Hope is faith that looks forward

A long time ago, I was a hospital chaplain in Appalachia, and I would from time to time find myself working with a patient and family from a country Pentecostal church, which was a very different culture of faith than what I was used to.

Once, I accompanied the family of dying patient who prayed fervently that God would heal the patient. They would pray with certainty that God would reach out and heal this person's illness and pray that the person would walk right out the door. Their preacher led them in laying hands on the dying man, commanding the disease to leave him, invoking God to make the man get up and walk… all while the numbers on the monitors showed a slide towards death.

My training taught me to be quiet, but my brain and my gut would be in turmoil. I said to myself—and sometimes doctors and nurses said to me-- “This preacher is setting them up for a fall! Raising their expectations like this is certain to cause upset when the patient eventually dies!” We worried that they were in fact teaching people, especially the children, to hate God because God was apparently not doing what they wanted.

But when the patient died, something remarkable happened. The group went from fervently praying that God would heal the person to joyfully praising God! 

It was like flipping a light switch. No anger at God, no earth-shattering disappointment (that I could see) but praise and singing that Jesus had taken the person home. 

I was perplexed, so I asked a fellow chaplain on our staff, who was himself Pentecostal, what was going on. 

First, he gently chided me for ignoring the teaching of my own tradition’s Book of Common Prayer, which have prayers for both healing and those for preparing for death printed side by side. These are prayers filled with hope! 

He also suggested that perhaps I was both rationalizing and being a bit judgmental, hearing their prayers as a kind of magical thinking, and their praises after the death as a kind of denial of death.

Okay, I'll admit to that. 

“So, what is really going on then?” I asked him. He said that their theology is grounded in hope. A faith that believes “Everything will be all right.” 

In their view, God is in charge of everything. And God, through the cross and resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit, will make everything all right. They embodied what we call “The Christian Hope.”

The doctrine of the Christian Hope is essentially this: God will make everything all right. 

Don’t believe me? Just look at our Prayer Book tradition, our Catechism, today’s Scripture lessons and, if that’s not enough, look at our own experience.

When a child falls down and skins her knee and comes to us in tears, what do we say? “Everything will be all right.”

I have heard it said in hospital settings: we say it to the anxious and the sick and even the dying. But most remarkably, it’s often said to us by the patients we care for and worry about. 

Time and again I’ve seen it. Just we can’t find the words to comfort them, time and again they comfort us! “Don't worry about me,” they will sometimes tell us. “Everything will be all right.”

And that what the scripture lessons we hear today, and over the next five weeks, remind us: God will make everything all right.

Today’s lesson from the Book of Daniel, which was written to persecuted Jews experiencing a war against yet another invader. The last book of the Old Testament, the Book of Daniel assures us that God is going to save God’s people and vindicate their suffering. The message is: “hang in there. God will make everything all right.”

The 13th chapter of Mark that we just heard, is often called ‘The Little Apocalypse’ because like Daniel and Revelation, it uses strange images and dire predictions to encourage us to remain faithful during rough and dangerous times. Mark remembers and brings forward Jesus' words to Christians, who thirty to forty years after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus, were living through the Jewish Revolt against the Roman Empire in 66 to 70 AD. That revolt would end badly with the sacking of Jerusalem, the destruction of the Temple, the scattering of the Jews as a dispersed people. It would also move Christianity from a sect of Judaism into something bigger as more and more Gentile Christians would join up. 

Mark reminds us of Jesus' words to not to put our trust in big buildings made with big stones by human beings—not in places, institutions, or even cherished traditions—but in God.

Jesus reminds us in Mark that God will make everything all right— but perhaps not in the way we expect. 

This is how the Bible speaks to people who are uncertain, who are suffering right now, and who are looking for hope right now.

We don’t have to listen too hard to hear that people today asking the same questions as they did in the time of Daniel, Jesus, and the early church. People still ask “what is God doing?” and “will I/we be okay?”

Here is how the Gospel we hear today answers that question: God will make everything all right. 

It is important because it is true. 

But remember, the truth that God will make everything all right should not make us complacent. We are not called to be helpless victims, but through our faith and in our baptisms and our sacramental living we are called—given power!—to work and pray to care for God's people especially in their suffering!

Saying “everything will be all right” does not mean that we do nothing! When children have fallen down and skinned their knees or hands and blood is all over the place, parents don't just say, "Everything will be all right." There may be bandages and antibiotics applied from the medicine cabinet. There may even be a fast trip to the emergency room. Why? Because parents do all in their power to make sure will be all right for their suffering children.

"How can I make ends meet, when more bills are coming in than income?" We do everything we can… change how we shop, economize, sign on for an extra shift. And God's promise is still the same: “Everything will be all right." 

"I'm having surgery tomorrow and I'm scared." Our presence and prayers—and the skill of those caring for us—say "Everything will be all right."

"The tests for cancer came back positive."

"Everything will be all right."

“My home was damaged or flooded during the hurricane.” 

“Everything will be all right.”

"My brother was just deployed to a war zone."

"Everything will be all right."

"My parent just died."

"Everything will be all right.

It’s not magic. It’s not pie in the sky nor is it wishful thinking. This is the day in and day out life of faith, and it requires time and effort and cultivation within our hearts and minds. 

And trust. Trust in God that everything will be all right.

Hey! God knows truth is that we might experience turmoil and pain and confusion along the way. The life of faith means that we steer into the wave of our hurt and fear and not steer around it. Jesus shows us in everything from his temptation to his healing to his walking with his disciples daily, God’s faithfulness and God’s power and love is healing with us in all we do. Jesus knows all this and remember he carried all of it to the cross. It’s on the cross, where everything that separates us from God, each other, and creation is taken up by Jesus, and dies with him and is left behind in that empty tomb.

We are in a season of hope. As we come to the end of the church’s year and move into the new year in Advent, we are reminded of the power of Christian hope. All of the Scripture lessons for the next six to eight weeks are about hope. 

What is hope? Hope is faith that looks forward!

As Jesus’ disciples, his followers, we learn and do the work of Jesus everyday.

Which is why hope is not passive. It is active! The Christian Hope is the confidence that God in Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit will fill all things, heal all things, complete God’s purpose for us and all creation. 

The Christian Hope is that God never, ever, leaves us alone.

The Christian Hope is the knowledge that God gives us everything we need to live abundantly right now as the people God made us to be.

We are a hope-filled people who participate with God in the church’s mission which is to restore humanity and creation to unity with God and each other in Christ Jesus.

You show off that Mission in many ways: just open your bulletin. Laundry Love. Build a Bed. Backpacks and your ministry to Sandy Lane Elementary. Your Eucharistic Visitors and the ways you care for one another. Your music, Bible Study and even your Sunday Breakfasts all show off the many ways that you as a community learn and do the work of Jesus.

So you see…we participate every day in God’s hope-filled future! Hope is faith that looks forward. 

We are not sitting on our hands and waiting for God to vindicate us someday. We are already vindicated! Jesus’ life and ministry show us that God is with us. Jesus’ death and resurrection show us that death is conquered. Our baptism and Eucharist show us that we are God's own people. Our community shows us that we are not alone. And our care for each other and for those people God sends to us reveal to us and the community that God is here and is at work. 

We are a people of hope… hope is faith that looks forward, and everything will be all right!

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Scripture for Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 28), Year B, November 17, 2024.

Website for The Church of the Holy Trinity, Clearwater, Florida

Here (8 a.m.) and Here (10 a.m.) are the livestreams of the November 17, 2024 Liturgies at Holy Trinity, Clearwater.

Work. Rest. Pray.

I just came back from an iconography workshop. Every year, for almost the last thirty years, about two dozen people gather at a retreat house near Scranton, Pennsylvania, to learn a little more about this ancient form of religious art whose roots are in the eastern Orthodox churches. An icon expresses a religious truth artistically. The idea of an icon is that it is a window to heaven not because it is realistic but because it points beyond itself to God’s reality behind it. Many aspects of the icon are highly stylized from how Jesus and the saints are portrayed to how color, light and line are used. In some circles, the iconographer is said to “write” an icon—not paint or create one—because they are communicating something about the logos, Jesus.

So when an iconographer writes an icon, she or he is to be steeped in prayer. Every line, every stroke of the brush is to be a prayer—at least that’s the ideal. Certainly God can communicate through an icon reproduced by a printing press, but either way, if the person viewing an icon can allow it to be a window to the divine, a first step in their praying, then it certainly helps that the artist is also steeped in prayer.

This creates a tension: a tension between spirit and action. Between “doing” and “being.” There is a tension between doing it “right” and focusing on the prayer. Last week, I shared the room with people who have wonderful ‘hands’ and well-tuned ‘eyes.’ They work with a precision and clarity that I only dream about.  I really want to be like these people when I grow up! We all strive to be technically better iconographers. But when the conversation in the room begins to get too technical, when people are beginning to spend too much time “futzing” over getting one little line just so, when then tension rises because we aren’t “good enough”, I find that Father Peter, our teacher these last three decades, has this way of turning up the music—maybe a Taize chant or one by Orthodox monks or something that brings us back to the center.

The process I’ve learned over the years goes something like this:  Paint (or “Work”). Rest. Pray.

And since the workshop is also a retreat at set intervals, we’d stop painting and gather to pray. The music we listened to as we worked was also prayer. We were working hard, our goal was to master some skills around color and line and to come home with an icon…and our goal was also to pray and be open to the presence of God.

Work. Rest. Pray.

Jesus was doing that for his disciples. One definition of the Church that I like is that “we learn and do the work of Jesus.” In today’s Gospel, we hear how Jesus’ friends and apprentices did just that. They were sent out in pairs to heal the sick, proclaim Good News. They were learning from Jesus. Now they were doing the work of Jesus for the first time.

And… wow! They came back chattering about their experience: audiences hung on their every word; demons jumped out of possessed people at their command; sick people were made well. They were pumped, excited, and they wanted more! So what does Jesus do?

Does he give them a workshop on how to hone their skills?

Does he raise the quota of how many sick people are to be healed and how many people are to hear them preach?

Nope. Instead, he calls them to take some time alone to pray.

Now the work did not go away. People followed them wherever they went, because the need was that great! But Jesus insisted: Work. Rest. Pray.

It turns out that a healthy spiritual life – and an effective ministry and a vital congregation—consists of periods of activity and periods of rest. We need both in order to be healthy, whole, and—yes—happy Christians.

God calls us to do certain things: care for the sick, serve the poor, feed the hungry, speak truth to power and good news to the oppressed.

God also calls us to rest: to learn from God’s word, spend time in prayer, love God with our whole heart, mind, and strength. To be fed sacramentally.

A healthy, maturing Christian life is found in an oscillation, the balance between activity and rest.

And the fulcrum between that movement between activity and rest is faithfulness. God doesn’t want us to be busy just to be busy. God wants us to be faithful!

The reason Jesus calls us to pray is that God wants us to be faithful! And that means lining up everything we do, our sleeping and our waking, our work and our play, and all our relationships, around our attentiveness to God.

Have you ever seen or ridden on a see-saw? A see-saw is nothing more than a lever, with two weights on either end, in most cases two kids. And they go up and down, up and down. How high and how fast depends on how the two kids work together and how well balanced they are. But a see-saw, as with any lever, won’t work without a fulcrum. Otherwise, it’s just a board with two bored kids aboard.

In the Christian life, we leverage God’s grace, multiply God’s blessings, see how God’s love can really work in the world by our application of our effort (on the one hand) and the depth of our prayer (on the other). But the fulcrum, the thing that really makes the see-saw or any lever work, is our faithfulness.

The apostles were sent out in pairs not only to extend Jesus’ work, but to increase their faithfulness. What drew people to Jesus and his apostles was not the power of their miracles but the depth of their faithfulness; the hunger that the disciples met in the folks they encountered was a hunger for faithfulness.

The fulcrum, the balancing point, between our activity and our rest is our faithfulness.

Remember that old joke? The one that goes “Jesus is coming! Look busy!” It reminds us that we Christian leaders are tempted to think that the only happy Church is a busy Church, and that the only really valuable Christian is a busy Christian. It is not God who tempts us to think that God only really loves us when we are busy.

God loves us. That’s a given. And what God desires for us is not busy-ness but faithfulness.

Do you want to know the first sign that your spiritual life is out of balance? When just the thought of coming to church makes you feel tired. Or when the only reason you can justify setting aside a few hours on a Sunday morning is because you have a job.

When we cannot carve out a block of time to just be, to listen, to read scripture, to think, to pray, then we are too busy. When we cannot come into this space without taking time to pray or at least sit in silence but instead get caught up in whatever “to-do” list we carry around, then we are too busy, too distracted. In short, we are out of balance.

Now that doesn’t mean that we don’t have work to do. Why just last week, at that Iconography retreat, the cook got sick and couldn’t be there, so we all had to step up and pitch in. None of us starved and we all learned something from practical acts of service like washing the tables or cooking up main dishes on short notice. This is a lesson the monastic tradition teaches us: ora et labora which means “prayer and work.” Our work is prayer. And prayer is our work.

The Christian Life is filled with moments of activity and moments of rest. We need both. Ora et labora.

That means learning how to be present to be here now. It will means learning how not to get so focused on our “to do” lists that we lose touch with the part that needs to pray, to sit, to listen.

Make no mistake: I love a busy church! I love a congregation that’s involved! I love a congregation that makes a tangible difference in the community! I love a church that gives its very best—and not second best—to God!

And give our very best means choosing to be a faithful church not just a busy church!

The point of all the committees, all the giving, all the sign ups and all the activity, is so that we—and anyone in the community-- can come here and find the space to pray. And if “all” a person does is come into the community and “just” pray… “just” give themselves to God even for a few minutes… then you have done your work well!

What makes the Church different from a social club, a charitable organization, a non-profit, or even a business is not how busy we are, how slick or how entertaining, or how relevant we are. We can’t beat the culture on those terms anyway. And that’s okay because they cannot offer what people really hunger for.

What makes the Church the Church is how faithful we are. Our world is deeply hungry and the Church is uniquely positioned—divinely positioned—to meet spiritual hunger. People long for hope, meaning, companionship, direction, purpose and love—people are hungry for faithfulness.

And the fulcrum between activity and rest is faithfulness.

What I learn every year when I go to the iconography retreat is that we work hard, learn a skill, stretch ourselves—and we also stop and pray, and we listen for God, in order to cultivate what God really wants from us: faithfulness. And over the years I’ve discovered that when every paint stroke, every line drawn, is a prayer. And this is the beginning of learning how to be present to God in the here and now, in the fulcrum between activity and rest.

So remember: Work. Rest. Pray. Ora et labora.

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Scripture for Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, Year B, July 21, 2024.

Website for Grace Church, Tampa Palms, Florida

God's gifts, God's purposes, Our action

I have a question for you: What the heck is a talent?

We hear the word all the time. In our culture, a talent isn’t money but a skill, perhaps an aptitude that we cultivate, train, and use, like artistic or musical talent, or a person with a talent (or head) for money. But that is not what Jesus is talking about here.

So what is a “talent?” Well, you know those billboards for the lottery… the ones that have the size of the current jackpot in great big numbers. That’s a talent. If you suddenly had in your hand enough money to equal the average annual salary times twenty… that’s a talent.

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

Now the servants in Jesus’ story did not hit the jackpot. They were people that the master had come to trust, and in the story he entrusted them with what amounted to a winning lottery ticket—with one proviso. Make it grow. Make it grow on my behalf, he said. And then give it back.

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

The three Servants in Jesus’ story had some things in common. For one thing, the master trusted them all. He believed them to be responsible. And he thought he knew them well enough to give them as much as they could handle, but not too much. So the master must have thought the third servant had some skills, some gifts, some ability—because even though he was given the smallest amount, it was not chump change. He gave the guy twenty years of average daily wage to play with! That would be about a million dollars in today’s money!

So if you were in the position of any of these people in the story, what would you do?

Thinking about that third Servants reminded me of a news story from a few years ago. It came out of California where a person bought a house for himself and his young family. The previous owner was an elderly man who had died, having outlived his wife and whose grown children now lived far away. As the new owner began to renovate his home, he found envelopes full of cash squirreled away in nooks and crannies all over the house. Now wouldn’t that make for an interesting show on HGTV?

Soon these envelopes became a pile and that pile amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The old man didn’t trust the banks. He didn’t invest the money. He kept the cash a secret so no one would steal it.  He hid them for the rainy day that never came. His children said he lived in near poverty his whole while working every day he could.

Now the new homeowners had a dilemma. His lawyers would have told him that all that money was theirs to keep. The contract on the sale of the house said so…all the contents of the house were theirs. But the couple knew that the man did not save all that money to go to some stranger who happened to buy his house. No, instead, they decided to give it back to the man’s children for them to use.

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

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

In today’s Gospel, Matthew’s church is trying to figure out how to live in that very long, uncertain time between the resurrection and Jesus’ return. They’ve remembered a teaching of Jesus and applied it to their own church. They remembered Jesus teaching us to never to bury or hide what we have been given. But here they were, only fifty or sixty years into the history of the church and already had developed a disturbing tendency to stand pat and let things work themselves out.

Their memory of Jesus’ story reminded them not to squander the bounty God has showered on his people; and, most of all, to remember that Christ trusts us to carry out his mission…to be Christ’s people, Christ’s representatives in the world!

But being trusted can be scary. We don’t want to disappoint. We don’t want to mess up. We don’t want to lose what we’ve been given. And if that fear takes hold…if that worry about what might happen becomes front and center…if thinking about potential disapproval or judgment takes hold of our hearts…then we become helpless. If we are overwhelmed by worry, we become afraid of risk or what’s around the corner. Gosh! Who can blame the third servant for burying his treasure in the garden and hunkering down?

That is our challenge even today. We have so much that we love in the Church that we want to hang on to. But changes comes so fast that we often don’t know how to sort it out! We have so many responsibilities—there is so much Gospel work to be done! —but find ourselves saying “what if?” We might be tempted to hunker down, hide our gifts, become helpless.

Pope John XXIII, the Pope who convened the Second Vatican Council sixty years ago that set not only the Roman Catholic Church but all Western Churches on the course to meet a changing world, once said this about the Church: he said that we are not the curators of a museum, but we are instead the cultivators of a flourishing garden.

Gardening is hard work and requires planning and preparation and attention, and you have to get your hands dirty.

And one other thing: gardens are for growing, not for burying our treasure.

Jesus’ parable says that the master trusted each servant with an amount in proportion to their abilities. I believe we have all been given what we need and the place to act on those gifts, and that God trusts us to use those gifts faithfully.

But we get scared, which is why we tend to focus on that poor third servant in Matthew’s Gospel and forget about the other two Servants who are complimented for their work and welcomed into the joy of their master. What they receive is not a promotion with a fat paycheck but something much more important. Their faithfulness means that they enjoy a deeper relationship with God.

So what are your gifts? Are they something to be protected and hoarded? Or used for God’s purpose?

If we understand that everything that we’ve have, not just our money, but everything, is a gift from God to be used for God’s purposes, then our whole outlook changes!

The lesson here for the average friend and apprentice of Jesus is this: our money, our stuff, our time, and our abilities, are our power for good! So receive what God has given you with joy, and then use it—even it means some risk—in a way that returns that blessing to God and to God’s people. Don’t stand pat—do something big and audacious and risky and wonderful for God!

We live in an uncertain time. We don’t know how the economy will unfold so we hang on to everything we can. The temptation is to risk nothing and go for safety. And I am not just talking about money here., but how we organize our living. If we organize our living around what we are afraid of, we might hide from other people, and not bring our best selves into our living. In short, we bury what we’ve been given.

The antidote is to live joyfully in the blessings God has given us in Christ Jesus; to use the abilities and resources God has given us to be God’s hands and feet in the world; and to build on the blessings and assets we have to cultivate our lives in service to God and to the world starting right here, right now.

In Christ, we have been a given a gift beyond expectation or imagining. Now, comes the fun part, using what we have for God’s purpose, God’s glory, for the good of God’s people and God’s creation!

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Bulletin for Worship for the 25th Sunday after Pentecost, November 19, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 25th Sunday after Pentecost, November 19, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on November 19, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on November 19, 2023.

Learning to love the wait

I hate to wait. 

None of us likes to wait. Modern culture demands immediacy. Whatever we want, we want it now. I have become so accustomed to immediacy, that I get frustrated when it takes a picture on my phone to materialize in five seconds and not in one. Never mind that I hold in my hand more computing power than was used on the Voyager probe that passed by Jupiter and Saturn on its way to the cosmos. I want what I want when I want it and I want it right now.

I get impatient to get what I want, even though Acme (whoops!) Amazon, not to mention the Postal Service, FedEx, and UPS, all get things right to my doorstep, often the day after (sometimes the same day!) as when I ordered it.

Father Anthony De Mello is a Jesuit priest, psychologist and retreat leader who teaches that the main task of the spiritual life is to wake up. Despite our over-stimulation with electronic devices, addictions to the Internet and social media, and our endless quest for the newest, the best and the most, we tend to make our way through life sleepwalking. Like the person who walks down the sidewalk (or worse while driving down US 19!) while texting on the phone, we go through life somehow unaware of the spiritual dimension of our lives. Like all of the bridesmaids in Jesus’ story in the Gospel of Matthew, we let that part of our life wait. There will be time for that later, we say to ourselves.

Jesus teaches us in the Gospel to both “wake up” and “be ready!”

Since we now know that we can grow our brains to develop new habits and awareness, what will be the spiritual equivalent of filling our lamps with oil and trimming our wicks?

Let’s first address wick trimming, since lamps and candles burn slower when we regularly trim the wick. It is similar with fruit trees – they produce more fruit when we do the work of pruning. Jesus is always extolling the value of doing the upfront work so that we can reap the dividends more easily when the fruit comes in. So trimming and pruning our lives, reducing the amount of distractions, would seem to be the No. 1 lesson for those of us who aspire to be in Christ’s wedding party when he comes. The paradox is that doing less can also help us to awaken to the presence of the Spirit in every breath we take. Doing less can help us to wake up and stay awake for the presence of Christ here and now.

As to filling our lamps with oil, doing less points us in the right direction. For it turns out that another way to encourage and promote neuroplasticity is to do nothing – not just less, but nothing. All religious traditions have some form of mindfulness meditation, centering prayer and contemplation as a religious or spiritual practice. Sadly, it is rarely found in church, where we tend to relentlessly work our way through the liturgy without pause so we can get to the end. And then what? Enjoy “the 8th sacrament”, aka coffee hour? Or go watch the ball game?

Archbishop William Temple said, “The source of humility is the habit of realizing the presence of God.” He encouraged us to develop the open, imaginative, and receptive side our brains and spirituality that looks for God at work, sees and seeks connections, and enjoys the holiness of the present moment. Contemplative prayer or mindfulness meditation helps us to create what some call an empty space within, but which I call an “open” space. A space open for God, open for the holy. This has two immediate benefits.

Another spiritual guide, Orthodox Archbishop Anthony Bloom encourages us to find God right here, right now, in every day life, even in the most mundane routine or seemingly rote activity. encouraging us to find God, who always seeking us, in the here and now, because as he said "if we cannot find God where we are, we will never find God at all."

Through our prayer and meditation and sacramental living, God’s Spirit has a point of entry into our otherwise busy and sleepwalking lives. Once we prepare a place within, however small, however tentative, for  God to dwell within us, we become more aware and awake to the fact that God has been and is always with us. That God is never absent from us. When we begin to see this, we begin to recognize that the work of spiritual growth is, in fact, no work at all.

But wait, (ahem)! There’s more!

Also, as it turns out, letting the brain rest promotes neuroplasticity. And our prayer can help us develop that plasticity. And we enter into and emerge from our prayer or meditation, we are made new, re-wired and more aware of not only who we are but whose we are. 

We discover that God has always been at home in us. The German theologian Meister Eckhart is quoted as saying, “God is at home. It is we who have gone out for a walk.”

So what are we waiting for? Are we to spend our time like those bridesmaids, waiting for Christ to come? Or are we to heed our Lord’s final imperative in the story: Keep awake!

The parables that we’ll hear the today and the next two weeks are tricky. Like today’s. And how we tend to treat them as doctrinal treatises or allegories, assigning parts to each character in the story doesn't help. We find ourselves saying "The unwise bridesmaids represent this or that group, the wise ones who were ready represent someone else… maybe our side, our church, our way of being or doing prayer and worship!"

But what if Jesus meant to simply shock us with details such as closing the door on the foolish ones only to deliver the real message: Keep awake! 

One suspects Jesus really did not want us spending hours of Bible study dithering over questions such as “How could Jesus do that? Why would he close the door on anyone?” when we already know the answer is that he closed the door on no one. Not prostitute, not tax collector, not sinner. His door is always open. The disciples to whom this little tale is told knew that and have witnessed it every day. And like them, we ought to be those who recognize that what seems like his coming again is simply the process of our awakening to the very real Good News of Jesus, that he is with us always even to the end of the age. No waiting required! He is here! Forever and always. We might even say forever and in all ways!

What is Jesus calling us to do? He is calling us to wake up and keep awake!

And the best way to be awake to God is to rest in Jesus. The time and effort put into doing less and doing nothing will awaken us to the clever truth buried deep within this tale of lamps and oil and bridesmaids: He is here. His door is open to all at all times of day and night.

But we have a choice, we can use our energy and time and attention -- our oil! -- for other, frivilous things, or we can use that oil-- our energy, time, and attention-- for God's purposes.

When we wake up to this truth all things are being made new – including most importantly ourselves! —all the time, in ways that often surprise us, we discover that God is making us ready for something new and inviting to participate in that re-making. The first step in accepting that invitation? Be awake to the work of God in our lives!

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Bulletin for Worship for the 24th Sunday after Pentecost, November 12, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 24th Sunday after Pentecost, November 12, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on November 12, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on November 12, 2023.

Stumping Jesus or Stumped by Jesus?

If you love game shows, like “Jeopardy” or “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” or, if you listen to NPR’s “Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me!” on the radio, the questions (or answers) are typically cleverly designed to stump the contestants. Part of the fun is seeing how the contestants handle the challenge of the questions. Of course, in the case of game shows, money, prizes, and lovely parting gifts all hang in the balance. One of the things I like to do when I watch these shows, is to see if I can answer the question quicker and better than the contestants.

In today’s story from the Gospel of Matthew, we see the religious leaders of Jesus’ day playing a game of “Who Can Stump the Messiah?” It is played when each contestant takes turns asking Jesus clever, even challenging questions, but instead of vying for prize, they are really designed to trap Jesus into saying things that will get him into trouble. Another name for the game is “Gotcha!”

And sometimes, I like to play along with Jesus, too!

Today, it’s the Pharisees’ turn to ask the question. On previous turns, you’ll remember, the Pharisees quizzed Jesus about whether or not people should pay taxes to Caesar. It was a question designed to make Jesus lose no matter what he said or how fast he hit the buzzer. If he said, “No, do not pay Caesar – rather, save your money for the real king” he would immediately get arrested for advocating revolution against the Roman Empire. If he said, “Yes, pay the taxes,” then he’d lose the respect of the Jewish people. Jesus reframes the question.

Jesus stumped them instead by asking them to fish out a coin with Caesar’s face on it, and he told them to give to Caeser what was his, and to God what was due God. Ding! Jesus won that round!

But not all the questions that we have, especially the ones that we might want to ask Jesus, can be handled with a simple buzzer, and rather than a glitzy prize, we may simply be seeing peace, solace, or to make sense of whatever is happening in our lives.

And many of the questions we have are not asked because we want to stump Jesus, but because we ourselves are truly stumped and flummoxed by what going on in our lives and in the world we live in.

There are certainly people who love to ask unanswerable questions just to sound clever or to make God, the Bible, or the church, or even ordinary faithful folk seem silly. I remember that very old George Carlin routine where he talked about thinking up outrageous question to stump the nuns in his Catholic school like “Can God make a rock so big that he himself can’t lift it?”

Generally, those kinds of questions aren’t designed to enlighten or even to promote dialogue. They are meant to make the questioner feel smug and superior by belittling the other person. They are usually hiding a deeper pain, or are meant to distract us from the real questions that are often left unsaid.

But other questions come deep from within us and speak to something inside longing for peace, for connection, for hope, for purpose. These are the real questions we want to ask Jesus.

I remember a story told by the late Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” It is about a mother who sent her son to the store to buy a loaf of bread at the corner store for lunch. He didn’t come back for hours and hours, and when he finally came home well after lunch, his frantic mother asked the boy where he was. He said “I was helping my friend fix his bike.” But you don’t know how to fix bikes, she replied. I know, said the boy, but I was helping cry about it!

Sometimes the answer to the question is not an answer but simply a loving presence, a listening ear, and a caring heart, given in the moment without strings or expectation of return. And this comes to us from God, often in the form of a caring friend or companion, or in the silence of prayer as we open ourselves up to God even in our most vulnerable moments.

You may be thinking that some of your questions might stump Jesus and still you want to challenge his authority like those of old. Jesus understands your curiosity and is fully prepared to take on all of the earthly challenges that can be thrown at him. Remember that this loving Jesus is ever-present. Jesus hears your questions as well as your cries, your temptations as well as your triumphs and disappointments. There is nothing too challenging for God. God also challenges us.

This is the pattern that Jesus sets for us in the Gospels. He teaches, yes, and he is ready to interact, even go a few rounds with the skeptics he meets on the way. But the main thing that Jesus does is to meet people, exactly at the point of their greatest need. That is why Jesus can hear our questions not as challenges but as the inquiries of search souls looking for guidance, solace, and connection.

It is tempting to think of the Pharisees and the Sadducees in the Gospels as people with a superficial faith who were only trying to preserve their position and status. And there was certainly enough of that going around, but what if they, like the disciples and the others who followed Jesus, they were simply endeavoring to live as faithfully as they knew how and were trying to figure out how Jesus fit into what God was doing? What if they were like so many people whom we meet today… people who want to believe deeply, and yet can’t get past the nagging questions that won’t go away, including, among so many others: How does faith work when we have science and technology? Why is there so much poverty and violence in a world with so much to offer? Does faith matter? Whom does Jesus truly love? Am I worthy of God’s love? And on and on and on.

Jesus was faced with all kind of questions: some heartfelt, some pesky. But at the heart of all Jesus’ interactions, and the heart of all his answers to all those inquiries was the answer we heard today.

Interestingly, Jesus’ answer to question “what is the greatest commandment” was not an answer new to Jesus. He didn't invent it, but every kid who ever learned Torah at their parent’s knee, or who ever went to Synagogue, would have known the answer by heart: the greatest commandment to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength; and the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. As even our Prayer Book says (in Rite 1), there is no other commandment greater than these.

And that is why God is ready to hear our questions no matter how basic or superficial sounding like whether or not you should pay your taxes or whether or not you can be married to your brother’s widow in the afterlife. Especially from us, Christ’s followers. Because as baptized people, we are not expected to be “Mr. or Ms. Know It All” but we are called to be followers, everyday disciples. We are, as baptized people, Jesus’ friends, students, and apprentices. 

As Jesus' friends and apprentices, we learn more and more, that in asking and living the questions, we are discovering and exploring how to love God with every part of our being everyday, and how to love the people God brings to us as deeply and as humbly as we love God.

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Bulletin for Worship for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost, October 29, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 20th Sunday after Pentecost, October 29, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on October 29, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on October 29, 2023.

Dressing for the Banquet

If you want to understand how we got much of what is in the Bible, think of the party game "Telephone." You know, the one where people sit in a circle, and someone tells a story… whispering it in their neighbor’s ear, who repeats it to their neighbor, and so on around the circle until it comes back to the first person. The fun is hearing how the heart of the original story gets garbled and changed as it moved around the circle.

Knowing that, we can maybe relax a bit after hearing today’s dramatic… and violent!... parable!

Understand that Jesus’ story is here being remembered by Matthew and his church after having been remembered by the people who heard Jesus, and the people who heard people who heard Jesus, and the people who heard the people who heard the people who heard Jesus, and… you get the idea! I suspect that Jesus’ original parable about how God’s covenant is for everyone has, through a first century version of the game Telephone, become something quite (well… how do I say this nicely?) weird!

It might have been easier if we did as some have attempted and just cut out the weird, jarring, far-out, or disturbing parts of the Bible. The problem is that, as strange as this is, it's still Scripture. It may feel like a game of Telephone, but the Holy Spirit is still part of the process. So now what?

I think it is helpful to recall that during the time between Jesus’ teaching and Matthew writing it down, the early church was bogged down in an argument. Even though God has expanded the Covenant to include all kinds of people—varieties of Jews and a myriad of Gentiles are all now members of this new Christian movement, they are beginning to repeat the same mistakes that Jesus tried to fix. The weirdness of this passage partially reflects the pinch these early Christian communities felt. 

Come with me as we walk through this passage.

Imagine that you were lucky enough to get an invitation to the Coronation of King Charles III last spring. You would have received a card that might have read “the Lord Chamberlain has been ‘commanded by the King’ to invite the holder to the Coronation at Westminster Abbey at 11 a.m. on May 6 in the Year of Our Lord 2023,” or something like that. And notice that the King would not have enticed you with the nice buffet afterwards. Would you have said “no?”

Well, that’s exactly what happens in Jesus’ story in Matthew’s Gospel today. The king really wants these people to come, but they could not have cared less!  They are not interested in the food, and they don’t want to dress up. Not only that, some are also so annoyed, so bothered by the invitation that they berate, beat, and sometimes even kill the messengers! This is an outrageously weird story!

Okay, but it’s weird on purpose. Imagine that what we have here is really The History of God’s Salvation…For Dummies!  It was written by and for Matthew’s church a few decades after Jesus may have said something kind of similar. I think that the parable that Jesus originally spoke might have sounded something like this: “God invited people to something great, to be God’s people and a light to the world. Only people didn’t respond as expected. So now God has invited everyone—not just one people or one nation or one group, everyone! —into the reign of God, and the promise of God's reign has been extended to the ones who have accepted the invitation.” Or something like that.

Along the way, someone added on to the original parable the part about the king who killed the party-poopers and destroyed their city. Why? To tickle the ears of Matthew’s church and invite them to think about how Jerusalem was destroyed by the Roman Empire in 70 AD, and with it the end of Temple-based Judaism, and also how the Roman city of Pompei, the most cosmopolitan, artsy, and secular city in the Empire, was wiped out when Mount Vesuvius blew its top soon thereafter. To drive home the point that “Shape up and fly right! God is not fooling around!”

But wait! There's more! You know those servants who were sent out to bring in everyone, both the good and the bad? They would remind those Early Christians of what we would call—from the last chapter of Matthew—the Great Commission, where Jesus tells us to “Go into all the world, baptize and teach!” So the Christians in Matthew’s church would have understood that God has sent Jesus Christ, who lived and died and rose again, and empowered the Church to go into all the world.

End of story, right? "They" are out. "We" are in. Hooray for us! Let the party begin!

Not so fast, sports fans! You may have been invited off the street without warning, but are you dressed for the party? The real sour note of this story (for us anyway) is the part about the guest who has been hauled in from the street and then is suddenly thrown into the eternal cosmic dumpster fire. Why? For not having the right party clothes handy! What’s up with that? 

Preachers have been trying to wiggle out of this for generations, with some commentators saying some malarky like "well, hosts kept party garments ready for guests and these jokers just didn't put them on" or some such silliness. [Sigh!] All that does is disguise the fact that this part makes us squirm. They don't want Jesus to sound so, well, mean! And I get it! We love the welcome part of the first part of the story, even with the special effects, but the “where’s your wedding gown?” part…? Not so much!

Well, it is very weird and I think it's meant to be weird-- but for a reason! I suspect Matthew's church heard and understood why it was weird... otherwise they would not have kept the story in their Gospel! The problem is that we are not in on the joke.

Or are we?

When I hear about the wedding garment, I think about a very old tradition that many Christian churches do when someone is baptized -- even today! The candidates (even babies) have their old clothes removed and after they are baptized from head to toe, they put on new clothes. The newly baptized are dressed in a brand-new white party suit!

So, I wonder if the wedding garment in Matthew’s Gospel might not point to this new clean white baptismal garment that would have been well known in the early church? I don’t know. In any event, I think that the Gospel is telling us that we are not party crashers but invited guests!

So, how do we dress for the party?

Today’s Epistle to the Philippians suggests an answer. Paul wrote this letter from prison. And he urges his friends to be reconciled, calling on his companions in Christ to rejoice and to stop worrying. He says, “Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things” he is not just saying have a positive attitude, he is saying "put on Christ" -- like that baptismal garment! What we choose to wear outside does affect how we are inside, and how we are inside shows up outside. We have a choice. If we choose to be faithful, to come to the party, we also choose how we are, the kind of garment we put on.

Like a teenager trying to find just the right outfit for the big night out, we might find ourselves trying on several new outfits over the course of our lifetime and our life in Christ. Putting on the “wedding garment” is a life-long process. It is a process that includes intentional prayer, intentional stewardship, intentional service, and intentional worship. As Christians grow and mature, as faith becomes more and more woven into our being, we develop new holy habits of sacramental living, reading, and learning scripture, discovering the skills of prayer, and the joy of generosity. As we do this, we find that we have, in fact, put on—and are putting on every day—the wedding garment! Every day, we are more and more dressed for the party!

Thinking about the wedding garment reminds me of a poem by the 17^th Century Anglican priest George Herbert. He wrote this poem just before or just after the King James Bible was first published 400+ years ago. He describes the ritual of a priest putting on his vestments in the quiet of the sacristy before a celebration of Holy Communion. But he is also talking about every Christian who in faith and baptism has not only accepted God’s invitation to new life in Christ but has also chosen day by day to put on the wedding garment. The poem is called “Aaron.”

Aaron

Holiness on the head,
Light and perfections on the breast,
Harmonious bells below, raising the dead
To lead them unto life and rest:
Thus are true Aarons drest.

Profaneness in my head,
Defects and darkness in my breast,
A noise of passions ringing me for dead
Unto a place where is no rest:
Poor priest, thus am I drest.

Only another head
I have, another heart and breast,
Another music, making live, not dead,
Without whom I could have no rest:
In him I am well drest.

Christ is my only head,
My alone-only heart and breast,
My only music, striking me ev'n dead,
That to the old man I may rest,
And be in him new-drest.

So, holy in my head,
Perfect and light in my dear breast,
My doctrine tun'd by Christ (who is not dead,
But lives in me while I do rest),
Come people; Aaron's drest.

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Bulletin for Worship for the 18th Sunday after Pentecost, October 15, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Here are the Scripture Lessons for the 18th Sunday after Pentecost, October 15, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on October 15, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on October 15, 2023.