming. So, instead of zeroing in on what is wrong with us; Jesus sees us through the eyes of God’s love.

Believing is seeing. That pretty well describes Epiphany season. Believing is seeing.

Epiphany, from last Friday with the gifts of the Magi, through Jesus’ baptism, and all the way up to the start of Lent on Ash Wednesday, is the season of Jesus showing himself for who he really is. Believing is seeing.

There is an old joke: the optimist sees the glass as half-full, the pessimist sees the glass as half-empty, and the engineer sees a glass that is a little too big for its specified use. We see what we believe.

I believe that God sees us with clear-eyed, unfiltered realism. God sees us for all our foibles, follies, and foolishness and God sees us as God made us to be, with all our potential, all our possibility, and all our power. God sees both our sin and our dignity.

During this Epiphany season, we are invited to see Jesus more and more and to encounter him in word, in sacrament, in scripture, and in Christian community. In the Gospels in these next six and a half weeks, we’ll see again and again the ways that Jesus showed himself. But most of all we will see in Christ how God sees us. As a people who are broken, yes, and as a people who also are lovely, made in the very image of God.

Believing is seeing. Look deep inside and you will, with God’s grace, see yourself just a bit as how God sees you. You will see obstacles and you will see potential. You will see what could be as well as what is. You will know the sin and take it seriously, and you, I pray, accept the forgiveness of the cross and the new life of the resurrection that we took on in our baptisms.

Believing is indeed seeing. It is important that we trust in God with all our being, and love the people God gives us with all our heart because these will change and inform what we see. And, never, ever forget that from the beginning, God always believes in us, and that drives how we are seen. 

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Bulletin for Worship on January 8, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Scripture Lessons for the First Sunday after Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's Clearwater, Florida on January 8, 2023

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on January 8, 2023

Healed, whole, and reconciled

Leprosy in Jesus’ day was no joke. Being a leper was a kind of walking death, considered evil and unclean. Because the condition was not well understood… and all kind of maladies could cause one to be called a leper from psoriasis to skin cancer to various kinds of skin infections, it was impossible to know who was contagious and who was not. They were excluded from every part of community life. They could not live, worship, eat, walk, or talk among “normal” people. They were required to stay away, keeping a safe distance from life’s normal activities and gatherings. 

So, to survive, they scrounged, depending as best they could, on the charity and more typically the trash of others. Lepers of that day not only lost their skin to continuous infection and inflammation and to the lack of basic care but they were also separated from the community. They had nothing, and no hope, yet they could – from forty paces – watch the real world, and real life, happen just outside of their reach.

Once, a band of ten of these lepers met Jesus. Nine were apparently Jews from who knows where, and one was a foreigner. Together they kept on the move, scrounging food, water and makeshift shelter, as best they could. Perhaps they helped one another dress wounds as they limped along from place to place.  The status and situation as lepers made them a kind of community of the sick and the outcast. What they had most in common was their disease, so their other differences did not matter so much.

When the saw Jesus they stood at a distance – as was required by the law – and shouted for mercy.

I’ll bet they made the same cry to every passing rabbi, holy man, and probably to every hustler and snake oil salesman with a reputation for healing whomever came within earshot. If they were lucky, they’d get some food or clean clothes or perhaps money laid down on the road from a distance. Their prayer was simple: “Jesus, master, have mercy on us.” And Jesus granted them mercy, and without conditions or expectation he gave them their lives back. He told them to present themselves to the priests because the priests were the ones who would certify that the lepers were cured and allow them to rejoin the world.

So off they went toward the city and toward the priests. And as they went, their leprosy went away; they were cured! As they walked their old dead, rotting flesh dropped away and they were clean, bright, like new-born babies. Jesus stood there and watched. He put no conditions on his gift, but he just watched and waited.

Imagine their feelings at this moment. They were grateful. They were no doubt thrilled. I imagine them, laughing, relieved, feeling just wonderful! And most of them had someplace to go… assuming the other nine were Jews, they were off to the temple or wherever they could find a priest to pronounce them fit and clean.

Call me an optimist, but I am also sure that they were thanking God that this holy man Jesus had cured them. To them, Jesus was the most wonderful person in the whole world! They could leave the exiled life and re-join the land of the living!

But even if they were thanking God as they ran to rejoin their old lives, they forgot something….

You see of the ten, there was one who had no place to go. The priests who would pronounce the nine clean, would still consider the tenth man unclean, even without his leprosy. This was a time when people kept to their own communities, lived, worked, and functioned with their own kind. And cured or not, he was a Samaritan… the old prejudices and customs would still keep him outside his friend’s community… unclean, unreconciled, now a stranger. He was no longer apart of the same community as his nine equally cured companions.

We tend to look on this story as one about gratitude… and Jesus certainly names that issue, but this is a story about community, and the grace of being apart of a community of people. The tragedy was that the nine, in their gratitude, forgot about the one who was different than them.

No one could imagine advocating to the priest at the temple for the tenth leper and saying, “for all these years, this Samaritan was one of us, but now that he—like us—was healed by Jesus of Nazareth, you cannot welcome him back in?” No one could imagine that God’s grace and healing power, mediated through Jesus, would do more than cure a physical disease… his healing would also knock down the barriers that were in fact much bigger than the disease they were cured from.

That is, no one could imagine it until after Jesus’ cross, death, and resurrection; it would not be until the Holy Spirit filled and baptized a new community, that we could imagine—and experience—that the  nine could have also been reconciled—and equally healed—with the tenth person.

“Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.”

The one who came back in the Gospel story, came back to the only place, to the only person, he could possibly go. And in that return, we see that this healing was much bigger that anyone could previously have imagined.

All ten lepers were cured. And all ten stayed cured, as Jesus said, “were not all ten healed?” But there was more going on. Jesus saw past the imposed exile of the tenth man. And when that man went to only place he could go, he received something more. To him Jesus said, “Rise up and go your way, your faith has made you well.” The Greek for “made you well” is a different word, a theological word; it means “being made whole,” or “being made complete.” It also means being saved. Go your way, Jesus told him, your faith has made you not just cured, but whole, and saved.

All ten were healed, all ten were given their lives, but one had an epiphany, where his gratitude turned into awe. For the tenth man, the light bulb went off and he came back…and was made whole! All ten were given their lives back; but only one was given the fullness of life.

For the one who was made whole, the one who came back to Jesus, his gratitude was the gateway to a something bigger: an epiphany that what God is brings to us is wholeness.

We all have had troubles in our lives, and we all have had blessings. It is easy to imagine crying out to God when we are in trouble. It is very easy to imagine that when everything is going well that we don’t. To just get caught up in the blessings and the busyness, we can forget to return to God. The one who returned received all that Jesus had to give—not just blessing, not even just healing, but wholeness and return to life.

Christ touches us, heals us, blesses us. And he waits for us to move from acceptance to gratitude and to awe. And that’s when we are made whole.

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Here is a link to the bulletin for the Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost  at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater

Here is a link to the Scripture readings.

Here is a link to a video of the sermon.

Here is a link to a video of the liturgy.

It’s Inside Baseball… except when it’s not!

Updated - July 7, 2022. It’s a triennial event. Every three years, as we get ready for the Episcopal Church’s General Convention, some issue, some resolution, some controversy will come up that burns up the internet airwaves and vies for the attention of clergy like me, convention deputies, and other church geeks. 

Whether or not these “hot issues” make any difference to everyday Christians… well, that’s another question.

This year’s edition of the “Hot Button Issue” comes in the form of a resolution from the Diocese of Northern California that, if approved in both the House of Deputies (laity and clergy) and the House of Bishops, would remove baptism as a prerequisite for admission to Holy Communion. There have been learned responses from eminent scholars, theologians, and preachers (lay and ordained) on both sides. And the arguments are very “inside baseball.”

[N.B. The Resolution has been deferred to the next General Convention in two years partly because of the shortened and streamlined agenda of this COVID-delayed, and abbreviated General Convention. Read more here.]

As near as I can tell, the rationale behind this resolution (and I am summarizing here) is either “hospitality” (i.e. “don’t turn aside guests and inquirers who present themselves at the communion table”) or “evangelism” (i.e. “don’t make baptism a barrier to the Good News.”)

The twenty-two theologians and church historians who have written a letter opposing the motion says (and, again, I am summarizing here) that in unlinking baptism from communion means that there is essentially nothing to get initiated into. Communion, they remind us, an action of the Christian community into which the faithful are initiated. Baptism is the Sacrament of Initiation. The Eucharist is the Sacrament of Christian community. 

The debate has devolved--as these things usually do-- into side issues, the main one being what we mean by "people" when we say in the liturgy "The Gifts of God for the People of God." That somehow, when we address the baptized at the Eucharist as the "People of God" that that makes other people who are not baptized as lesser people, or something like that. 

And then there is the whole question of whether or not folks outside the confines of the Episcopal Church even know or care about what we're doing on Sunday morning anyway. As one colleague said on social media, "Given the state of our evangelism, until people are knocking down the doors to come into our churches, I am not sure what the argument is about."

But I digress.

As I write this, I honestly can’t predict how the next General Convention will vote. Whether the proposed resolution passes or not, I know two things for sure: Initiation is hard work. And Christian community is matter of intention.

To me, the resolution is both well-meaning and unhelpful. In trying to be the most pastoral, to me it misses the pastoral mark in several ways.

To become a follower of Jesus in community assumes a certain intentionality. And our Prayer Book reflects that. In fact, the baptismal rite in our Prayer Book assumes that the norm for the baptized to be adult converts to the Christian faith. It’s just that we baptize more babies than adults because we assume that Christian families in Christian households and congregations will raise up Christian children.

Whether the person first receiving Communion is a child or a grown up, the task of the community is formation and an increasing sense of inclusion into the community of faith and the life as a follower of Jesus.

Having said that, my pastoral practice has always been to communicate the Sacrament to anyone who presents themselves to me at the Communion rail, or for that matter, the hospital bedside. I am certain that over the course of nearly forty years of ordained ministry, I have at one time or another given communion to someone who was not baptized… say, an adult who was raised in a tradition that only practiced believer’s baptism but left that tradition before it occurred and then found his or her way into an Episcopal Church. Or a person who never encountered a church before and was simply doing what everyone else in the room is doing. There are thousands of stories like this and more, and I am sure I’ve encountered folks who are living them out, knowingly or not. 

So what does one do when, as priest, one meets or pastors such a person? 

My own practice has been that when I find a congregant who is not baptized, I will care for, teach, and invite that person to baptism, preparing them along the way, and asking them, once they enter a process of catechesis, to refrain from communion until after their baptism. I have baptized enough older children, young adults (teens and college aged), and adults to know that this process, while time-consuming, works. The process of initiation is not instant gratification. It is a process of building relationship between God and the person, and between the person and their Christian community.

To the charge that not communing such a person is somehow not inhospitable, I reply that it is apex of hospitality to meet people where they are, to listen to their story, invite people into conversation, especially when that conversation is as central as a person’s relationship to God, their neighbor, and themselves. To have that conversation is to invite a person into a process of reflection, prayer, and community, and to walk with them through that whole journey.

I am, frankly, perplexed by the argument—put forth by some theologians that I have profound respect for—that baptism is a barrier to communion, because it short-circuits initiation as part of the process of full inclusion. 

To be fair, I think that for many in this debate, the argument that baptism must precede communion sounds and feels to them as if we are in the business of checking one another's papers. Kind of like this:

One thing for certain, initiation happens. 

Over the years, I’ve joined enough organizations… from workplaces, to organizations that train and certify chaplains, to volunteer fire and EMS companies, to local community theaters and choruses, and, yes, even churches… to know that every organization on the planet, every place where humans gather in groups, have rites and processes of initiation. Even something as informal as a Twelve-Step group, has a process to welcome new people, identify appropriate leaders and mentors, and to establish group norms to assure the safety and anonymity of their members. And these processes are not instantaneous.  We in the Church aren’t any different than that, even as a community founded upon the free, unconditional, unbounded grace of God.

A significant amount of textual real estate in the New Testament is spent on sorting out what it means to be a part of Christian community. The Epistles are filled with congregations working out this question. Even the Gospels, growing as they do out of various Christian communities have their own take on what it means to be a follower of Jesus in community. Sometimes they err on the side of grace (as with the inclusion of Gentiles into what started out as a Jewish sect when the Church was very young) and sometimes the communities require discipline or correction (as when Paul admonishes these early Christians to not let their liberty become an occasion for sin). Christian community is always a work in progress.

I suspect that the two halves of this argument are a side urging order and a side urging charisma. Which is a good thing! Because Christian community always experiences the tension between charisma and order, and it is in that tension where the Holy Spirit lives!

So, what about Communion?

Every Sunday, I stand before you and make this invitation: “In the Episcopal Church, all baptized Christians are welcome to receive Communion. This is Christ’s table and you are all welcome to it.”

When there are events (like weddings or funerals or the Big Holy Days) and where there may be people present who don’t how “we” do things, I give a brief instruction, including how to participate even if one wants to opt out of communion.

You want to know the funny part about my standard invitation? I wrote that little script many years ago, when I was working in Catholic Healthcare as a Chaplain in a hospital run by a community of Catholic nuns. The invitation I recite came in reaction against the experience of being excluded from Communion in that tradition!

In those days, I would go to many churches and clergy groups to talk about pastoral ministry at my Catholic hospital, and this put me in situations where I attended Roman Catholic Mass but was unable to receive because I am not, in their view, in full communion with the Bishop of Rome (ie, the Pope). I often heard a little spiel (I don’t know if they still do it) talking about “our sad divisions” and as gently as possible discouraging non-Catholics from receiving at their altar.

My weekly invitation that you hear is a deliberate reversal of that standard announcement.

So, while I follow the Episcopal Church’s official line on “open communion”—that is, Communion is open to all the baptized, I am equally committed to baptism as full and complete initiation and I believe that the Church’s normative practice is that communion grows out of baptism.

I also believe that other oft-overlooked rubrics require are important guidelines, too. Like the so-called “disciplinary rubric,” which requires us to be at peace with one another when we present ourselves for Communion, and that people who are at enmity with one another might do well to refrain from receiving until they are reconciled.

Speaking of which, I notice that the proponents of the resolution also seem to drive around the uncomfortable fact that communities don't just welcome people. They also live together, and they set norms for each other as to what is appropriate behavior and the consequences for going outside those boundaries. The aforementioned Disciplinary Rubrics are a case in point. (In nearly forty years of ministry, I have never invoked these myself. But a foundational story growing up in my household was my parents account of how in the late 1950's during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, my family's parish priest in northern Virginia once invoked these when he was confronted by a parishioner who on Sunday morning loudly objected to receiving Communion alongside a person of color.) The implication is that being in communion means being in relationship with a community and in that relationship there is at once accountability and amendment of life.

Since the time of the Apostle Paul, the long tradition of teaching in the church reminds us not to take lightly the significance of sharing Christ’s Body and Blood in community; at the same time, we are equally admonished by our Lord and the Apostle not to lay on each other any unnecessary burdens. And, finally, we are reminded in scripture not to turn the gracious liberty that we have been granted in Christ into an occasion for sin and pride.

All along the way, I keep before me something Pope Francis said not long ago, “who am I to judge?”

Which is why, I repeat, that as a practical matter, I have never, ever, refused to communicate anyone who present themselves to me at the rail (or who requests communion at the bedside). Neither in my nearly forty years of ordained ministry have I had to invoke that very long, very specialized disciplinary rubric. I will not check your papers or ask for your bona-fides.

I might urge and encourage you to be reconciled to your sister or brother, or to be sure that you are spiritually ready to receive the blessed Sacrament, I may even invite you to the sacrament of confession, but none of these are the same thing as refusal. If you are not baptized, I will certainly invite you to take the step of both coming into relationship with God in Christ and being baptized into His body, the Church, and in any event to remain in fellowship with the community and to present oneself for prayer and blessing.

At the same time, I get nervous with we start invoking modern, post-enlightenment ideas of ‘rights’ or modern ideas of ‘privilege’ on to the pastoral act of taking, blessings, breaking, and sharing the bread and wine of the Eucharist in Christian community. Because Christians are not solitary creatures, and our liberty in Christ is not a ‘right’ (in the political sense) but a grace. Christian community is a community of people living under grace who seek to follow Jesus Christ as his friends and apprentices.

The way we are fully initiated into that community is through baptism. Our communion is a sign that we have all chosen to continue in this community, this portion of the body of Christ, together. In any event, we walk this journey as followers of Jesus and any claim that we have to be a part of that community is through God’s grace. The process that we take to become apart of a given community can teach us a lot about what it means to listen for and respond to God and to live a faithful, abundant life in community. 

The particular conversation at this moment may seem like, and may in fact be, “inside baseball,” and whether or not this particular resolution passes this summer still leaves an important question before us and every follower of Jesus: how do we know and follow Christ with the people God has given us in this community at this moment? How do we become apart of the community of Christ’s followers, friends and apprentices? How are we accountable to one another in ways that lead to charity and growth? 

The answer may be as simple as an act of faith, and as mysterious as life together in Communion.

Remote and In-Person, It's All Embodied Church!

Today, an Op-Ed in the New York Times, written by a priest in the Anglican Church of North America, the Rev. Tish Harrison Warren, put forward the thesis "that the time has come to shut off hybrid and remote worship and to encourage people to come back into physical churches for worship." 

At the parish where I am priest in charge, we follow a hybrid approach. About 40-50 of us gather in person on Sunday, and others take part via Facebook Live and YouTube, with the numbers of views hovering around 65 to 100 every week. It's small potatoes, yeah, but it is now at the heart of how this community functions.

My experience as a Christian communicator, parish priest, and hospital chaplain informs my belief that this technological shift is not only long overdue but is consistent with the practice and ministry of the Church since the beginning of the Christian era. Furthermore, just as we cannot dispense with books, musical instruments, or writing, we cannot simply dispense with technology simply because it has limits, temptations, distractions, or challenges. Tech changes Christian community... and gives us tools to communicate the Gospel! This isn't to say it's either automatic or easy.

Personally, I don't think we can put this genie back in the bottle. Even if the pandemic should magically end tomorrow, we have been habituated to a new way of interacting that is here to stay. We must find ways to embody Christian community and communicate the Gospel in the ways the culture understands.

In light of that, I am posting here the letter that I wrote to Pastor Harrison Warren in response to her piece (which is exists behind the NYT paywall) that I forwarded through the portal at the NYTimes website where her essay appeared. Since comments were not open on the column itself, I chose to write her through that portal. I await her reply.

(An earlier version of what follows also appeared in the Facebook site of "The Episcopal Café," where I was a once a regular columnist and an editor.)

Dear Pastor Harrison Warren,

I read with interest your Op-Ed Column in today's New York Times. I am sure that by now you have received many bouquets and brickbats from those in and out of the wider Anglican world about what you wrote. I appreciate the vulnerability of putting oneself "out there" whether it's in the pulpit or in the newspaper to both proclaim the Gospel and to reflect on theology in public spaces. 

I am sad to say that, as an Episcopal priest with nearly forty years experience-- with almost fifteen of those years as a clinical chaplain in both secular and Catholic healthcare settings as a Board Certified Chaplain, also have served congregations, large and small, rural, suburban, and urban, and who is now serving as priest in charge of a small south Florida congregation-- that I found your column today to be both wrong-headed and unhelpful.

While I do appreciate the ideal that the best worship is found in community, and that it is essential for communities of Jesus' modern disciples to encounter Christ in worship among crying babies, the stranger, the homeless, the poor, and so on, in what may appear to us as random encounters, this does not mean that we should shut off the tools of remote worship now that we are passing through this phase of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In an ideal world, I believe, as you do, that all of God's people should, whenever possible, physically gather in one space at the same time, certainly on the Lord's Day around the Eucharistic table. Such a hope is at the heart of the doctrine of the Christian Hope: that we will all gather at the Throne of the Lamb in eternal praise, basking in the glory of God! Our Eucharistic theology reminds us that every Eucharistic gathering points us to both mystical bonds we share in Christ and to the promise that we will all one day gather at the banquet feast of the Lamb. So to me, to write off all those who still might need to worship remotely... even the homebound and shut in!.. is to me beyond shocking! It is callous and belittling.

Way before this pandemic, during my time in hospital ministry (particularly when I was a chaplain in a Roman Catholic hospital), we broadcast the Mass on closed-circuit television to patients throughout our hospital. On days when we could not hold Mass in our own chapel, we would broadcast the daily Mass from one of the Catholic cable networks. In both instances, broadcasts were followed as soon as possible by the rounds made by deacons or, more typically, lay eucharistic ministers. If LEM's, deacons, or staff chaplains could not see every patient who might have wanted communion, or if the patient was unable to receive, we understood that the grace of the Sacrament was still present and available to the faithful (as the rubrics of our own 1979 BCP clearly state).

I understand that you might say that is totally different from a "Zoom Mass," a service on Facebook Live, YouTube, or whatever, except that you wrote in your column:

Our worship is centered not on simply thinking about certain ideas, but on eating and drinking bread and wine during communion.

“Christians need to hear the babies crying in church. They need to see the reddened eyes of a friend across the aisle,” Collin Hansen wrote in his Times essay about online church. “They need to chat with the recovering drug addict who shows up early but still sits in the back row. They need to taste the bread and wine. They need to feel the choir crescendo toward the assurance of hope in what our senses can’t yet perceive.”

I find the sentimentality at the heart of this both understandable and unhelpful. I understand the desire--and the call-- to gather with all God's people and especially with those who are at the edges of society or who, because of their illnesses, find themselves disconnected from Christian community. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer groups the various kinds of rites of reconciliation (Ministry to the Sick, Confession, and so on) together for just this reason. But to extend from that the technology behind remote worship is in and of itself harmful to Christian community is a logical leap that cannot be sustained. 

One might as well as say that the Apostle Paul should never have depended on epistles delivered by couriers via Roman ships and Roman Roads, or that Henry VIII's 1539 decree that the Great Bible be left open and available in every English parish church somehow separated people from the word of God because there was no one there to interpret it. In fact, we know from history that this those letters and roads were a blessing to the work of the Apostle and the early church. We know that those open Bibles were a hallmark of the English Reformation and that many people were blessed precisely through that widely distributed technology that allowed ordinary people to be able to read or hear the Word of God delivered in the plain language of the people. 

All through the Church's history, the Church has experimented with the technologies of their age in the service of the Gospel, from the Roman road, to the printing press, to radio and television, to the internet. 

My experience of evangelicals has been that they as a group are generally more open to technological innovation and experimentation. So I wonder if something else might be at work in your narrow understanding of "embodiment?" 

At the same time, I worry that hidden not-so-deeply in your column is a kind of judgmentalism and perfectionism that weakens your pastoral theology, not to mention showing off a kind of weak, tepid, ecclesiology... as if somehow the Body of Christ and the Action of the Holy Spirit might somehow not stand up to the rigors of Zoom!  At any rate, I am concerned that it reveals a kind of cruel perfectionism, of a theology of Church that depends only on the gathering of like minded (and physically able) persons in the same local space...which might certainly seem to limit the action of God!... and in so doing manages to write off centuries of Christian pastoral theology, practice, and tradition in the service one small facet of a greater ideal that somehow the only valid worship is worship where people can interact in the same physical space. 

I understand that in a consumer culture, where convenience is king, the kind of solitary encounters with a screen is a poor (but very tempting!) substitute for an embodied and sacramental community. But in the case of my little congregation, we have found that the hybrid nature of in-person and remote worship has by every metric drawn us closer together precisely when the pandemic (and society generally) wants to pull us apart. 

And this is at the heart of my disagreement with your op-ed essay: the Body of Christ is served by the wise stewardship of all kinds of technology. How these new, and often old-but-reimagined, technologies get used in the service of the Gospel will require experimentation, learning, trial and error, and creativity. 

No, it's not time to end hybrid worship, as you suggest. I suspect that in fact, we've only scratched the surface of what God has in store for us! And the best is yet to come!

Faithfully yours!

Andrew+

Becoming what we eat

Are you full yet? I mean, full of bread… or the image of bread. Are you full yet?

If you have been following the Gospels in our Eucharistic cycle of readings, you’d have noticed that we have taken a month-long break from the Gospel of Mark and are three-fourths of the way through the long discourse in the Gospel of John where Jesus talks about himself as living bread.

Jesus says, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life. … Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”

For the past four weeks, we’ve heard—in response to Jesus walking across the stormy lake and getting in the boat with us—that Jesus is bread of life. So… are you full yet?

Not by a long-shot!

I know, I know…. Jesus could well have said, “You are what you eat” and that would be that! To tell the truth, I am betting that nearly every preacher on the planet today has or will use that old saying, just as I did last week and the week before that and the week before that! But just because the idea is repetitive doesn’t make it any less true.

This is familiar territory for us Episcopalians who value Holy Communion so much. We might be tempted to say “yeah, yeah” or “are we there yet.” But I am going to invite you look closely at this part of John’s Gospel that we have been journeying through to discover what God is up to here.

If you take up that challenge, the first thing you will notice is something strange. John, unlike Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul, does not contain an account of the Last Supper. He does not describe how on the night before he died, Jesus took bread and wine and told his disciples to eat and drink of it, calling it his body and blood, and to keep doing it until he comes again in glory. Instead, when John talks about the part of Jesus’ Passion in the Upper Room, he recalls Jesus washing the feet of the disciples—which is not found in the other three. Does that surprise you?

So where did that Last Supper go?

Right here. Of course, the writer of the Gospel of John certainly knew, along with the rest of the Church, that Jesus’ people lived in eucharistic community, and every week did exactly what Jesus’ commanded; but instead of rehearsing the Eucharistic story again (as the other Gospels and Paul the apostle does), he gives us a commentary on what it all means!

In John, we hear Jesus talking about a profound but mysterious spiritual truth: that in the Eucharist bread and wine, through the power and spirit of God, becomes Jesus’ living presence.

John tells us that just as Jesus gave his followers physical food, as in the feeding of the 5000 a few weeks ago, he gives us spiritual food as well. The living bread that Jesus spoke of in John’s sixth chapter is something that has woven itself deeply into our everyday Gospel stories. In eucharistic community, we become people who show off the Eternal Word of God in all we do. In short, we really do become what we eat.

Dom Gregory Dix, the English priest whose scholarship on the Eucharist helped get the ball rolling on the recovery of the liturgy that we use today, once wrote,

“At the heart of it all is the eucharistic action, a thing of an absolute simplicity—the taking, blessing, breaking and giving of bread and the taking, blessing and giving of a cup of wine and water, as these were first done with their new meaning by a young Jew before and after supper with His friends on the night before He died….

“Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth.”

When you come to the table today, think of all the places where you have taken communion, and all the people with whom you have taken communion—people in this congregation, people you know in this diocese or elsewhere who are gathered in their own communities, people still living but you don’t see anymore, people now long dead and seen only by God. Imagine all the places in which God has been experienced through this Eucharistic meal. Jesus is the “bread that came down from heaven,” whose presence sustains people in every place and situation, who over and over again follow Jesus’ command to take, bless, break, and give.

We need this strengthening of the Body and Blood of Jesus encountered in the Eucharist now more than ever. We live in a time that prizes the self-reliant, where people confuse the snarky for the clever, and where we think we can power through life by sheer will power. We live in an era where everyone has a right to their own opinion and where people will not hesitate to get in your face to tell you how wrong you are. We live in an age that is suspicious of community and who think all the answers are found in the self. But all the noise and snarkiness and righteous rage all over cover a deep, gaping hole in our souls.

The truth is that when we are apart from God, we find it all too easy to remain apart from God and to rely instead on other, lesser answers to our deep hungers and thirsts—hungers and thirsts which only Jesus can satisfy.

It turns out that we really are what we eat; so, we must mind carefully what we eat and digest spiritually, for the health of our souls. The world offers us a lot of unhealthy diets – diets of materialism and greed and selfishness. Feeding on the word of God and partaking of the body and blood of Christ ensures life-sustaining nutrition for the spirit – food for the soul. By faith, eating the bread and wine of Holy Communion, in community steeped in prayer, scripture, and service, we take part in the process by which Christ penetrates our beings and nourishes our lives. In this sacrament, God’s very life comes to us through the elements of bread and wine so that we can have union with God. Time after time, the Eucharist re-calls us to union with God through Jesus Christ, and guides us to see and know all that is good and true and holy in us, each other, all people, and in all creation.

The early church writer Irenaeus said it this way: “The word of God, Jesus Christ, on account of his great love for [humanity], became what we are in order to make us what he is himself.”

We can never be full enough of the bread Jesus offers! The incarnate, crucified, and risen Jesus gives himself to us and through our baptisms and Eucharist; through our common life, our study of scripture; through our prayer and ministry and care for each other and creation we take him into ourselves. Eating Christ’s body and blood in the Holy Eucharist and sacramental community nourishes us and transforms us so that we become more and more what he is. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again…because it’s true! We truly are what we eat.