St. Michael's Episcopal Church Sunday Sermons: Recent Episodes
St. Michael's Episcopal Church Sunday Sermons
2 Samuel 7:1-14a
Psalm 89:20-37
Ephesians 2:11-22
Mark 6:30-34, 53-56
The post July 12, 2024 – The Rev. Katharine Flexer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
2 Samuel 6:1-5, 12b-19
Psalm 24
Ephesians 1:3-14
Mark 6:14-29
The post July 14, 2024 – The Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10
Psalm 48
2 Corinthians 12:2-10
Mark 6:1-13
The post July 7, 2024 – The Rev. Katharine Flexer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
2 Samuel 1:1, 17-27
Psalm 130
2 Corinthians 8:7-15
Mark 5:21-43
The post June 30, 2024 – The Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
1 Samuel 17: (1a, 4-11, 19-23), 32-49
Psalm 9:9-20
2 Corinthians 6:1-13
Mark 4:35-41
The post June 23, 2024 – The Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Third Sunday after Pentecost
1 Samuel 15:34-16:13
Psalm 20
2 Corinthians 5:6-10,[11-13],14-17
Mark 4:26-34
The post June 16, 2024 – The Rev. Sam Owen appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
1 Samuel 8:4-11, (12-15), 16-20, (11:14-15)
Psalm 138
2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1
Mark 3:20-35
The post June 9, 2024 – The Rev. Katharine Flexer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
1 Samuel 3:1-10(11-20)
Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17
2 Corinthians 4:5-12
Mark 2:23-3:6
The post June 2, 2024 – Gillian Okimoto appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
- Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
- 1 John 5:9-13
- John 17:6-19
- Psalm 1
The post May 12, 2024 – The Rt. Rev. Matthew Heyd appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
- Acts 2:1-21
- Romans 8:22-27
- John 15:26-27; 16:4b-15
- Psalm 104:25-35, 37
The post May 19, 2024 – The Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
- Isaiah 6:1-8
- Romans 8:12-17
- John 3:1-17
- Psalm 29
There’s a wonderful story that I’ve shared before – but I love it so much that I’m going to share it again. Maybe you’ll remember it, maybe you won’t. It’s from a book by the writer Ian Frazier called On the Rez, about life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. The story is about a high school basketball player in the late 1980s named SuAnne Big Crow, who became one of the greatest basketball stars of her tribe before she was killed in a car accident. Every time the Pine Ridge girls team played a certain other team, white kids from off the reservation, that school made fun of them. They made Indian war whoops and shouted things like, ‘Where’s your tomahawk?’ whenever the Pine Ridge team came on the court. The Pine Ridge kids get angry, often heckling back, stoking the mutual hatred. One day SuAnne insists on being the one to lead her team out onto the court before the game – and then stops suddenly in the middle. She takes off her warm-up jacket, drapes it over her shoulders, and begins to do the Lakota shawl dance, a traditional young woman’s dance. She performs the whole beautiful dance in silence, and the arena is completely still. Then she grabs the ball, dribbles it to the hoop, and does a perfect lay-up. The whole gym erupts into wild applause – and from that day on, when those two teams play each other, there is no more of that taunting. Friendships begin to happen between the two teams, and one of the Lakota girls says of the other school, ‘There are some really good people there.’
That’s a story that always makes me cry. It’s a story of a young teenage girl who responds with generosity and dignity to ugliness and hate. It’s a story of call, of doing the right thing at the right time. And it’s a story of changing others’ hearts and minds – of what happens when we live in alignment with God’s love in our world. When we live with integrity, growing into the full stature of Christ, realizing whom God is calling us to be – it changes everything.
My mother-in-law liked to say, we are not evolving well as a species, and sometimes, I fear she is right. In our daily prayers at our online Morning Prayer service, we pray for the leaders of the world, that they may act with wisdom, integrity and compassion. But so many of our leaders seem to utterly lack integrity. From our presidential candidate to our Supreme Court justices to many of our university administrators, we see people flouting moral standards, even federal laws, with impunity; serving their own interests instead of the common good; making decisions based on big donors instead of doing what is right. I was almost startled this week to hear the International Criminal Court’s announcement of war crime charges against both Hamas leaders and Netanyahu – the chief prosecutor reviewed the evidence and issued the decision without bowing to public opinion and threats. Whatever you think of his decision, it felt like a rare moment of integrity – we don’t often hear from someone ready to be such a grown-up. And so we’re not very well modeling to our kids what a grown-up should look like, either.
This can’t be the way God is calling us to be.
The story we heard from Isaiah today is in some ways the story that sets the paradigm for all call stories. It’s the reading often chosen for ordinations, as people step forward, feeling full of conviction to dedicate their lives to God and the church; it’s the language of that stirring praise song, ‘Here I Am, Lord’; it’s a powerful, mystical, profoundly personal story of the prophet receiving his commission directly from the Most High God. Isaiah’s only hesitation in replying is over his unworthiness: ‘woe is me, for I am a person of unclean lips.’ But God does not hesitate in return – don’t worry, I’m taking care of that. I will cleanse you and give you the integrity you need. Just go and speak my word.
The gospel story of Nicodemus, on the other hand, is another sort of call story. Nicodemus is a Pharisee, surrounded by people who all say this Jesus of Nazareth is a nut job. But what he hears from Jesus stirs something inside Nicodemus, and he quietly slips off to talk to him in the middle of the night. He’s confused in that conversation, but something seems to take – at the very end of the gospel, Nicodemus brings spices to Jesus’ tomb, along with Joseph of Arimathea. No longer hiding, he openly identifies with Jesus’ followers, whatever the cost. He hears a call, and he responds, in time, with integrity.
Some of us may experience a call like Isaiah’s – big, dramatic, supernatural and momentous. But more often, it’s something like what happens to Nicodemus, or like SuAnne Big Crow. The call comes because something happens inside of us. Something in us stirs, shifts, becomes uneasy with what people around us are saying. We find we have to make a change in our behavior, our community, our understanding of truth. Or something in us stays our first, hot reaction, prevents us from snapping back in anger and insult, grounds us in generosity and largeness of spirit. We might feel ourselves nudged to do something; we might feel ourselves restrained from saying something we shouldn’t. We might make a big change in our lives or we might just reach out in a small way to someone who needs it. We can make a big puzzling mystery out of call and vocation, seeking some kind of ultimate answer for which direction we’re meant to go. But seen another way, responding to God’s call is another word for living with integrity; which is another word for maturity. We are all of us called to grow up – into the full stature of Christ, as our baptismal words say. And that’s a long, slow process.
Today, Trinity Sunday, we honor one of the central doctrines in the Christian faith, the idea that God is a community, an interplay between different ways of being: the Creator, always creating; the Incarnation, drawing creation back into God; the Spirit, guiding creation’s response to that invitation. The Trinity is a fluid system of integrity – of absolute coherence and alignment, yet always shifting and flexing and growing. It’s often been described as a dance, never standing still, always moving.
And the Triune God invites us into that dance, that process of finding coherence. Calling us to respond, calling us to root ourselves in whom we were created to be, and to grow into whom we are called to become. To align our own trinity of head, heart, and hands, so that all we do and say and think and feel is of one piece, and of one piece with God.
And so on this Memorial Day weekend, how are we called? How are we growing up? And how are we helping others to grow as well?
It often is simple – thankfully, none of us are the chief prosecutor of the ICC, our call and so our response is a bit lighter to carry. And yet not always. Tomorrow is Memorial Day – at our cemetery in Queens, volunteers have walked the whole grounds, placing flags at the veterans’ graves. They do this to honor those who responded themselves to their own calls, to serve, to stand with others, to face into fear and evil and stay firm. Many of them were kids, not much older than SuAnne Big Crow. And yet they served, and sacrificed everything.
Other volunteers this weekend made our Saturday kitchen happen – people spent the morning putting food items into bags, carrying the bags outside, and handing them to guests. They did this to respond to the nudge inside of them that reminded them of how much they have and how little others have; to be with community instead of isolating alone. Others this week shared food with one another here over Bible study – our teens, that is – and stories of God’s action in our lives – our book group, our Revive small group, our choir. Others prayed for the names given to them that day to pray for on our prayer chain, offering up intercessions for strangers in need. Others found ways to serve God’s call in their daily work, with their families, in their own quiet prayer. All of these ways of living in integrity; responding to the Spirit; growing up. And all of these ways that help others to grow up too.
Most of the world’s leaders may fail at this; we pray for them daily anyway. But we’ve already responded enough to God’s call to get ourselves here today – so guess what, we’re the ones on the hook to continue responding. We are called in love, given a precious invitation, drawn into the dance. We are fumbling toward integrity, with God’s help. Our kids are watching, for one thing; our kids are showing us, for another. So may we live, children of God, in the full stature of Christ.
The post May 26, 2024 – The Rev. Katharine Flexer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
- Acts 10:44-48
- 1 John 5:1-6
- John 15:9-17
- Psalm 98 The post May 6, 2024 – The Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
- Acts 8:26-40
- 1 John 4:7-21
- John 15:1-8
- Psalm 22:24-30
So this isn’t normally when you expect a sermon to come – maybe you thought you’d escaped it today, thanks to the baptism! Attentive churchgoers might recall we tried this liturgical order out last All Saints – it allows the kids to be part of the baptism before they go up to children’s worship, and they get to escape the sermon. Kids love baptisms, and besides, a baptism isn’t nearly as special without all the kids gathering around, this celebration of new life and new family. Amaya is an official part of the family now, baptized and sealed with the Holy Spirit and marked as Christ’s own forever, and that’s a glorious thing for all of us together to celebrate. And now she’s gone upstairs with her siblings to enjoy that.
Which is not to say Amaya wasn’t a member of the family before – she and God have known each other well for a long time. Bur her being made official today is a sign for us – almost more than for her. Baptism marks what is already true, and holds it up for us all to see: Amaya is a beloved child of God. And so are all of us. That’s what we’re trying to remind you of when we splash you with water – in case you’re wondering. God loves you, even when it ruins your hairdo.
That is the message of baptism, and why we do baptisms all together as a congregation – because we all need that reminding of God’s abundant, unconditional love. John’s letter today spells it all out: God is love; love is from God; when we love, we know God. If you have ever loved someone – if you have ever felt yourself to be loved by someone – then you know God. It’s as simple as that. You can stop trying to figure it all out now.
But we do usually want it more spelled out than that. Just exactly how far does this love go, and who is included in it? It’s the theme of some of the most beloved children’s books – The Runaway Bunny, to take one example. Over and over again the little bunny asks his mama, yes, you say you love me, but what if I turn into this, or that, something different and strange? What if I run away? What if I hide, fly away, disappear, reject your love? The mama replies, over and over again: I’ll love you anyway. I’ll come find you. I’ll still call you mine. At the end of that book, the little bunny gives up – oh well, then I guess I might as well just stay here and be your little bunny. Yes, you might as well, says the mama. ‘Have a carrot.’ (About the best last line of any book, I think.)
Jesus puts it another way: I am the vine, you are the branches. You’re connected to me. My lifeblood flows through you. You can’t really separate yourself and run off – we are one. So you might as well just abide in me and bear fruit. And if you abide in me, you abide with one another also. It all goes together: John’s letter says, ‘Those who say, “I love God,” and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen…those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.’ It doesn’t get much clearer than that.
To bring the point home even further, we have the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. It’s a curious story. Philip, apostle and new deacon, has been in Samaria, preaching about Jesus and healing people – making new disciples amongst the Samaritans, despised enemies of the Jews. He’s called by an angel to get onto the road from Jerusalem to Gaza, ‘a wilderness road’ – words that have a particular resonance today, there’s a lot of wilderness between Jerusalem and Gaza, isn’t there. And on that road, a eunuch comes riding along.
The eunuch is from Ethiopia, highly placed in the queen’s court, wealthy and influential. But in Jewish terms, he is an outcast, outside the law as a eunuch. He can’t convert to the Jewish faith he so clearly admires. He’s returning home from Jerusalem, reading from a scroll of Isaiah as he rides along. The Spirit tells Philip to catch up with him, and Philip begins to teach him. Passing a pool of water, they stop the chariot: what is to prevent me from being baptized? the eunuch asks. It’s a poignant question, because so much has already prevented him from full inclusion. But nothing prevents him – Philip baptizes him, marking him as Christ’s own forever, marking and blessing what is already true – this wealthy eunuch, just as much as ragged, crazy Philip, is part of God’s beloved family. Unalike as they are, they are one. And then Philip takes off again, to preach and proclaim some more in other Gentile regions. He just can’t seem to stop preaching to all the wrong sorts of people.
On the road to Gaza, two unlikely people, opposite sides of nearly every binary, have this encounter. They listen to one another; they engage with one another; they learn from one another. And lives are changed – and not just the lives of these two people. This eunuch is understood as the founder of the Christian church in Ethiopia, one that continues strong to this day.
We are all of us branches of that one vine. And one branch can’t even live without the vine – if it tries to, it fails, dries up, is cut off. We only bear fruit when we’re connected to one another, stemming from the one true vine. Whoever does not love their brother or sister cannot say they love God. It’s all of a piece.
We know what happens when we forget that. Today Mother Julie is at a service at our cathedral commemorating the Armenian Genocide of 1918 – remembering this history at a time when Armenians are seeing a repeat of the same catastrophe in their homeland. The state of Israel is causing unconscionable death and suffering in Gaza in a war of retribution for a terrible attack, a war that has lost all proportion, over 30,000 dead. Russia doggedly plows through Ukraine, claiming territory, possibly hundreds of thousands dead now in that war. It is the history of our world. This is where hatred and despising the other can lead. There are no conversations between opposing sides. There is no listening, no understanding – just the frenzy that leads to war. And safe here in our most privileged universities, students supporting Palestine refuse to listen and engage with Zionists, while supporters of Israel call them antisemitic. Free speech is hotly contested – but free listening, no one wants to do that anymore. Because those whom we oppose are the other, the wrong ones – why listen when you can just shout louder? With politics carrying the weight of religion, it seems less and less possible for people who disagree to stay in relationship with one another. Why bother, when we know we’re right? And so we sow the seeds for still more violence to come.
Will you still love me if I run away? What about if I vote differently from you? What if I wear a keffiyeh? If I wear a star of David? Will you still love me then? Can we love our sisters and brothers and so love God, or can we not?
What we mark and make official today in baptism is that God loves us all even with all of this. We are each one of us beloved of God, whatever our political persuasion, whatever we post or refrain from posting on socials. Whatever our history or our people; whatever the privilege we carry or are denied. We are loved. And we are part of one vine, rooted in Jesus, in the full expression of God’s love for us. In the source of all our life, without whom we cannot exist. We are all a part of it.
Imagine if we listened as carefully as Philip did to the Spirit’s promptings – if we called out to someone completely unlike us and shared with them the good news of God’s love. Or as carefully as the eunuch, who invites Philip into his life to hear and understand him. If we lived out our faith that says that no one is outside of that love. If we heard one another and engaged each other even when we disagree – dropping the posturing and tribalism that blinds us to each other, and embracing our true shared identity, God’s children. That is the way of Jesus – what he taught, and what he showed. All of us part of the one vine – all of us beloved. May we take the radical step of acting like we believe it.
The post April 28, 2024 – The Rev. Katharine Flexer, Rector appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
- Acts 4:5-12
- 1 John 3:16-24
- John 10:11-18
- Psalm 23 The post April 21, 2024 – The Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
- Acts 3:12-19
- 1 John 3:1-7
- Luke 24:36b-48
- Psalm 4
Last week, right after Easter Sunday, I traveled to Loreto, Mexico with my daughter Frannie to visit our old friend (and her godfather). Steve lives in a little house directly on the Sea of Cortez, and so for several days I began my mornings sitting, watching the waves, seeing the sun come up over the island opposite us. I spent most of my middays sitting, watching the waves, the pelicans flying by. Late afternoons I spent sitting, watching the waves, listening to the wind in the palm trees. And my evenings were spent sitting, watching the waves, looking for the stars as they began to come out. I think this will be my Easter week tradition from now on. I began the week exhausted – I ended it in peace.
So, Easter peace to you all, my friends. Jesus is risen – and just as he said to the disciples, so I say to you: Peace be with you.
We’re in the great 50 days of Easter, and Sunday after Sunday we hear story after story of Jesus resurrected, Jesus alive, Jesus appearing to his amazed disciples. Every one of the stories is just about the same as every other one: there the disciples are, doing their own thing, and suddenly, boom, there’s Jesus, who’s just walked through a locked door or turned up on the road or otherwise shown up where he shouldn’t be. And the disciples are scared, and Jesus tells them not to be, and then he does something to prove he is who they think he is, truly there in the flesh. And then he tells them to spread the word, and then he goes away. Leaving them with his peace.
And every time this happens, it all seems to sink in just a little bit more with the disciples. The very same disciples who ran away in fear when he was arrested, who deserted him when he was crucified, who fled from the empty tomb because they were afraid. Little by little, Jesus coaxes them into trusting that this good news really is true. And so the disciples go from frightened children to brave evangelists, and the church is born. They do what Jesus tells them to – they spread the word, they themselves preach and teach and heal just like he did, the Holy Spirit comes upon them, and the community of faith begins to grow. Sharing the peace with one another as Jesus shared it with them.
And all this gift even though they hadn’t at all shown themselves to be worthy of the job. This, to me, is one of the most amazing themes of our scriptures both in the Hebrew stories and in the later Christian ones: ordinary, messed up, broken people are chosen by God, who nurtures them, heals them, and calls them into new places and new work, expanding the reach of the good news of life to all the world. And if it happens to them, these unworthy characters of scripture, then it might just be that God is showing that it can happen to us too. How wonderful this is – and, perhaps we’d better look out!
That theme of our unworthiness is brought home in the reading we heard first today, from the book of Acts. Peter and John, two of Jesus’ dearest disciples, heal a man lame from birth, in the name of Jesus. The man walks and everyone stares, and Peter uses this as a preachable moment. ‘You Israelites,’ he begins, ‘why do you wonder at us?’ And then he goes on to point out how ‘you Israelites’ rejected Jesus and killed him. This is ugly language, some of what has fueled Christian anti-Semitism throughout the ages. But Peter himself is an Israelite, and this is the same Peter who denied Jesus three times in his hour of need. So his speech, blaming though it sounds, is to himself as well. His point is, we all did this. We all asked for a murderer instead of Jesus to be freed. We all crucified the Author of Life. Remember the Passion narrative on Palm Sunday? We all read the parts of the crowds calling for Jesus to be crucified, including ourselves with those who inflict such horror in the world.
It’s important to name this – it’s us, not ‘them.’ But Peter’s point goes beyond fixing blame. We acted in ignorance, Peter says. We were stupid; we humans always are. And God forgives us – totally. Wipes out the sin altogether, as though it never happened. Denying Jesus three times, running away from the soldiers, abandoning Jesus on the cross – all of that terrible behavior is left behind. When Jesus appears to the disciples again, he makes that abundantly clear. Peace be with you, he says. It’s ok. Or as John writes in his epistle: ‘See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.’ God says, never mind all that – you’re my children, and I love you. And that grace is extended to all of us. And through us, it’s meant to be extended to everyone.
Because whenever God speaks to someone, they’re told to go tell it to others and share God’s word. Whenever God gives a blessing, it’s meant to be spread around. Peace is for sharing. All of it is gift. All of it is grace.
It’s a whole new layer on why we’re called further into spiritual growth and deepening. Often what gets emphasized in teachings about prayer and spiritual disciplines is that it is good for us. It’s part of a healthy lifestyle, a life of nutrition, exercise, good sleep, and mindfulness. Mindfulness itself has been picked up by popular culture, detached from religion and religious community. You can use an app to be mindful; you can go to a workshop on mindfulness at your tech company; you can teach mindfulness to children in a public school. From time to time that might tip over into Buddhist teachings about compassion and lovingkindness, that lowering our stress levels and building in quiet can make us more patient and gentle with others too. And of course that’s all to the good – this world can certainly use more healthy, loving people.
And – there’s more to God’s peace than that. The peace that Jesus offers the frightened disciples isn’t just quiet confidence and reassurance – it’s not only a forgiving pat on the head, relax, I forgive you. The peace Jesus brings is the peace of the Holy Spirit – peace that breathes into us and stirs us, might just rile us up inside, open our eyes to see injustice around us, open our hearts to see the suffering on the faces of those we love and those we don’t know, push us out to new places, to bring healing and peace to others and upset the structures of this world. Peter and John were on their way into the temple to pray when the man in need of healing showed up in front of them. They could have said, no, we’re going inside to pray and get more peaceful – no time for you right now. But they stopped, engaged directly with his need, and healed him in the name of Jesus – and then everyone comes running, there’s chaos, there’s excitement from the people around them – and then they get arrested, and the story keeps going from there. Just one of many of the stories of what happens to Jesus’ followers. And yet they never stop. Because they’re filled with God’s peace. And it just keeps pushing them on.
Peace be with you, Jesus says. Stop and breathe that in. Let go of the fear, let go of the crush of anxiety, and breathe. You don’t have to have waves to watch to do this. Do this every day, over and over, throughout the day – prayer and quiet, moments of rest, glimpses of peace that passes understanding, even in the midst of our busy chaos.
And then, look out. Because God’s peace keeps moving; the more you breathe it in, the more you will be stirred – turned from a disciple who learns and follows to an apostle who is sent. To spread the word, to right the wrongs, to bless this world. And to bring God’s peace. Because it’s for everyone.
The post April 14, 2024 – The Rev. Katharine Flexer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
- Acts 4:32-35
- 1 John 1:1-2:2
- John 20:19-31
- Psalm 133 The post April 7 2024 – Seminarian Kate Schneider appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
Genesis 1:1-2:4a [The Story of Creation]
Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21 [Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea]
Isaiah 55:1-11 [Salvation offered freely to all]
Ezekiel 37:1-14 [The valley of dry bones]
Did you know that it takes 10 compliments to undo one criticism?
Research on how our brains and nervous systems are wired reveals that human beings have a negativity bias — we pay much more attention to bad things, and easily overlook the good. Evolutionarily, this make sense; a long time ago, humans needed those instincts for survival. The ability to quickly assess danger meant the difference between life and death. And even though most of us don’t encounter lions and tigers and bears while going about our daily business anymore, the bad stuff coming at us and around us – news of war abroad, crime in our city, strained relationships with family, or coworkers, or friends – feels so much bigger and more consequential than anything good.
And if we’re not careful, we can forget that there’s a difference between this being part of the truth and this being the only truth we see.
When I was a teenager, there was a particular kind of optical illusion that became really popular – poster prints you’d hang on your wall, part of a bygone era before we all walked around with screens in our pockets. They looked like computerized Jackson Pollock paintings, but if you looked really closely, and blurred your vision just right, if you got lucky, an image would begin to emerge. Your eyes would see a three-dimensional image hidden in the two-dimensional image in front of you. And once you saw it, you couldn’t un-see it, or at least, you could much more easily focus your eyes to make the three-dimensional image appear. But the thing about these images was that it was really hard to see the three-dimensional image. You had to trick your eyes into seeing something that was obscured by the more obvious splatters of color in front of you. Some people would only ever be able to see the two-dimensional image. They’d stand in front of the image, squinting and straining, trying to see the number or the unicorn or the boat or whatever you were supposed to be able to discern in 3D, squeezing every ounce of concentration like when you’re all alone after seeing Star Wars for the first time and secretly try to use the Force to bring a pen into your hand, only to step away in frustration and throw their hands up in the air, “I don’t see it!” The brain has a bias, and you had to work hard to override that bias to see something much richer and more deeply embedded.
The holy days that we walk this week, leading up to this Easter moment, take us through a lot of suffering and death. You have to work spiritually hard to stick with it and get to the good news. There’s a whole week of trial and tribulation that lead up to this day of glory. And there’s a good reason we begin the Easter Vigil, the first proclamation of resurrection, in the dark. There’s a reason we begin by lighting a fire in the dark, with prayers and chants that remind us that “This is the night, when Christ broke the bonds of death and hell, and rose victorious from the grave.” There’s a reason we tell and retell the story of God’s saving work throughout history, and why we renew our baptismal vows, as part of the ritual of eventually proclaiming the joy of resurrection, all in the dark.
Because the darkness of the tomb, the darkness of hell, is where the Easter story begins. We tell the story of God’s saving work in the dark because we acknowledge that in many ways, this is our earthly reality. We can easily be given over to our negativity bias, to seeing the world in the darkness of two dimensions, and we can forget that what’s in front of us is not the whole picture. We can easily think that the truth of what’s bad is the only truth there is.
So if we don’t tell these stories over and over again – if we don’t renew our commitment to our faith – if we don’t rekindle the fire of God’s saving love in our midst – we only see in part, and not in whole. We so deeply long for resurrection, for good news, for the victory of life over death. And this is why we need this ritual. This is the night we proclaim resurrection out of darkness. Ringing these bells, proclaiming these alleluias, is not wishful thinking, or blind optimism. We proclaim alleluia even at the grave. There is such a thin place between death and life in our tradition. And we enter that thin place by telling these stories, lighting this fire, re-entering the waters of baptism. Reminding ourselves of what we need to know and remember to stay grounded in God, able to see the world in 3 dimensions, strengthened to see past our bias and to know that as much as it is true that things and people can be truly evil and awful, it is also true that Jesus shows us the way that leads to victory over evil and death. Not that we sit back and wait for God to do it for us — no, this is the night we are invited into the resurrection of Jesus. It’s not substitution, it’s participation. God doesn’t see the world in 3D for us – we now put on the eyes, and ears, and heart, of Christ, and we are invited into that very same life.
In the words of St. Epiphanius, Bishop of Cyprus (403 A.D.):
“Rise, let us leave this place. The enemy led you out of the earthly Paradise. I will not restore you to that Paradise, but I will enthrone you in Heaven. I forbade you the tree that was only a symbol of life, but see, I who am Life itself am now one with you. I appointed cherubim to guard you as slaves are guarded, but now I make them worship you as God. The throne formed by cherubim awaits you, its bearers swift and eager. The Bridal Chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared, the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The Kingdom of Heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity.”*
Alleluia, Christ is risen! The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
*https://holycrossoca.org/newslet/1204.html
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- Isaiah 52:13-53:12
- Hebrews 10:16-25
- John 18:1-19:42
- Psalm 22
He bowed his head, and gave up his spirit.
And so, in the story of Jesus’ Passion and death, we have come to the end. With those words from John’s gospel, Jesus is gone. Today the church is bare, the altar stripped. Today, Good Friday, is a day of fasting and mourning, a day of absence where once there was presence. Until the first rays of Easter shine, we live in the symbolic absence of our Savior.
Honoring this remembrance, our ancestors in the ancient church kept a fast on Good Friday not only from food and drink, but also from Holy Communion. It was the one day in all the year when the Eucharist was not celebrated, when the sacrament of body and blood was not shared. Although that began to shift in the Middle Ages, abstaining from communion is still the custom in much of the church, and it is one we’re observing this year – not only refraining from celebrating the Eucharist, but from receiving the reserved sacrament. Which means we don’t have Jesus symbolically present with us in that same way. When we celebrate the Eucharist we re-member, make present again, Jesus’ sacrifice. Today, however, we recall his original historical sacrifice, the cross erected there outside the city, the humiliating, slow, painful death that he died.
Crucifixion was a horrible way to die. It was death by exposure and suffocation, the victim hung usually by a roadside for people to see as they walked in and out of the city. It was meant to be not just execution but deterrent – the Roman Empire sometimes crucified hundreds of people at a time, a warning to the masses against rebellion. It was what they did to slaves, to thieves, to people without power – even innocent victims were rounded up and executed for show. Usually those who died were left hanging there, their bodies food for carrion eaters. When the gospel tells us Jesus was brought to Golgotha, the place called The Skull, you can imagine the scene. Here was a place where human beings were reduced to objects. Jesus cries out on the cross, ‘My God, why have you forsaken me?’ It is a scene of total desolation.
And yet at Christmas, we acclaimed Jesus as the Incarnation, the Word made flesh, God in man made manifest. Now the Word hangs heavy on the cross. On this day, with Jesus dead, we contemplate God absent also. God forsaking his son, and God forsaken on the cross.
What does it mean for God to be absent?
Often, it must be acknowledged, that’s our experience of God – absence. We hear horrible news of another act of senseless violence – so many of those in recent days here in our own city, and around the world in Moscow, in Haiti, in Gaza, in Ukraine – and we cry, God, where are you? We lie awake weeping in the middle of the night with grief, or because we feel lost and unloved, or because we are afraid, and we cry, where are you? We pray for a cure for a loved one, for a mending of relationship, for food for our hunger, and we cry, God, where are you? And all too often, we hear nothing in return. God does indeed feel absent.
We don’t often pray and talk about this in church. We ask for God’s presence and companionship with us; we remind those who are struggling that they are never alone. We name and hold onto an endless list of images for God with us, the rock on which we stand, the comfort of my Jesus in my heart, the warmth of love felt in community, the stirring passion of call and vocation. We tell stories of how God has acted in our lives, even in miraculous ways, looking over our histories with an eye to God’s presence with us. But I know from conversations with some of you that as beautiful as all those prayers and witnesses are, you struggle to experience God’s presence in your day to day. Or you did once experience God, but these days, you don’t. The truth is, many don’t. Few of us will live our whole lives without at least some period when that is true. Several years ago, when the diaries of Mother Teresa were published, it came as a shock that this saint among us had been living for years without a felt sense of God’s presence. The 16th century monk John of the Cross called it the dark night of the soul. Good Friday is a dark night.
We can’t gloss over this absence. We can’t skip over Good Friday in our rush to Easter. We’d like to – witness how many people are here today and how many will be here Sunday. But suffering and the hard news of the world force us to be honest. Either God is in our utter desolation and suffering, or God never was at all. If God is God, our experience of absence must also be part of God. Otherwise it’s all just feel-good fairy tale.
In the early Middle Ages, the church began to explore this experience in a more profound way. The desert fathers and mothers went out into the empty wilderness to live in silence and solitude, worshiping God beyond words and images. When people would come to them asking for wisdom, they would teach them to stop asking, to abandon language, to live with the unknown. By the 7th century the theologian known as Pseudo-Dionysius distinguished two different approaches to prayer – kataphatic, the kind of spirituality that we’re most familiar with, using metaphor and imagery and storytelling to describe the mystery of God; and apophatic theology, which finds itself speechless and unknowing before the glory of the divine. Like Moses on Mt Sinai, plunged into mysterious darkness, we come to terms with the limits of our senses and intellect. God is absent in every way we would perceive God; only as we abandon ourselves to that absence do we finally meet God. Only by letting go do we receive.
Several years ago Peter Matthiessen wrote a book called The Snow Leopard, a journal of his search in the Himalayas for a glimpse of the elusive cat. He trekked some 250 miles with a biologist named George Schaller, who was there to study the Himalayan blue sheep – but Matthiessen was really along just in hopes of seeing the snow leopard. Spoiler alert: He never sees one, and the book becomes more than a journal of outdoor adventure – it’s a meditation on seeking and not finding, on the hiddenness of ultimate reality. Schaller says, ‘Maybe it’s better if there are some things that we don’t see.’ Toward the end of their trek Schaller suggests sending a porter to a local village to buy an animal as bait, but Matthiessen writes that he doesn’t want to glimpse the leopard that way. ‘If the snow leopard should manifest itself, then I am ready to see the snow leopard. If not, then somehow (and I don’t understand this instinct, even now) I am not ready to perceive it…and in the not-seeing, I am content…That the snow leopard is, that it is here, that its frosty eyes watch us from the mountain – that is enough.’
On the hard wood of the cross, Jesus dies. It is not symbol or metaphor. Death and suffering are real. Darkness can’t be explained away. And the only way around it all is through.
And so we sit, in the emptiness of this day. At the end of the words and the music and the action today, there is silence. It is not easy to stay in that silence, but I invite you to do so. Our faith, our calendar, our hopes tell us that Sunday will come. But for now, it is Friday. And so let it be.
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- Isaiah 25:6-9
- Acts 10:34-43
- Mark 16:1-8
- Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
All the years that I knew him, my beloved Uncle Bob had a mustache. His was not a luxurious mustache with the edges curled up – his was a practical mustache, worn out of necessity – to cover a scar. Because, as the family story goes, one day he and his older brother – my dad – were out in the backyard of their home in Cashmere, in the high desert of eastern Washington. My dad, about 7 at the time, was playing with a snow shovel, trying to use it to pick up and fling a tumbleweed. He claimed he told his little brother to get out of the way: the snow shovel glanced off the tough tumbleweed and flew directly into Bob’s face, splitting his lip. As Bob wailed and cried, blood pouring from his lip, my dad’s first words were, Don’t tell Mom.
And so ends our resurrection gospel today: The women at the empty tomb run away, and ‘they said nothing to anyone because they were afraid.’ Don’t tell anyone.
This has always been a curious turn in Mark’s version of Easter good news. The young man in white sitting at the tomb tells the women to go and tell that things have happened just as Jesus told them they would – tell the good news that their beloved friend, their teacher, the one who has shown them God’s love, is alive. Death has not had the final word – Life and Light are true. Up till now in this gospel, Jesus has repeatedly said, wait, don’t tell anyone who you think I am – wait till my life comes to its full conclusion, because then you’ll see and understand what God is up to. Now, here we are at the very end of the story, and it’s clearly time to tell.
Except that the women flee and don’t tell anybody.
And Mark finishes his gospel with that sentence – they said nothing to anyone because they were afraid. The last word in our English translation of this good news of Jesus Christ is ‘afraid.’ (Curiously, the Greek could also read, they were afraid, because…leaving the whole gospel story dangling on an unfinished thought. Because why?) Why are they so afraid?
Well, we can certainly imagine why. These are three women in ancient society, people without power in their time and culture. The male disciples have already deserted the scene, running away while Jesus was still on the cross. The women seem more faithful, showing up again to prepare Jesus’ body for burial. But this strange young man and his news upsets everything. Tell people? Who will believe us? People without power are never listened to. We’ll just be disbelieved, ridiculed, shunned. And so they tell no one.
Or, maybe they fear that what happened to Jesus might happen to them. The Roman Empire was profligate with crucifixions, sometimes crucifying hundreds of people in a day. If the women went to tell this tale, who knows what would happen to them. Jesus talked about taking up your cross and following, but faced with the actual threat of an actual cross, well, of course they were afraid.
But maybe what they were terrified of most was that resurrection might really be true. They just couldn’t dare to believe it.
More than one scholar has suggested that in this gospel, one particular parable is key – the Parable of the Sower, the story Jesus tells about seed falling on different types of soil. Unusually, Jesus actually explains this parable to the disciples, something he doesn’t do very often. The seed, he says, is the word. Will the word, the message, the good news, be choked out by the cares of this world? Will it sprout only to wither under persecution? Or will it take root in you and grow and bear fruit? This resurrection story seems to leave that question in our laps: here’s the good news. Everyone in the story so far has failed. But what about you: are you going to do something with this good news? Will it, in you, bear fruit?
Over 20 years ago an ad executive named Allen Kay came up with a phrase that has become ubiquitous in our world: If you see something, say something. New Yorkers will remember it was first part of the subway’s amped-up security after 9/11, but in 2010 it got adopted by the national Office of Homeland Security, and now is used in several countries around the world. As a security motto, it has its problems – sometimes people see things and make assumptions about other people based on wrong information, or on their own biases, as several civil liberties suits have pointed out. And as a security motto, its meaning is that we should all be on the lookout for bad things – keep an eye out for danger, and tell someone in authority about it if you see it. The world is a dangerous place.
But what might happen if we turned that motto to a positive – a gospel mandate? If you see something, say something. The world is full not just of danger, but of beauty. If you see something good, tell about it. You have good news about love and light and life? Share it. Because we all need to know – everyone needs this good news.
All too often, we too say nothing to anyone. We can imagine why that’s the case. We don’t want to misspeak or offend and so we say nothing – or on the flip side, we trumpet our opinion without caring what others think. We’ve all heard preaching – on Facebook and the subway – that is the opposite of the good news of life and light. And so we just talk past each other, or say nothing at all.
And maybe it’s also that we don’t want to embarrass ourselves. Today is a glorious day in church, full of good news to share. But will you go out and tell your friends and coworkers about it? what, you believe this stuff? How many people know you’re here in church this morning? What if you told them you go to church a lot, not just on Easter? If you told them what faith means in your life? What in the world would they think?
But deeper than that, I think we might be quite like those three women – maybe we don’t say anything because we don’t dare to hope that it’s true.
For some of us this may be pure survival instinct. We can’t claim to believe good news because it might open us to the scary thing in our heart we’re trying to keep in – the childhood trauma, the fear we live with, the anxiety that wracks us every day. Good news of God’s love – well, what if that too proves untrue?
For others of us, it bothers our tidy, rational worldview to contemplate resurrection. Jesus was a nice man. Can’t we just leave it at that?
For still others, it might just demand too much of our lives, so carefully arranged around the values of the world. If God’s abundant love and life are really true – then what might we have to change in our lives, in how we treat people at work, in what we buy and where we shop, in how we vote? This is risky. Better just to leave this here in church – say nothing to anyone.
At our vestry leadership retreat in February we talked a lot about our neighborhood here on the Upper West Side, and what we see around us, and how St Michael’s can do more to serve our community. One person wisely said, we’ve been talking a lot about what’s wrong in our neighborhood and the needs we see. What if instead we talk about what kind of neighborhood we want, and how we can help it get there? Ohhh, we all said. It was like a door opened.
So many polls lately tell us that Americans feel the world is in terrible shape right now. Whether it’s true or not, we read the polls, and we think, yeah, it really is awful. We could go on and on listing the wars and daily tragedies we are witnessing; the unequal systems we live in; the sense that things are headed in the wrong direction for our children and generations to come. We worry that we can’t fix it, and often we just give up trying. But what if we started looking for where we see light in the darkness, and shared that? What if we told others of the love of God – in words, and even more in how we act toward them? What if we risked believing that death is not the final ending, and Life is greater, always making a way out of no way – what if we told that good news? what world could we help speak into being?
The thing is, everyone of us here today has experienced resurrection. It is not just a story from 2000 years ago – it’s not just a doctrine of faith we choose to accept. It’s something that happens in every one of our lives. It happens in the springtime each year, as blossoms burst forth on bare branches. It happens in hospitals, when a deep sense of peace comes over a frightening situation. It happens in this community, when a lonely person is brought in and shown love and care. It happens over and over again in big ways and small, in moments when a door opens, when light shines, when the dawn breaks, and we see that there is more than what we imagined and feared. We see and know that Life that is greater than everything. We feel that love. We know it is true. We name it as resurrection. That’s what we celebrate today.
There’s an old favorite Easter hymn that many of you will know:
I love to tell the story;
‘twill be my theme in glory
To tell the old, old story
Of Jesus and his love.
The Savior of all people
Has brought his peace to you;
Now go and tell the story,
For others need it too
Do not be afraid – he is raised, just as he told you. Good news, even here at the grave – right here, where you never expected it. Go, and tell the others – for there you will see him. God’s love, for the whole world. Happy Easter.
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- Jeremiah 31:31-34
- Hebrews 5:5-10
- John 12:20-33
- Psalm 51:1-13
A little while ago, I was talking with a friend of mine who is a life and fitness coach. As we were catching up over coffee, she asked me directly how I was doing and what was going on in my life. Now, I know that when a life coach asks you that question, they’re expecting a different answer than maybe your average small-talk scenario where this question might get asked. So I mentioned that I was struggling with achieving a certain goal of mine that I’d set a while back. Fully expecting my life coach friend to come up with a flow chart, way to track progress, etc, I was surprised when she asked me one simple question: “What do you have to say ‘No’ to?” One of the mantras I’ve heard her say over and over again is that in order to say yes to something, you have to say no to something else. In order to get what you truly want, to say yes to your goals, you have to say no to the beliefs and habits that don’t serve your goals. Even though I’d heard her say this many times before, hearing it directed toward me and my own life hit me straight in the gut. The truth was, I already knew what I needed to says ‘No’ to, and I’d been hoping to avoid it. I had been hoping that the answer could be much more Episcopalian in nature, and be of the “both-and” variety. That I could have both my new goal, and my old habits. But it wasn’t. In order to say yes to the goal I had set for myself, I had to say no to a few bad habits that stood in its way.
What do you have to say no to, in order to say yes to something else?
There isn’t room for something new if the old is still lurking around. There isn’t room for truly eating healthfully if you always skip the vegetables. There isn’t room for getting in shape if you only exercise once a week. There isn’t room for starting your own business if you aren’t willing to give up a lot of your free time, savings, and self-doubt. There isn’t room for forgiveness if you’re still nursing grudges.
In order for something new to take hold, something old has to go.
In today’s reading from Jeremiah, the prophet is proclaiming that soon, God will be making a new covenant with God’s people. Soon, God will be doing something new. A covenant where God’s law isn’t studied, or known cerebrally, but known in the heart, acted on instinctually. A covenant of forgiveness and grace. At the time Jeremiah was making this prophesy to the people of Israel, they were in exile in Babylon, displaced from their homeland. And this meant being displaced from the temple, from the holy of holies where God resided, where the covenant lived. They were a people in need of some good news, of some hope that God had not abandoned them to their captors and given up on them. They seem to have had good cause for concern, since they are reminded of their history of straying from the covenant God had made with them – a history of idol worship and injustice. The words of the prophet Jeremiah must have been reassuring to the people who had broken their covenant with God. Not only was God not giving up on them, they were getting a new and improved relationship with God. This new covenant wasn’t just an upgrade of the old one. It had new, fancy, shiny features they were going to have to adapt to. This new covenant was going to write God’s law on their hearts, make God’s law so instinctual that it would no longer have to be taught. But in order to say yes to this new covenant, the people of Israel would have to say no to some old ways of doing things. They would have to adjust to a new way of being in relationship with God, departing from the tradition of countless generations. In short, it wasn’t a both-and situation. They couldn’t have both the old and the new covenant. It was one or the other.
In order for something new to take hold, something old has to go.
In one sense, we are a society that functions, economically, on this idea. Advertisers are constantly telling us we need a new phone, new clothes, new car, new computer… our economy thrives on the concept of “out with the old, and in with the new.” Except we, as people, often don’t. We are much better at “in with the new” than “out with the old.” We buy new clothes, only to have them sit right next to the old ones in the closet. We buy a new computer, holding onto the other one because we’re not ready to get rid of it. (I don’t know about you, but I’ve got laptops dating back to 2003 sitting in my closet!) If cellphone providers and car dealerships didn’t ask for a trade-in at time of purchase, who knows what would happen to our old gadgets. The thing our economy teaches us is that we love the concept of something new. But it doesn’t ask us to consider how we make room for it.
In order for something new to take hold, something old has to go.
But go where?
Lutheran pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, a tattooed former alcoholic, has a compelling story of redemption. She describes her journey from Junkie to Jesus as one that was completely against her will. She says, “Getting sober never felt like I had pulled myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps. It felt instead like I was on one path toward self-destruction and God pulled me off of it by the scruff of my collar, me hopelessly kicking and flailing… and then plunked me down on an entirely different path. I was not allowed to die in exchange for working for God.” (Pastrix p. 38) In her own words, following Jesus “is about spiritual physics. Something has to die for something new to live.” (Pastrix, Introduction) She was given, albeit against her will, a new chance at life, but it meant that her drug and alcohol abuse, and the lifestyle that went with it, had to die.
In order for the new to take hold, the old has to go. But unlike life coaching, the Christian faith is not just about developing new habits and letting old things go. It’s about death and life. It’s spiritual physics. In order for something new to live, something also has to die.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks about his own death when he says, “unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” The Gospel goes on to say that he said this to explain the kind of death he was to die. What Jesus is saying about his own death is that it’s the kind of death that bears much fruit, that it’s a death that has a greater purpose. He’s trying to tell his disciples that his death would not be the sad, horrible, dreaded thing his disciples were fearing. Death of a loved one is a natural thing to fear. Death by crucifixion was excruciating torture. To think of Jesus, their beloved teacher, dying this way, it’s natural they’d be a bit freaked out. But that wasn’t the end game. What they learned on that Easter morning, and what we know today, is that Jesus death led to new life. It’s spiritual physics. The kind of death that Jesus died is the kind of death that allows for new life to grow.
This passage about the grain of wheat falling to the earth and dying so that it can bear much fruit is one of the most familiar passages of the Bible to me. Growing up in the Armenian Church, it was read at every funeral, memorial service, and anniversary of a person’s death, both a reminder about the meaning of Jesus’ death, and a metaphor for the hope we can have as we grieve the death of our loved ones. I’ll be honest with you – I never found these words holy and reassuring. It always felt like a BS way of dealing with death. Because I never saw the fruit, the new life, springing forth from death. All I saw was grief and emptiness. Most, if not all, of you know that when someone you love dies, you walk through the rest of your life missing a limb. But the Church was right to remind people that this Gospel – that if a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it bears much fruit – this passage is not only about Jesus; it’s also about each one of us. It reminds us of the awful and awesome truth that ours is a faith that stretches far beyond the self-help section, and plunges into the depths of death and life. The Christian faith is more than a belief in Jesus the good teacher; it is hope and trust in a God who went as far as gruesome death and as far as glorious life. It is trust in a God who walks with us in all our dying and all our living, because there is nowhere we can go that God has not already been.
This penitential season of Lent is a time when we can dare to practice the spiritual discipline of examining ourselves and asking the hard question: what part of me has to die so that the God of love can dwell there? What resentments, what addictions, what greed, what anxieties have to die in order to make room for God’s love to grow anew? Every time we celebrate Eucharist here at this altar, we remember Jesus’ words: “drink this, all of you: this is my blood of the new covenant, which is shed for you and for all for the forgiveness of sins.” The new covenant comes to fruition at this altar and in the person of Jesus Christ.
When we drink from the cup that Jesus gives, the cup of a new covenant, what kind of forgiveness and grace do we drink? What is put to death by the bread of life and the cup of salvation?
Truly I tell you, if those grains of wheat fall to the earth and die, they will bear fruit. Amen.
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- Numbers 21:4-9
- Ephesians 2:1-10
- John 3:14-21
- Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22
Happy Laetare Sunday, everyone – Easter is just 3 weeks away, and today in the tradition of the church our Lenten fast lightens a bit and we get to celebrate, modestly. It is also known as Mothering Sunday, the day when one would visit one’s mother church – the church where you were baptized. So for all of you who are feeling overmuch the rigors of Lenten discipline, today is a day to relax that a little bit. And for all of you who are gloomy for other reasons, like, say, you read the news this morning, well, take today as a chance to lighten up a little as well. No matter how bleak it looks, there are still spring flowers coming up amidst the dry leaves.
I just finished reading a beautiful book called All the Beauty in the World, about our very own Metropolitan Museum. It’s written by Patrick Bringley, who worked there as a museum guard, going there shortly after his older brother died, a young man reeling with the loss of someone he really loved. He’s not a religious person, not raised in the church, but finds incredible solace in the art around him, and in the long stretches of quiet that he has as a guard in the galleries there. At the end, on his last day, he goes back to his favorite piece of art in the whole museum – a scene of the crucifixion, by Fra Angelico. He describes it well – the broken body on the cross; the crowd of people around, mostly not seeming to care; the grieving Mary fainting at Christ’s feet. In Bringley’s time of loss, bewilderment, grief, it is beauty, and most especially the tragic, complex beauty of a crucifixion painting, that anchors him and brings him back to life. That vision of Jesus on the cross brings life, even just hanging in an art museum.
Today’s gospel tell us, Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.
The image of Jesus lifted up on the cross is tied directly to Moses lifting up the serpent, in that bizarre and troubling passage we heard from Numbers. It comes from the long journey of the Israelites to the promised land, with all the ups and downs in the relationship of God and God’s people. The book of Numbers has seven so-called ‘murmuring stories’ where the people complain and God responds. Lots of complaining, in other words. In this one, the people complain about the food and how long the trip is taking – sounding a little like the kids in the back seat – and God sends in venomous snakes. Not manna, not quail, not water, but pow, snakes. This is the first time God has seemingly punished the people directly for their complaining – perhaps because it’s the first time they’ve complained against God directly, instead of just about Moses. But when the people repent and ask for help, God makes the sign of their suffering to be the sign of their healing: make an image of a snake, God says, and when you look up at it, you will be healed.
Of course the troubling part is, Why does God send the snakes in the first place? We don’t like this idea of God. Of course, the text doesn’t explicitly say the snakes are punishment. But then God doesn’t take the snakes away either – God just provides a means of healing for those who are bitten. It’s not an easily explainable story, and it’s a hard reading.
And perhaps we’d rather leave it there, safely in the mysterious ‘Old Testament,’ about ‘the Old Testament God’ – who, you might recall, is the God that Jesus worships, and the God of our Jewish siblings today, all part of why that mindset is, in fact, a heresy. But leaving that aside, the gospel passage picks this passage right up, directly linking Jesus crucified to the image of the snake. Jesus crucified is also a symbol of suffering and death; and yet Jesus crucified is a sign of life for the world. And then the gospel continues with John 3:16, one of the most famous scripture verses, often the sign and signature of evangelical Christians at sporting events. ‘For God so loved the world,…so that everyone who believes in him may not perish.’ We sometimes read those signs as more about the perishing than the love. But as the passage goes on to say, ‘God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.’ What we see as condemnation and death, God means for life and love. There in a nutshell is the message of Good Friday and Easter. The paradox of the cross; the paradox of human suffering. Troubling truth. Not easily understood – and yet life-giving.
All of this triggers all kinds of things for us. Does God really punish us? Can’t God just take away our suffering altogether? What about the people that died from those snakes? What about those who don’t believe in Jesus? There are about 20 hard questions for preachers embedded in today’s readings – sermons I’ve preached over the years, good, valid hard questions we Christians have to wrestle with. And yet, I hazard to say, in some of that questioning, we can miss the point. Jesus on the cross is about is love and God’s embrace. It’s right there in the language of John 3:16. Everyone who believes in him shall be saved. Or ‘Whosoever believeth,’ in the King James version. Whosoever – everyone, no matter what, is welcome. Whoever believes in him, meaning whoever trusts the revelation of love that Jesus incarnates. Whoever tries to follow in his way of love. Whoever asks for God’s help when we fail.
There’s a quote I came across from the mid-century Black leader Mary MacLeod Bethune. Bethune was a child of enslaved parents who grew up to help found Bethune-Cookman University and became a civil rights leader and an advisor to both FDR and Truman. Bethune was also a faithful Christian, and writing about John 3:16, she said,
With these words [John 3:16] the scales fell from my eyes and the light came flooding in. My sense of inferiority, my fear of handicaps, dropped away. “Whosoever,” it said. No Jew nor Gentile, no Catholic nor Protestant, no black nor white; just “whosoever.” It means that I, a humble Negro girl, had just as much chance as anybody in the sight and love of God. These words stored up a battery of faith and confidence and determination in my heart, which has not failed me to this day.
I wonder if this might be part of why Jesus calls the poor in spirit blessed in his Sermon on the Mount – those who are in real need of God’s saving embrace, they know that embrace. When you’re well established in society, when the world seems on your side, when all is well in life – when you don’t feel as much like you need what God is offering, then it’s comfortable to sit back and hold it all at a distance. Maybe chew over the questions for a while, and then set them down and move on. Then it’s easy to be like the onlookers in Fra Angelico’s painting – idly curious, busy, distracted, bored. We can turn away from Jesus on the cross as just another picture, and not believe. We can stay in our wilderness of snakes and not be healed.
Ultimately the message of the cross, though, is more basic than that: All are loved. All are healed. Death turns to life; condemnation turns to love. All that is needed is for us to look and see. To see not just with our heads, full of all their questions – but with our hearts, ready to know and be known. That is the good news of Good Friday. That is the amazing gospel that is given to us to share with the world. The paradox at the heart of our faith – God’s love in the midst of suffering – isn’t meant to be figured out so much as it’s meant to be lived out.
The Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglass often notes that the church isn’t always good at being church. We’re more often aspiring to be church, she says. And I think this is one of the ways we falter. At the heart of our faith is a treasure that we can so often fail to see – and because we do not see, we do not share it with others. That deep love at the heart of it all is there for us and there for every single one of God’s children in creation. That, church, is a treasure we need to share. We Episcopalians, we progressive Christians, we Upper West Siders spend a lot of time apologizing for our Sunday practice, hiding from our co-workers that we go to church, distancing ourselves from ‘those people’ Christians, downplaying the importance of our worship to the ministry of this parish. As if what we’ve got here is something optional and unnecessary and frivolous, not worth mentioning. Is it really?
But this world needs healing. In ways people know and in ways they don’t, they need the truth of this message of love. Not just in a banner, ‘John 3:16’ – but in the truth of our witness and our lives. Here is a place to come be with people who will love you, misfit that you are. Here is a place that holds up the truth and speaks it – not social media ‘truth’ of the day, but real truth. Here is a place that teaches us to love our neighbor, and even more, to love our enemies. Here is a place that feeds the hungry, that sits with the dying, that prays for the sick and the lost. Here is a place that shows God’s love. You can get a spiritual feeling from watching the sunset – and a dopamine hit from sharing it on Instagram. But real love must be lived out in relationship and community. God loved the world enough to show us what that looks like.
God so loved the world. God so loved you. Think of it. No – don’t think of it, feel it. Let it seep past all your barriers and spread through you for a minute. And then tell me: how are you going to show that love today? How will you be a witness? Whom will you love? So let it be.
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- Exodus 20:1-17
- 1 Corinthians 1:18-25
- John 2:13-22
- Psalm 19
Last year the Episcopal Church released a book called “Realizing Beloved Community,” a publication of the House of Bishops’ theology committee. It examines one of the greatest threats to Christianity today, and indeed to our democracy as well: white Christian nationalism. This is not only an ideology but a heresy that seeks out the power of the nation to exert what some believe is the power of God. It subjects God’s power to the nation’s power, making redemption and life in God only possible if God can rule through earthly powers and principalities. It is the highest and most egregious form of idolatry. We have seen this heresy at work as recently as this past week, in the ruling in the state of Alabama. Christian religious language is woven throughout the ruling. We see this heresy at work whenever people claim to believe in Jesus but the power they trust is in fact a political party, or a former president, and the laws they seek to fulfill ensure the oppression or even destruction of people of color, queer people, women, and immigrants. And we know this is heresy because it seeks to destroy the very people Jesus spent his earthly ministry reminding of their inherent worthiness and belovedness.
In the words of the pastor Benjamin Cremer, “It tragically reveals how little we Christians truly believe in the power of Christ when we act as though his kingdom is dependent upon a political party, supreme court, president, and a nation maintaining, advancing, and enforcing his will.”
It’s enough to make true Christians wish they could do what Jesus did, to use the whip of justice to clean out the corruption in our own temples of power. Yet, we know that only Jesus has the courage and the authority to do so. All we are able to do is wait and repeat the words of the Psalmist, “How long oh Lord, how long?”
The story of Jesus and the money changers in the temple takes place in the first Passover of his public ministry and his first known visit to Jerusalem as a grown man according to John’s gospel. The other gospels put this visit just before his arrest and crucifixion. As one scholar notes, early in his ministry, Jesus still considers the Herodian Temple his “Father’s House.” But by the end of his ministry, when he weeps over Jerusalem as “the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it,” he declares it to be the people’s temple. “See, your house is left to you,” he cries, and the implication of desolation is in his words.
And this episode is rather uncharacteristic of Jesus. For the entirety of his public ministry, Jesus is calm, self-differentiated, non-anxious, clear on his mission. Think of how he was in front of Pilate, or with the woman caught in adultery, or in the boat with his disciples while a storm was raging. The epitome of calm. So why did Jesus become so angry when he saw his father’s house being made into a marketplace?
Well, as our lesson from Exodus tells us, in the Ten Commandments, idolatry of any kind was forbidden by God. You shall have no other gods before me. The money changers had a purpose: taxes had to be paid to the Roman overlords, but the Roman money carried the image of Caesar on it. The High Priests, considering this image idolatry, had ordered that the money paid in taxes should be converted to the shekel in order to be acceptable for Temple business. In that exchange, a great profit went into the coffers of these same priests. Anyone of us who has had to exchange our dollars for foreign currency knows how crippling that can be. Jesus knew that this was both profanity of the Temple and exploitation of the poor citizens. It was another form of idolatry—here the idol was earthly gain, a god ever present both then and now—a god not named by his followers but worshipped nonetheless.
Jesus also knew that his acts in the courtyard of the Temple would bring him in direct conflict with these same high priests, but this did not cause him fear. At this point in his earthly ministry he is very popular with the people, so the priests don’t dare touch him. As his interpretation of who God is and what God demands of us continues throughout the land, he becomes a stumbling block to the high priests, and the people, not getting the signs that they demand, agree to his death. But on this first Passover in Jerusalem, filled with the Holy Spirit, he burns with the fire and power of Truth. Afraid of that fire, they don’t dare touch him, but their desire to see him dead begins on that day.
A few decades after Jesus’ death, Paul will articulate this all very clearly to the Corinthians. The Jews, Jesus’ and Paul’s own people, were scandalized by Jesus’ courage, by his claim to know the mind of his father, by his willingness to meet his death without any retaliation or violence. To the Gentiles, with whom Paul is sharing what he learned from Christ, all this is foolishness. It goes against their own admiration for wisdom and philosophy, even for courage in battle. Paul summarizes the reaction to the acts of Jesus in brilliant brevity: “For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”
In today’s gospel story, John shows the scandalous activity of Jesus in all its glory. The leaders of the Jews had fooled the people with a piety that had become idolatry and had allowed physical structures to take the place of a God who demanded, “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Our culture has forgotten this command also, and so many signs or symbols today have been turned into idols: the Ten Commandments are not obeyed, but their depiction on stone is approved; the flag that is supposed to remind us of the human longing for freedom becomes an idol to be worshipped; money that should be used to educate and feed children becomes an idolatrous acquisition for those who already have too much of it, while our streets fill with unhoused people; schools and libraries, once safe havens where information was made publicly available, have become battlegrounds to slaughter truths about racism, homophobia, and bigotry. Guns, instruments of death only to be used in the extremity of war or self- protection, are worshipped as symbols of freedom as they have become the leading cause of death of children in this country; medicine, health care, means of healing, the very thing Jesus spent his entire earthly ministry dedicated to, is cast not as a right for all people but a privilege for the few.
We need Jesus’ courage to cleanse the temples of idolatry. We long for his kind of integrity that dares to call out the oppressors, no matter who they are. We pray for the power to overthrow the tables of the moneychangers who cheat the poor and the voiceless. In Paul’s words, we too must “proclaim Christ crucified.” Nowhere does Paul ever speak of a prosperity gospel.
As we approach Holy Week, we need the love and the passion that can sustain us even unto death. We will be laughed at when we resist the culture of our day, but we will remember with Paul that, “The message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” Let us be aware, more than ever during this season of Lent, that the power of God goes with us. Amen.
https://www.episcopalchurch.org/sermon/resisting- the-idolatry-of-the-age-lent-3-b-2018/
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- Genesis 9:8-17
- 1 Peter 3:18-22
- Mark 1:9-15
- Psalm 25:1-9
Many hard years ago, the apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Rome, encouraging them in a long dark time: ‘Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint.’ (Romans 5:3-5) This is probably the origin of that familiar parental response to kid whining, one that drives kids so crazy: ‘I’m sorry you’re bored and miserable, honey, but this is building your character.’ So here we are, in another character-building time: Lent. A time of self-examination, fasting, and self-denial. What fun!
Forty days and forty nights can feel like an awfully long time. The good news is that we’re already 4 days in, so we have only 36 more to go. For various reasons recently I’ve been remembering Lent of 2020, the Lent that started off strong and two weeks later found us shut out of church and hiding in our homes. The Lentiest Lent we ever lented, we said at the time. It felt like the good news of Easter would never come. Well, now we’ve done that, we know we can get through this, right? If you can make it through Lent 2020, you can make it through Lent anytime.
Now, I haven’t sat down with each one of you and asked about your Lenten observance. I don’t know which of you are stubbornly trying yet again to give up chocolate, or checking out a new prayer app, or signing up for 5 weeks of serving in Saturday Kitchen; and I don’t know which of you are thinking right now, uh, Lenten observance? Me? So if I go off talking all about 40 days of endurance and character-building, I may just be speaking into thin air. I realize that. No judgment here about whether this is the first you’ve thought of any of this. But I do suggest that now you do think about it, and for good reason. We all could use a little character-building.
Forty days and forty nights is not a random number, of course. The character-building of Lent is based on the character-building in the Exodus story, the 40 years that the Israelites wandered in the wilderness on their way to the Promised Land. It’s also based on the scripture stories from today: the forty days and forty nights of rain that caused Noah’s flood, the forty days and forty nights of Jesus’ fasting in the wilderness. Times of real suffering – 40 years being lost, nearly starving, fearful and afraid before finally finding a home. 40 days of rain when everyone and everything on the earth is swept away and drowned, only the small handful on the ark surviving to start a new world. 40 days in the desert being tempted by demons, with wild beasts as doubtful company, until the new ministry can begin. It makes you wonder, did all that character-building really need to happen?
In the case of Israel and Jesus, the scripture seems to say it does, as it is God who takes them out to the wilderness in the first place. Something needed to happen to take them from the high of that initial experience – Israel’s crossing of the Red Sea and being saved from the Egyptians, Jesus’ profound spiritual experience of baptism – to the hard work of new life and living out God’s call. Wilderness time, though full of suffering, is apparently intentional, and fruitful in the end.
But in the case of Noah – it’s less clear. God puts the rainbow in the sky to promise a flood will never happen again – not just a promise but a reminder, something that when God sees it, he’ll remember that he doesn’t want to do that again. Which feels a little like an oops, doesn’t it – like, God says, gee, maybe I overreacted and this destruction of the world thing didn’t need to happen – let’s not do it again. That’s a story that gets more disturbing the deeper you sift it.
But maybe in some ways the needlessness of suffering in the Noah story is part of the point of it. Because although we try hard to find meaning and purpose in suffering, the fact is that most of the time, the suffering we go through didn’t really need to happen. And that does make it harder to know how to live with it.
How many different stories like this can we tell? Here’s just one: Today is the 82nd anniversary of Executive order 9066 – signed by FDR, which sent 122,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps. 70,000 of them were American citizens. Given 48 hours notice, most of those people lost their homes and property – a report in 1983 calculated a total of $1.3 billion of property loss and $2.7 billion of income loss (1983 dollars). Finally in 1988, Congress passed a law that acknowledged the injustice of the incarceration, apologized for it, and provided partial restitution – a $20,000 cash payment to each person who was incarcerated. In other words: Oops, that was a mistake. The internment of Japanese Americans is one of the horrors of our recent history, but it’s just one of the things this country has done to people of Asian ancestry; just one of the things done to people who weren’t white, and didn’t look like those who were in power. Just one example of intense, needless suffering inflicted on a group of people by another. We can ask why it happened, and in response we come up with a handful of human sins – fear, and hatred, and jealousy, and bigotry. We can pass laws and make changes so it never happens again. But none of that really explains the suffering. It didn’t have any purpose – it just happened.
Theology has tried for centuries to explain why suffering happens. It feels like a huge conundrum, how suffering can happen to good people. Why people are struck with disease, born into poverty, killed as collateral damage in a horrific war. So we have stories in scripture and tradition that tell us suffering is somehow God’s doing, part of a plan – stories that never quite ring true in the end. Because God doesn’t make suffering happen. You can’t gloss it away with easy answers.
And yet we dare to believe that God doesn’t just let suffering be, either. Without wiping it all away, still somehow God can take trauma and tragedy and work it into blessing. Think of people who have gone through great suffering and emerged stronger than before, who speak with profound gratitude of the wisdom they gained through their trials, or the empathy, or the grace. Famous people like Nelson Mandela or Harriet Tubman; ordinary people like, well, some of you sitting right here in this congregation. People who have buried loved ones, or battled cancer, or lived through persecution, and yet found joy and hope in the process. They can seem superhuman to those of us just struggling to get through the days. They don’t deny the suffering, they don’t pretend it didn’t happen, but somehow, they are able to make it through and even thrive. Psychologists talk about the need for resilience, the ability to adapt well to suffering and difficulties, and there’s been much written about the need to build that resilience in our children especially. But as the theologian Richard Rohr wrote recently, ‘Resilience is really a secular word for what religion was trying to say with the word faith.’ Christians aren’t guaranteed any easier passage through life than anyone else. But we are given tools to grow through it all – to come through darkness and yet still declare our hope. How can we come through it all and thrive?
This Lent we’re focusing on building up our faith and resilience – our strength for the journey. There’s a lot happening in the world these days, and given our media diet, it will undoubtedly continue to be unsettling and distressing throughout this year. We read about suffering and see it and hear it every single day. And we each go through personal storms in our own lives, shipwrecks that at first can feel like the utter end of everything. So this season of Lent feels like a good time to work on our spiritual muscles, to put down deeper spiritual roots, to build a stronger spiritual foundation – pick your metaphor, whatever works for you – to weather any storm that might come our way. We need to build our character – and we don’t just have to wait for suffering in order to do it.
So we’re going to work on our prayer lives, the foundation to our relationship with God. Not by teaching anything new, but by highlighting the prayer practices all around us in this community. We have candles to light at the back of the church, prayer cards to write to be prayed by the prayer chain, healing prayer to ask for in our chapel each Sunday. We have our common prayer here together, daily in our morning prayer and noonday services, and weekly this season, an evening prayer service on Wednesdays. Prayer is communication with God, and you have to communicate to have a relationship. If you haven’t tried it before, now is a good time to start. If you don’t know how to go about it, your clergy are here to help – and the people next to you in the pews might have an idea too.
And there are other practices along with prayer that can deepen our relationship with God. In our forums we’ll look at them through the lens of our sister faiths, Judaism and Islam. How do we all pray and worship? what about fasting? The practice of pilgrimage, traveling to a holy place. Mysticism, the deeper connection with God beyond all ideas and languages. And what it means to be saved, and how we see that at work in our lives. We’ll have a quiet day for listening to the voice of God, practicing quiet and discernment to recognize how God speaks to us. And our ongoing ministries with our music and our children and with our Saturday Kitchen provide practical places to serve with your voice, your hands and heart, always getting something more in return.
Sometimes advertising Lent feels like making the cover of a popular magazine: Lose weight by eating healthy and exercising! Feel better by getting more sleep! Be less stressed by simplifying your life! Well, duh. There are no actual gimmicks here – it’s just the basics, what we teach and try to practice all throughout the year. But it’s all worth another look.
Lent, in other words, is another chance at a restart. It’s a chance to square our shoulders and try growing up a little bit more in our faith. Whether this is your first Lent or your 60th, it’s a good time to come a little closer in. Take a little daily intention, fast from something, set aside some time. Keep it up and restart it if you falter. This part is on us. It does mean a little work on our part. Hard work if you’re finding yourself in a shipwreck right now – the refiner’s fire may be already at work on you, like it or not. But if everything right now is smooth and easy – well, you may need the strength for what is yet to come. It’s worth building up your practice.
But it isn’t all on us to get this right. In the stories of character-building in scripture, God didn’t just send people off on their own to figure it out for themselves. God was with them, ministering to them and feeding them and guiding them – God was even with Noah in the midst of that terrible flood. And the good news is that God is with us too every step of the way – ready to deepen us, ready to bless us, ready to turn our sorrows into joy. Ready to redeem our suffering, to bring something out of it for us and for others. Ready, in other words, to build our character. So that we can live in hope, and share that hope with this world. So may you have a holy Lent.
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Exodus 3:1-15
Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c
Romans 12:9-21
Matthew 16:21-28
I’ve been thinking a lot about my inner taskmaster ever since Kate’s sermon last week.
Over a period of several weeks, we’re reading the story of the Exodus – Moses leading the Israelites out of slavery and away from Egypt. And through that story, Kate invited us to look in and around us at what taskmasters we find ourselves beholden to.
And it’s true, we often don’t have to look farther than our very selves to hear the voice of the taskmaster saying, “what did you do today? What did you produce? What did you accomplish?”
Still, the story of Moses and God’s deliverance of the Israelites out slavery in Egypt is explicitly about external taskmasters. Enslavers, to be exact. And the Hebrew Scriptures tell us plainly why the Egyptians, so favorable toward the Israelites in one generation, turned against them in the next: fear of how numerous and powerful the Israelites were. The new pharaoh felt his power threatened. So he enslaved and oppressed the Israelites.
It’s a shame St. Paul wasn’t alive yet to give them his beautiful and timeless words of exhortation: “Love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. Live in harmony with one another.” (Come on, Pharaoh.) But those words wouldn’t come to us until many centuries later, after God entered the world in the flesh and showed us what true redemptive power looks like.
Taskmasters – enslavers – have sadly always existed. Systems of exploitation have always existed. The fight for what resulted in Labor Day was a fight for better treatment of the American worker. Over a century ago, the systems of labor in this country demanded a lot of American workers with very little accountability. And so workers organized, and labor activists pushed for a federal holiday to recognize the many contributions workers have made to America’s strength, prosperity, and well-being.*
But even as we celebrate Labor Day, and rest for the American worker, we cannot forget that exploitative employment was fought against long before the labor movement resisted it. For centuries, enslaved African workers on this soil fought for and desired rest from their unpaid and oppressive labor, with no response or reprieve from their taskmasters. And it doesn’t take much to see that the systems that allowed slavery to thrive as long as it did still have a strong hold on our common life. The pandemic revealed labor disparities exacerbated by the gig economy and our thirst for on-demand delivery of everything and anything, yet these systems have only proliferated. Tomorrow, many of us will still order food for delivery, hail a ride share to go to a friend’s BBQ, or expect to be able to go to a variety of retail establishments for our convenience (or be frustrated that they are closed for the holiday). Your Uber driver or Seamless delivery guy or local grocery store isn’t getting a day off. Tomorrow, many of us, especially people of color, will not get a day off to rest from their labors.
If you were in a small group this spring, you read the book Sabbath as Resistance by Walter Brueggemann. It examined the commandment to keep sabbath: “the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God; you shall not do any work—you, your son or your daughter, your male or female slave, your livestock, or the alien resident in your towns” and showed us how much we have to resist that’s all around us in order to take the sabbath commandment seriously.
Just to contextualize this – notice we’re reading from Exodus 3 today. The 10 commandments come to us in Exodus chapter 20. In other words, these commandments are given once the Israelites have escaped the Egyptians and reached freedom from slavery. I imagine the commandment to rest was a very welcome one indeed.
One of the profound takeaways for me in the book was how Brueggemann links the sabbath commandment to the first commandment.
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.” THAT is who God is. The one who delivers from slavery. From oppressive systems that demand constant production. Because of that identity, we rest. Not just because of what God commanded us to do, but because of who God is. God worked and rested. So must we, if we actually believe in the same God who revealed themselves to Moses in that burning bush, the great I AM, whose identity is not enslavement, exploitation, or incessant demand of goods and services, but of deliverance, freedom, and rest.
And yet there is a central tension here that is the struggle of faith. God is the one who delivers from slavery – yet enslavers have always existed. God is the one who promises abundant life, yet suffering has always existed. There is a tension in believing in the I AM whose identity is deliverance, but whose created world will never be rid of its taskmasters.
There are moments along the path of following Jesus when we are faced with this reality, and we say what the disciples did. “Forbid it, Lord! That must never happen.” Moments when we feel like the suffering that is so unthinkable is the worst thing imaginable, and therefore should never be allowed to happen if God is in charge. Moments we realize our faith might no longer be insulation from suffering, but necessary immunization to help us withstand the suffering we are about to encounter. But what Jesus tells us is we’re being too shortsighted when we think that the pain, the suffering, the grief, is the end of the story. You’re setting your sights on human things, not divine things.
But often, the Christian response to suffering offers one of two unhelpful ways:
On the one hand, it digs in and buries its head in the sand and simply blames the victim: “If you truly had enough faith, you wouldn’t be suffering this much. God would relieve your suffering. You must not be doing this faith thing quite right.”
Or, it simply resigns itself to the inevitability of suffering and our powerlessness to do anything about it, so try to focus on the positive in the midst of it. “Well, Jesus said we’d always have the poor with us, so suffering is just a part of life, but don’t worry, God loves you. Just remember God is love.”
Both of those paths are shallow. Both of these responses fail us. And neither is the way of Jesus.
The way of Jesus is the delicate dance of hope, resistance, and perseverance.
Hope in a better future yet unseen.
Resistance to atrophy, to simple resignation to suffering.
And perseverance in prayer, seeking justice, and demanding a more godly way of life. The courage to boldly proclaim that the suffering around us now is not God’s way.
To feel the horror at suffering and cry out, “Forbid it Lord” because we also look around us and are also emboldened to cry, “Forbid it, Mr. President. Forbid it, Senator. Forbid it, Mr. Mayor. Forbid it, Bishop. Forbid it, Your Honor. Forbid it, Mr. Chairman. This must never come to pass. It is too horrible.”
Certainly, God knows, there will always be suffering.
And the task of our faith is to trust in the hope of deliverance from it. Good will overcome evil. Resurrection will follow death. That is the Christian story. Not that God prevents suffering, but that God does not let suffering have the final word.
It’s the kind of hope that fueled labor organizers, fueled enslaved Africans seeking freedom against all odds, fueled my own ancestors as they lived through genocide, fuels movements today that refuse to let greedy economic systems or a few trillionaires have the last word.
It’s the hope Jesus lived. Because it’s who God is – the one who delivers. If anything, my friends, let us rest in that knowledge – and let it be our food for the days to come. And if our inner taskmaster stirs anything in us, let it be the choice to live in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. To not lag in zeal, be ardent in the spirit, and serve the Lord. To not be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil with good.
Amen.
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- Acts 2:1-21
- or Numbers 11:24-30
- 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13
- or Acts 2:1-21
- John 20:19-23
- or John 7:37-39
- Psalm 104:25-35, 37
So, the story of Pentecost: there they all are, gathered into one place, praying.
Why are they there? Because it’s a Jewish feast day, Pentecost, 50 days after
Passover, a day of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and the Jesus followers aren’t
really sure what else to do. Jesus has appeared over and over to them since his
crucifixion, apparently risen from the dead, and now somehow he’s not
appearing to them anymore, and, what are they supposed to do next? So they
come together, and they pray, because well, what else can they do? And
suddenly there is violent wind, and flames on their heads, and they all start
praising God and proclaiming the gospel in languages they didn’t think they
knew. It’s like they’re drunk. It’s like they’re crazy. It’s the birth of the church,
the beginning of the people that would carry on Jesus’ good news right on up
to our present day, and it’s all total chaos. And we’ve heard the story so many
times that we simply say, Thanks be to God, and sit quietly in our seats. Which
is why Mary Ellen thought it was time to get us taking part in the story, and
throwing accusations at each other about being filled with new wine.
And then there’s the other story, a quieter version of the same thing, the
disciples gathered together in fear with the doors locked, and the risen Jesus
shows up and breathes the Holy Spirit on them. Less chaos and drunkenness.
But the same Spirit.
There’s something to learn from these stories:
When you’re not sure what to do, get together and pray.
And when you do that, the Holy Spirit is bound to show up.
The Holy Spirit – what IS the Holy Spirit, anyway? The Advocate, the
Comforter, the Breath of God, the Life Force. The thing that gives us
goosebumps sometimes, that feeling of euphoria that comes upon us when we
least expect it; the gift of tears at a moment of grace. The force at work when
things fall together so easily and rightly, when we’re in the flow; the sense we
have when a Presence beyond our own seems to be there in our midst. The
Spirit of Truth, when for a moment the questions all fall away. The thing Jesus
promised when he left his disciples and ascended into heaven. God active in
the world, present in the church, moving among us for reconciliation and
forgiveness, igniting in us new life. Ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek, wind,
fire, breath.
The Holy Spirit is God beyond our theological systems. It’s not like we haven’t
tried to capture it, of course. Pneumatology, it’s called, the branch of theology
that tries to say just what the Holy Spirit is. The problem is, you can’t say a
whole lot about the Holy Spirit that makes sense. The Holy Spirit doesn’t make
logical sense. She’s more like God’s intuition. You just know; we just are
known. And, um, what else is there to say?
So we come together and we pray, because we don’t know what else to do.
And the Holy Spirit shows up. But when she does, things start changing. It’s
chaos and confusion and everyone is talking at once.
We call the Holy Spirit lots of things, but ‘Comforter’ is probably the most
misleading term we use. We hear that word and we think, down quilt. Cozy.
Nurturing. We’re always trying to make God be that for us. But the intent of
‘Comforter’ is more like strengthening, building up, giving fortitude. Fortitude
we need, because there’s something we have to do – something there before
us we have to face. As one writer put it, the Holy Spirit doesn’t come to solve
our problems…The Holy Spirit creates problems. There’s nothing swaddling
about the Holy Spirit. The disciples did what made sense to them in their
uncertainty, hanging out in their clubhouse, their upper room where Jesus had
been before, praying and sticking together. They could have stayed there and
been safe and lived out their days. But the Holy Spirit came and blew them out
of there, gave them different languages to speak and different missions and
sent them out, some going here, some going there, most of them, it seems,
heading off to places they’d never been before. Out to danger and difficulty
and, for many of them, martyrdom, suffering and death. No more status quo.
No going back to the life they had before Jesus came along.
So yes: when the Spirit shows up, she may throw us into chaos and confusion.
It may not feel as sweet as our hymn makes it sound. God is always pulling us
out into what is bigger than us – God is always breaking us open in order to
widen the circle. The Spirit at Pentecost wanted the disciples to spread the
word – to communicate with people they hadn’t known before, and bring
others to God. And so they starting speaking all these different languages, so
that people could hear and understand, and as the story goes on to say, some
3000 of those who heard them were baptized and joined the movement. The
circle widened, far beyond what the disciples could imagine. And so it
continues to this day.
We gather and pray here at church, because what else are we going to do? The
world is hard and confusing, our lives have traumas and tragedies in them, we
are lost and lonely and we need other people and sometimes we’re really at
the end of our rope. So we pray. And sometimes the Holy Spirit comes too.
And she doesn’t say, you just stay right here where it’s safe with all these nice
people. She doesn’t say, just talk to each other about the things you have in
common. She pushes us to go out. She brings us other people who need to
hear about God through us. Different people, different places, who knows
where we’re going and what’s coming next. It’s a challenging path we’re
walking – the Spirit gives us the strength and courage to walk it.
This shouldn’t be news to us. The Spirit’s work is there to be seen in every one
of our stories. Have you ever spent time really looking back at your life? I’ve
led and been part of so many retreats and gatherings where we’re asked to go
back and reflect on things past, to draw a spiritual timeline so we can see our
lives visually, to reread our old journals or listen to stories of those who knew
us when, to revisit places we once knew, to write it all out like a story. If
you’ve never done this, consider it your summer project. It’s work worth
doing, whether you’re 15 or 85, especially as we come out of COVID and
remember that we did have a life before 2020 and it might just connect to who
we are now after all. Do this with the lens of faith, asking God to highlight
things and bring them to your attention. And you start to see: There was a
time when I didn’t know what to do. There was a time when I prayed, or did
the equivalent of praying. There’s a time when I was so confused and the rug
was pulled out from under me and everything I thought I could count on in my
life was taken away. And there was a time when something new started
instead, or when I felt the sweetness of life despite it all, or when I got good
news when I expected the worst. And oh, look, that happened over and over
and over again. I wonder if it might happen again, even though I’m struggling
now. I wonder if I might be headed someplace new. I wonder just what God
might be up to with me now.
If you’re like me, you can forget the story all too often. What’s happening now
seems more total and final than anything that happened before. What’s coming
next seems like things can never change. We have to go back and look – we
have to reread and retell our stories – inviting God to join us in the process,
sitting with Jesus at the kitchen table and spreading it all out to look at – we
see, even in a life full of tragedies, the sweetness of joy; in a life of routine and
duty, the unexpected chaos of the new; in a life of isolation, the strange voices
of other languages calling. Pentecost happens to us. Over and over again. In
each of our lives. In the life of our church. In the life of our world. The Spirit is
always arriving with her unanticipated hope.
When you don’t know what to do next, get together with other people and
pray.
The Holy Spirit is bound to show up.
When she does, she may throw things into chaos and confusion.
But the new possibilities that emerge? They’re bigger than us. And they
happen so that we, and the whole world, may know God and make God
known.
So don’t be afraid. Just breathe. And let’s see what comes next. Amen.
The post May 28, 2023 – Rev. Katharine Flexor appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
- Acts 1:6-14
- 1 Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11
- John 17:1-11
- Psalm 68:1-10, 33-36 The post May 21, 2023 – Fr Jonathan Kester, Vicar of St. Peter’s Eaton Square appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
- Acts 17:22-31
- 1 Peter 3:13-22
- John 14:15-21
- Psalm 66:7-18 The post May 14, 2023 – Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
When the environmentalist and writer John Muir came to California in 1868, the first place he went was Yosemite. He loved it enough that he returned for an
entire season to work as a shepherd, taking a large flock of sheep up into the
mountains, seeking out good pasture as the snow melted higher and higher up. It was a chance to get into the high country for a whole summer…but Muir hated being with the sheep, which he referred to as ‘hoofed locusts.’ Later he made a point of showing people what sheep could do to a pristine alpine meadow, which helped lead to the designation of Yosemite as a national park – where sheep, and all livestock, were not allowed. As for being a shepherd, although he thought that they fared pretty well in his native Scotland, he wrote that ‘the California shepherd, as far as I’ve seen or heard, is never quite sane for any considerable time.’ It was not a job he was eager to take again.
Today is Good Shepherd Sunday, and we heard in our gospel passage about Jesus as the good shepherd. We’re also today celebrating new members who have joined our community over the last year or so. So, welcome to the sheepfold, everyone! It has long been pointed out that the metaphor of Jesus as the good shepherd and us as the sheep is hardly a flattering image for us – stupid animals that eat what is not good for them and wander off into danger, getting themselves into precarious, life-threatening situations. I suppose as an image for humans, I can see certain parallels. But I hope that Jesus thinks of us as more than hoofed locusts – though perhaps it’s true that our behavior does drive God nuts.
All the same, the image of the good shepherd is compelling, and has been so for
centuries. The very earliest depictions of Jesus in the catacombs, in fact, are as
the good shepherd – linking him to the shepherd king David and to earlier
scriptures of God as shepherd of our souls (like in Psalm 23). There are churches named for the Good Shepherd, and thousands of stained-glass windows with that theme. It’s popular especially in pictures and books for children, and with good reason. For all the times that I feel lost or weary or uncertain, the idea that God will guide me, feed me, and hold me tight is deeply comforting. It is no wonder that Psalm 23 is many people’s favorite passage of scripture. When we are in need of reassurance, we want to trust that God is in charge. We are safe no matter what comes. God will protect us from harm.
We’ve heard something like this before. But here’s something different about the reading we just heard from John. Today we heard the part that comes before the line where Jesus says, I am the good shepherd. In this passage, Jesus begins with ‘I am the gate.’ The shepherd comes in through the gate and the sheep hear his voice and follow him out of the fold, following him because they know his voice. When they go out following the shepherd, they find pasture. Jesus is somehow both the gate and the shepherd in this image – probably best not to press it too hard for clarity. But Jesus doesn’t say, you’ll note, that the shepherd leads his sheep into the safe fold of the sheep pen. Nor does Jesus say that he is the sheepfold – instead, he is the gate. He’s the way in and out, not the surrounding pen of safety. And he is the shepherd, who comes to the fold and leads the sheep out of the pen. In going out of the fold, following the shepherd, the sheep – us – have life abundant.
There’s been some writing about how the COVID shutdowns changed us, and
particularly how they changed things for our kids. When the world shut down, we stayed in, if we had the privilege of doing so, and so for some of us, family time became more meaningful. Whoever we included in our ‘pandemic pod’ were our people, our close ones; the rest of the world we encountered at several feet of distance, mostly online. So we lost a great deal of community of those people we hadn’t known we knew, the neighbors and store owners, the dog park people, the other preschool parents, the people who sit in different pews from us at church. No surprise that now psychologists realize that all of those so-called ‘weak ties’ matter a lot to our sense of wellbeing and happiness. Small talk and friendly smiles go further than we realize. Without all of that, the world started to feel alien and a bit frightening, full of idiots who vote differently from us or crazy violent criminals or vectors of disease. For our kids especially, but really for quite a lot of us, that state of mind has been hard to shake off and leave behind. Go out of the sheepfold? No thanks. We can see it all from here, and it’s not pretty.
But the thing is, staying in the fold isn’t so great. There’s not much to eat in the
sheepfold. Actually, there’s nothing to eat – there’s nothing to truly nourish us
and give us life. We might feel safe, but in that safety we stop living so well. We
start picking at each other, because there’s not enough to go around. We get
bored and restless. We get caught up in things that actually don’t matter very
much. Think of the pictures you’ve seen of chickens in factory farms – safe in their cages, but it’s a horrible life.
But Jesus says he is the gate, the way in and out. Jesus is the shepherd who comes to lead us out. Not to keep us here, but to take us out there, to feed us.
In our loud, dusty, amazing construction project here, we are doing a lot of work on the gates of our sheepfold, on opening our doors wide and making the way in welcoming and accessible for everybody. Once this is all done we are going to have a truly beautiful flow to these two buildings, new ways to come in and out, new spaces to gather and linger in, new possibilities on our upper floors that everyone will get to enjoy. It feels like the next iteration of the longtime mission of St Michael’s, to be a community center and hub to everyone in the neighborhood. But of course, as beautiful as this sheepfold is, and as graceful and accessible as we make the gates, our real mission isn’t about sitting inside and waiting for the world to come in. It is in going back out to the world, renewed and restored for another few days of mission and ministry in our daily life and work. Doors open wide both ways, not just in.
That’s the case for us in our lives too. God’s invitation is to step out in trust, not to stay in where it’s safe. Going out of our comfort zones, stepping out of our well-worn routines, the way we’ve always done things. Letting go of our assumptions about who people are or the way things have to be. It’s not just a post-COVID thing. It always feels risky to follow where God leads, into new places and unknown territory. Sometimes it even means going a separate way from where the flock is headed…particularly if they’re all looking at their phones as they go.
But there’s sure a lot more to see outside the sheepfold. It’s way more interesting than staying put. It’s scarier, yes. And maybe there’s the chance that we’ll mistake Jesus’ voice, that we’ll listen to the wrong voices and go blindly off in the wrong directions. But as Jesus points out, the sheep know the shepherd’s voice. The shepherd calls his sheep by name and leads them out, going ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. The sheep, even the stupid sheep, recognize the voice of the one who cares for them and has their welfare at heart – they’ve spent time with that shepherd, they remember that he has given them good pasture before, that they have been safe with him.
What we do here in church together, what we do in our spiritual disciplines of
prayer and scripture and holy conversation, is to learn that voice, to learn to
recognize the shepherd’s ways. So when we come to times that feel scary or risky or uncertain, we know what to listen for. We can look back at where God has led us, reminding each other of the stories of nourishing love and care in scripture and in our own lives and in the lives of others we know. We can listen to where God has carried this community through its generations of mission in a challenging world. And so we can recognize the new thing that God is doing in our lives, even we least expect it.
God wants us fed. Jesus wants for us life abundant. That’s way more than getting by in the same old same old. That’s new life, new hope, new possibilities. May we faithfully come in and go out, following where he leads. Amen.
The post April 30, 2023 – Rev. Katharine Flexer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
- Acts 2:14a,36-41
- 1 Peter 1:17-23
- Luke 24:13-35
- Psalm 116:1-3, 10-17 The post April 23, 2023 – Rev. Sam Owen appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
- Isaiah 49:1-7
- 1 Corinthians 1:18-31
- John 12:20-36
- Psalm 71:1-14
Collet for Tuesday in Holy Week
O God, by the passion of your blessed Son you made an instrument of shameful death to be for us the means of life: Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
—
Good evening St. Michaels,
So good to see you all on the Tuesday of Holy Week, a day that tends to be overlooked by many Christians. With so much going on this week, this day can feel like a break between Palm Sunday and the rather heavy emotions we’ll all go through this coming weekend. To do so, however, would be to miss an important aspect of the story that connects the triumphal entry into Jerusalem with the coming Passion–namely, that Jesus knew what was to come and he accepted what today’s Collect refers to as the ability to “gladly suffer shame.”
Gladly suffer shame? That’s not something I’d be eager to sign up for. Is that what we are called to do? In short answer, yes. But what I would like to discuss is why and how we can do so tonight.
Jesus admits in the gospel today that his soul is troubled. He knows that his hour has finally come. Throughout the Gospel of John to this point, he has repeatedly pointed out that his hour had not yet come. But now it has and he has to deal with everything that entails. The knowledge of his coming betrayal and death, the hardship and the drastic changes that will follow, and the pain that his passing will cause to those who follow and love him. And yet, he doesn’t succumb to depression, nor does he try to escape. His soul is troubled. But as he says to Andrew and Philip and to all people around him, the hour has come for him to be glorified, and to be lifted up, and through this for God’s name to be glorified. Jesus knows what must happen for God’s glory.
For us, this might be a harder task. We often face troubles in our lives. We may feel as though we are suffering, or even suffering shame. Do we accept it gladly? Probably not. We may at times feel that we do not have the same assurances that Jesus did. We may feel like there’s no point to our suffering and no hope for a better future. In my own life, I didn’t give birth to my son Ian until I was 40 years old. My husband Paul and I spent years trying with no success and it was painful and even shameful to feel, for lack of a better word, barren. But we got through it together, with the support of others. I did IVF, went through some complicated medical conditions. Now, for us, Ian is the living sign that I could suffer gladly. What in your life sometimes makes you feel like you are suffering shame? Do we give up? Do we succumb to depression?
According to Jesus, we absolutely should not. Yes, this is a troubling time for him. Yes it is. What Jesus highlights is that these troubled times are not the end. That’s the mystery of faith we have proclaimed. Christ has died, Christ has risen and Christ will come again. We have been all lifted up like Jesus on the cross. We will all be lifted up someday, like resurrected Jesus, full of life, after we pass through the troubles and tribulations. Like the grain of wheat, we will die, but we can also bear much fruit with how we live our lives. We can gladly suffer cross for life, because our Jesus Christ suffers for life with us and for us.
Now, that’s a lot easier to preach than to practice. Let us acknowledge the suffering. Let us accept it and know that we all suffer one way or another. It’s a lot easier to say it will pass when it’s not your own. Acknowledging our own and other people’s suffering is hard work. And it requires faith to see the light at the end of the tunnel. That’s where our faith comes in. We just might not be able to do it alone.
Look around you. The people here at St. Michaels are the ones who help us sit with suffering when the world is dark. They help us believe by sitting with darkness and suffering, believing that we are children of the light. They help us believe that it is worth suffering gladly for the sake of life.
One of my favorite authors, geochemist Hope Jahren, once wrote in her book, Lab Girl.
Quote “Something so hard can be so easy if you just have a little help. In the right place, under the right conditions, you can finally stretch out into what you’re supposed to be. After scientists broke open the coat of a lotus seed and coddled the embryo into growth, they kept the empty husk. When they radiocarbon-dated this discarded outer shell, they discovered that their seedling had been waiting for them within a peat bog in China for no less than two thousand years. This tiny seed had stubbornly kept up the hope of its own future while entire human civilizations rose and fell. And then one day this little plant’s yearning finally burst forth within a laboratory. I wonder where it is right now. Each beginning is the end of a waiting. We are each given exactly one chance to be. Each of us is both impossible and inevitable. Every replete tree was first a seed that waited.” End Quote.
For two thousand years, a tiny lotus seed stubbornly kept up the hope. The right place, the right time has not come yet. During the winter, the tree waited faithfully to be blooming. Every time we reach out for hands to pray together, we could be like scientists broke open the coat of a lotus seed and coddled the embryo into growth. So I want to thank everyone here, for all that you do, known and unknown, that being present with others when they are suffering. Whether you know it or not, you make the promise of Holy Week real for us all.
On this Tuesday of Holy Week, Let us walk to the cross of our savior together. It is too soon to see Easter on Holy Tuesday. Yet with all the confidence of Easter, let us sing like psalmist once again so that “we will hope continually and will praise God yet more and more.”(ps. 71:14) Grant us so to glory in the cross of Christ, that we may gladly suffer shame and loss for the sake of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
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- Acts 2:14a,22-32
- 1 Peter 1:3-9
- John 20:19-31
- Psalm 16
What a story we are presented here, in the wake of Jesus’ resurrection!
Before we go into the passage for today, I want to set the scene: Jesus has returned from death and conquered the grave. Before our passage today, he appears to Mary Magdalene, who does not recognize him, but then greets him with an emotional and warm embrace. Jesus, though he has not been “doubted,” has already been deemed unrecognizable by one of his closest followers, but then accepted and celebrated profoundly.
Now, today, we read Jesus’ next move: he goes to the disciples, who have locked their doors. The disciples are hiding in fear of what John calls “the Jews.”
That’s Loaded Language in our era. We see the reality of violence in this translation. Thinking back, when Jesus was arrested, all the disciples fled: they ran away from the site of Jesus’ death. John and Peter followed the arresting mob at a distance, and John was at the foot of the cross when Jesus was executed. Other than John’s presence, Jesus’ closest followers have
been in hiding since His capture. John, as we have discussed throughout Lent and Holy Week, again uses the term “the Jews” in reference to the religious leaders of Jerusalem and their loyal adherents. It would be reasonable for the disciples to assume that if Jesus’ enemies could have Him killed, they might well be looking to get rid of His students, as well. So, they are hiding from the leaders of this time, in fear that their Messiah has been executed and is nowhere to be found. The “Jews” in this story are religious and political leaders.
As Jesus approaches these doors to find the disciples, we don’t know if it’s a dramatic Hollywood style gesture with extra joy, suspense, or flair, or a simple gesture after knocking on the first door he knew held the disciples. But, Jesus says something that feels entirely Jesus-y given his behavior prior to his death. He simply says, “Peace be with you.”
This language is familiar to us, brought in from our Gospels. Anyone recognize it? Though some of us use a hand gesture – it’s our language of the passing of the peace. How often do we exchange the passing of the peace with these very same words, without even thinking? Some Sundays, the passing of the peace is a beautiful and vibrant experience, where the congregation walk across aisles and spend moments catching up and sharing joy. At other times, I’ve seen it look more muted, hesitant, or demure. In my own experience, I recall a month
spent in Copenhagen, feeling lonely and down on myself. I sought out the local Anglican Church for a sense of familiarity. I wasn’t greeted as I entered, and as I overheard some conversations I recognized that I was mostly amongst British expatriates. As the time came and the peace was exchanged, I received some small greetings of hello – maybe one tight smile – at an untrustworthy distance.
I attributed this encounter to the cultural knowledge that Americans are seen by the rest of the world as overly friendly, but I also sensed a conditional agreement that’s required to be part of a community, to be part of the “in crowd.” I felt the distance between myself and these other people, or even between each person worshiping, with a skepticism I didn’t know how to break
through. It made me wonder: was I enough to be there?
Yet, in John’s Gospel, Jesus invites the disciples into unity with him, and among themselves. Jesus also goes on to say to the disciples: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And even further, Jesus breathes – he breathes – on them, and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” We benefit from calling it what it is: the Pentecost event in John’s gospel. This is the Holy Spirit’s arrival
and presence, which comes with peace and power. Jesus is sending the disciples out to greet, engage, and connect with their communities and all believers.
We know Jesus saw and embraced people in a myriad of ways, and most often that didn’t include long introductions or a disclaimer on who they are. Sure, they were sometimes provided to him, but that never mattered–Jesus embraced and connected with everyone with a fondness and a
charge inspired by God. Jesus embraced people without suspicion, but the grace of presence and community is freely bestowed upon us by and through Him.
Jesus does this too. Jesus has called himself a stranger in his sermons and stories. As a stranger, who was welcomed. That strangerliness, for lack of a better word, and welcome is a crucial path to the household of God.
How often do we feel like an outsider or an outcast in our own schools, our workplaces, our neighborhoods, our friend groups? How often do we feel a bit awkward and uncomfortable at that random party or social gathering where we’re invited to as a plus one, where we’re eyed with suspicion?
In lucky moments and Jesus-like environments, we’re embraced as part of the crowd, without any condition. We get to play the party games or go on field trips with bonding opportunities where there’s an equal framework. Someone might invite us into a conversation by asking our perspective on the topic, and we join in on the fun. Maybe we’re a newcomer at church, and
we’re warmly welcomed by a greeter at the back or, hmmm, during an exchange of a “Peace be with you!”?
These moments of welcome, of peace, and of unconditional grace must be part of our invitation to our neighbors, just as Jesus has instructed us. We must give as we have been received. What can we do to welcome and embrace?
Further, and best of all, when the disciples have been blessed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, Jesus says, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”
As Rev. Cyndi Banks has said in her own sermon on this story, when Jesus talks about forgiving in this passage, the word Jesus is using emphasizes a release, to let go, to keep no longer. And when Jesus talks about retaining, the word means to hold fast, not to let go, or to continue to hold.
It’s a deathgrip—it literally means “of death continuing to hold”—it’s the death that won’t let go. Jesus wants us to forgive, to embrace, to be connected to one another. He instructs the disciples to acknowledge the forgiveness of sins in those they encounter. To let go, as they ask for forgiveness and are forgiven. To hold onto them tightly, with a grip only known by those who have gone before. To hold fast, but to do that forgiving, too.
This is it. This is our call, too. This is our work.
Yet, welcoming is hard. Forgiving is even harder. We know that. We see it in our own lives. It’s difficult to welcome the stranger and absolve the people who are sorry, who are seeking forgiveness for themselves from a place we can never be certain is genuine or is real. It would be unfair of us to say that Jesus hadn’t been prepared for that, and that God prepares that within and for us.
Knowing how difficult belief is, how hard it is to welcome and to absolve, we can better read the story of Thomas. How he wasn’t there, and he touches the marks of the nails in Jesus’ hands, and touches the wound in Jesus’ side. So when Jesus says to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see
my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe,” only then does
Thomas declare: “My Lord and my God!”
Thomas believes because Jesus has shown him.
Jesus then goes on to say: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” Yes, belief comes out of a mystery, often times, but Jesus is not admonishing Thomas. Jesus knows that belief is hard, that an unconditional trust and
absolution does not come naturally or easily. He knows because, even after he has told the disciples what was to come, even after the prophecies were fulfilled, they still needed to see him, to hear his voice, and to receive the message of peace he brought to them.
And John knows, because he tells us why he’s written these stories – to share them, so we might believe, too.
Belief comes in many forms in our gospel stories, but this example shows how Jesus led Thomas into deeper belief with a sacred act. That Jesus understood how Thomas needed this moment of intimate evidence to understand Jesus’ pain, death, and resurrection that much more profoundly. What if, then, we are Thomas, and what if Jesus is asking us to touch the wounds of our trans
siblings, of our siblings of color, of our siblings on the Border, of our siblings in poverty and in distress? What if deeper belief comes from seeing the harms and the deaths of their struggles as the marks of his nails, to know that when we encounter their wounds, we’re touching Jesus’ very own?
I visited El Paso and Chihuahua with my classmates last month for a week-long trip of this very nature, of knowing and understanding. We went to talk with Border Patrol, nonprofit organizations, and local clergy about their experiences on the Border. On our first full day there, we spent our time welcoming and assisting recently arrived migrants coordinate their travel from El Paso to their destinations. We heard, anecdotally, the trials they endured. The heat they
experienced, the things they left behind, the bodies they saw along the way. To know their pain, to see for ourselves, to touch their wounds taught us that much more about the realities of what is happening along the Border.
I read every day about the legislation targeting trans youth and adults, with the most recent legislation in Missouri working to effectively ban all care. I talk with my friends about the fear and anxiety of knowing the resistance to the person they’re becoming is ever present despite, as Daniel Lavery once said: their existence is like “wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine – God
made it so that humanity might share in the act of creation.”
In learning these stories, in knowing their pain, in seeing the nails in their hands, I might better know how to embrace them in their suffering.
Likewise, as these people have blossomed into being, I might know the resurrection and new life.
Of the new life of a new country, return to family, a new language and culture interwoven with one’s own and informed by one’s experience. Of the new life of transition, namings, and chosen family.
In these, and in all examples, we must remember our Biblical duty: to read and engage with the work of justice and of the power of peace. Like Thomas, we must not shy away. Like the disciples, we must unlock our locked doors and see our Lord face to face. We must work to proclaim peace through the love and community we are given by God. Only then, might we partake in the joy of the resurrected life.
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Genesis 1:1-2:4a [The Story of Creation]
Genesis 22:1-18 [Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac]
Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21 [Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea]
Ezekiel 36:24-28 [A new heart and a new spirit]
Matthew 28:1-10
The post April 8, 2023 – Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
- Acts 10:34-43
- or Jeremiah 31:1-6
- Colossians 3:1-4
- or Acts 10:34-43
- John 20:1-18
- or Matthew 28:1-10
- Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24
I heard an interview the other day with the actor and writer Brett Goldstein, of ‘Ted Lasso’ fame, where he described a service that he attended, something like a funeral, I’m guessing, that was deeply moving and solemn and sad. He was sitting toward the back of the church, and behind him, a woman came in to begin setting up for the reception. As the congregation leaned forward to absorb the sad stories they were hearing and the loss they were mourning, the woman wheeled in a tea cart with one loudly squeaking wheel, rattling with stacked china as she rolled it slowly along. Reaching her destination, and obviously trying to be quiet, she began clattering cups down on the table stack after stack, clearly trying her utmost not to disturb anyone but persistently going about her setting up for long excruciating minutes, totally distracting everyone in the service. The ridiculous humor of this struck him, Goldstein said, and he realized, ‘This is life…I’m literally in the middle of this powerful, beautiful, profound thing in front of me, and behind me, this ridiculous, mundane thing of a woman trying to stack some cups quietly… I was like, this is it. This is all of it in one moment.’
And here we are today, on Easter Sunday – having all of it in such a moment. It is a powerful, beautiful, profound thing that we are celebrating today, this joyful Eastertide, this glory of life breaking through where once there was death. And it is messy and ridiculous and mundane too, all at the same time. Our buildings are under construction and there is dust everywhere, even though we’ve tried to clean this place up for you all. We are a big group of all kinds of people and some of us might have a harder time sitting still and being reverent, which is wonderful, because there’s an egg hunt after the service. We’ll probably sing a difficult hymn you don’t know so well, and someone’s voice will crack, and the sermon will go on too long. And then we will leave this service and maybe we’ll have brunch or something, and we’ll take off our fancy clothes, and it will be back to the same old same old. And yet today, of all days, we act like this is the best party we’ve ever been to, with the very best news we’ve ever heard, the unbelievable idea that life conquers death. How can we dare believe it?
Mary and Peter and John the disciples might have been tempted to disbelieve too. Just a few days before, they had seen their friend and teacher crucified, a slow, painful, shameful death on the cross. His body had been laid in the tomb. It was over, and all the hope they had had for new possibilities was over too. They were back to the same old, same old. When Mary encountered that gardener outside the tomb, she could have turned away, not trusting that he was Jesus. When Peter and the other disciple saw the empty tomb, they could have simply gone back home, confused but none the wiser. They all could have decided, no, this is impossible. We saw him killed. We know how this goes. To pretend otherwise is just a fairy tale.
But something made them believe. Somehow in that empty place of death they found life. And they believed it. And their believing it is why we are here today.
One of the anthems in our Prayer Book burial office begins, ‘In the midst of life we are in death.’ It’s a prayer attributed, get this, to a Crusader battle song written in the year 912 by a monk named Notker the Stammerer – don’t you just love church history? You can’t make this stuff up. ‘In the midst of life we are in death.’
The prayer goes on, ‘From whom can we seek help? From you alone, O Lord, who by our sins are justly angered.’ The prayer was considered so powerful that 500 years later a group of nuns threatened with the reform of their order chanted the prayer in protest, prostrate on the floor – and temporarily scared off the reformers, who feared it was a curse. Media vita in morte sumus. In the midst of life, we are in death. It is an anthem at burial, but it is also the anthem sung at the Holy Saturday service, when the church hangs in the waiting time, the nothing time, quiet in the tomb. Life leads to death, inexorably. Suffering and loss are inevitable. None of us can escape it.
But today, the tomb is empty. And the power of that chanted prayer is that the reverse of it is also true: in the midst of death, we are in life. That’s not a curse at all. It’s a promise. And a statement of faith. Of faith that has carried God’s people through thousands of years: as the prophet Jeremiah said so long ago, God loves us with an everlasting love. (Jer. 31:3)
When we sing glorious music with trumpets and brass and we put flowers to cover the ugliness of the cross and we’re here in the beautiful church with all these people, it can all feel plausible. We are, I think, wired more to hope for good news than to believe the bad. It’s why we love our happy endings, why we find it possible to laugh even in the hardest moments of life. We can learn to be cynical pessimists, but I think that we still hold a germ of hope despite ourselves, especially on a beautiful spring morning when there are flowers in the air.
But how do we believe it when we go back out into the world of suffering and pain? How does this day make any difference in our lives? There was a film made a few years ago called ‘Free Solo.’ It’s the documentary chronicling Alex Honnold’s climb of El Capitan in Yosemite, the 3000-something foot cliff that looms over Yosemite Valley. Alex Honnold famously climbed all 3000 feet of it without any rope, by himself – that’s what it means to free solo. It is an excruciating film to watch, because even though your brain reminds you that of course he makes it because otherwise you wouldn’t be watching this, seeing him dangle from his fingertips from a granite face thousands of feet in the air is, well, sickening. I’m not even that afraid of heights, but oh my goodness. If you’ve ever done any climbing yourself, you can feel in your body just how risky it is.
When I tried mountaineering many years ago, crossing glacier slopes with crevasses you can fall into, I was perfectly content to be in the middle of the rope team, with two strong, skilled guys on either side of me. Yes, I still had to do my own part and not pull everyone down, but the rope, and their skill, was what kept me safe. The idea of going out on my own with no rope, trusting in my fingertips – that just feels frankly insane.
Alex Honnold acknowledged as much. But, he said, ‘The casual observer might think free soloing is all crazy and reckless…’ An MRI showed that Honnold’s brain does not experience fear like other people, leading people to think, ‘“There’s something unique about his brain.”’ Honnold said, ‘I find that slightly irritating, because I’ve spent 25 years conditioning myself to work in extreme conditions, so of course my brain is different—just as the brain of a monk who has spent years meditating…would be different.’
So the brain can be trained to climb thousands of feet in the air without any safeguards. What sounds impossible to us to imagine becomes possible when we train ourselves to it. Our brains can change. We can learn to trust what seems untrustable. Just look around at some of the elders in this church here today. There are people right here in this room who have learned the long lesson that God is faithful – that God makes a way out of no way, as Dr King said. They know it because they’ve experienced it over long time. That’s one of the many, many benefits of being part of a church community, that we get to do life with experts.
But we don’t get to be experts immediately. Even Alex Honnold had to start as a beginner, with a rope and strong partners to help him. He had to practice, and fail, and learn, before he became the climber he is. Just like no one can meditate the first time they sit down to try it. Just like we find it hard to trust this news of resurrection and love when we first come to it – or when we come to it again after trauma and grief. We need a community of other climbers to learn with; we need routes to follow that others have accomplished; we need that rope of commitment to hold us when we fall.
The disciples could have quite reasonably turned away in that garden and gone back home, chalking the whole vision up to fear and trauma. But they had spent time in in-depth training with Jesus, witnessing his healing, feeling his love, hearing his teaching. They had the promise and witness of generations before them that God’s love delivers people out of enslavement and fear and desperation, into the promised land of freedom and joy. And they had one another, the community that Jesus assembled for just this very purpose, so they would have each other when he was gone. And so they were able to claim the radical good news, the unbelievable news, that their Jesus was risen from the dead. And their lives were forever changed because of it.
So if today you’re here and you’re not so sure what this all means and whether you can trust Easter to be real, it’s ok. Life truly is hard. And it’s terrifying sometimes to step out and try to see otherwise. But you are not alone. These people all sitting around you, they’re your community. Some of them are beginners too; some of them are total experts. And every one of us has fallen and been wounded along the way. And whether we trust it or not, whether we feel it or not, God is there, always there, ready to catch and to heal us – to turn our suffering into dancing and our mourning into joy, just when we least expect it. God loves us with an everlasting love. And we can rejoice and be glad in that.
Happy Easter.
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Maundy Thursday
- Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14
- 1 Corinthians 11:23-26
- John 13:1-17, 31b-35
- Psalm 116:1, 10-17
“By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”
Good evening. I am a fortunate one indeed.
I get to preach about feet. Journey worn feet; filthy, tired feet that need to be washed before dinner. Where do I begin, with a basin of water, towels to dry, perfume to scent, or wishing aloud that ancient times had spas where people could be sent?
Just another manic Maundy!
Tonight, on Maundy Thursday, our mandate is more than the superficiality of the act, our mandate is to love. Less a mandate, I suppose, more a gift of grace given, to those of us who yearn to follow Christ more deeply.
As we consider this Gospel scene, let me instead begin by talking about love, /beautiful words of love from the poet Kahlil Gibran, /words as pleasing as a scent of incense rising.
“Speak to us of Love.
And he raised his head and looked upon
the people, and there fell a stillness upon
them.
And with a great voice he said:
When love beckons to you… follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you… yield to
him,
And when he speaks to you… believe in
Him.”
Tonight, love beckons…
We are asked to do as he has done. To wash the feet of the world. There are no feet excluded from love. Even Judas’ feet were washed.
As part of our hospital end of life training for nurses, my supervisor and I offer a presentation on cultural humility and spiritual sensitivity. We show a video entitled “If the World was a Village of 100 People.” Through it we understand the needs of the world on a micro level. Our society has become mutually inter-twined and inter-dependent. We are global citizens.
If the world was a village of 100 people:
- 61 would be Asians, 12 Europeans, 8 North Americans, 5 South Americans and Caribbeans, 13 Africans, and 1 from Oceania.
- Out of 50 men and woman, 1 would be nonbinary
- 47 would live in an urban area
- 9 would be disabled
- 33 would be Christian
- 18 Muslim
- 14 Hindu
- 6 Buddhist
- 13 Other
- 16 non-religious
- 43 would live without basic sanitation
- 18 without improved water source
- 6 people would own 59% of the wealth
- 14 can’t read
- 7 are educated at the secondary level
- 12 have a computer
- 3 have Internet
- 1 adult between 15-49 is positive with HIV or has AIDS
- The Village spends more than 1.2 trillion on military expenditures
- Only 1 billion on developmental aid
- If you have food in a refrigerator, keep clothes in a closet, have a bed to sleep in and a roof over your head, you are richer than 75% of the population.
- If you have a bank account, you are one of the 30 wealthiest people.
- 18 struggle to live on $1 per day, 53 struggle to live on $2 per day
Think of all the feet that walk the paths of our global community, who pass through our lives in a day, a month, a year, a lifetime. Many of whom we don’t know, don’t notice, or have no idea how they are living.
So many feet, young and old, tired, lost, angry, hurt, broken, /have we noticed, /have we washed them /have we received them like Christ?
What have we done to care for those feet? What will we do for them? Ignore them, step on them, be repulsed by them?
Whose feet might we be asked to wash? Feet that have walked through the muck of life. Feet of different hues, feet that walk a privileged path like mine fresh with my Maundy Thursday Pedicure?
Truth is we all need to be willing to wash and to be washed, /the action, and the metaphor for serving like Christ served, /for loving like Christ loved.
In this evening’s Gospel, Jesus teaches us that every relationship must be a whole-hearted love relationship, / offering abundant love to all, /especially to the most vulnerable. He gifts us with the Eucharist to nourish this community mission to love.
Nourished by the sacrament, powered by the mystery of the metaphor of washing the feet of others, we move from being spectators or re-enactors of Jesus’ life, to being engaged in Jesus’ ministry, servants ministering to God’s beloved people.
Sometimes “washing the feet of others” is more daunting than we realize. Yet, when we separate ourselves from washing the feet of others, either knowingly or unknowingly, we reject the heritage bequeathed to us this night, Jesus’ mandate, forgive me, gift to love one another.
Too often though we are blinded, we fail to see who journeys with us.
There is a French Fable:
One night a cobbler dreamed that Jesus was coming to visit him. The dream seemed so real that he got up very early the next morning and hurried to the woods where he gathered greens to decorate his shop for the arrival of such a great guest.
He waited all morning, but to his disappointment, his shop remained quiet, except for an old man who limped up to the door asking to come in for some warmth. While the man was resting the cobbler noticed the old fellow’s shoes were worn. Touched he took a new pair down from the shelves and saw to it that the stranger was wearing them as he went on his way.
Throughout the afternoon the cobbler waited, but his only visitor was an elderly woman. He had seen her struggling under a heavy load of firewood, and he invited her into his shop. He saw to it that she had a nourishing meal before she went on her way.
As night began to fall, the cobbler heard a child crying outside his door. The child was lost and afraid. The cobbler went out, soothed the youngster’s tears and with the little hand in his, took the child home.
These three guests, not unlike the worn shoes we see as our Saturday Kitchen guests wait on our food line, on the faces of those in war torn places like Ukraine where they struggle under the heaviness of war, in the tears of our children as they feel unsafe in school, or struggle to make America a new home with their families.
When he returned the cobbler was sad. He was convinced that he had been away and missed the visit of his Lord.
In his anguish, the cobbler cried out – “Why is it Lord that Your feet delay? Have you forgotten that this was YOUR day? Then, soft in the silence he heard a gentle voice, “Lift up your heart for I kept my word.
Three times I came to your welcoming door; three times my shadow was on your floor.
I was the man with the bruised feet.
I was the woman you fed.
I was the child on the street.”
Ah yes, “Speak to us of Love.
And he raised his head and looked upon
the people, and there fell a stillness upon
them.
And with a great voice he said:
When love beckons to you… follow him,
(Though his ways are hard and steep.)
And when his wings enfold you… yield to
him,
And when he speaks to you… believe in
Him.”
Tonight, as we end this service, as the altar is stripped, and the lights are dimmed, we go deeper into the dark place of emptiness.
In the stillness, love beckons us to be light.
“By this everyone will know that we are disciples, if we have love for one another.”
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Fifth Sunday in Lent
- Ezekiel 37:1-14
- Romans 8:6-11
- John 11:1-45
- Psalm 130
There is a [Southwestern] desert legend about an old woman called La Loba, or the Wolf Woman.
The sole work of La Loba is the collecting of bones. She is known to collect and preserve especially that which is in danger of being lost to the world. Her cave is filled with the bones of all manner of desert creatures: the deer, the rattlesnake, the crow. But her specialty is said to be wolves. She creeps and crawls and sifts through the mountains and dry riverbeds, looking for wolf bones, and when she has assembled an entire skeleton, when the last bone is in place and the beautiful white sculpture of the creature is laid out before her, she sits by the fire and thinks about what song she will sing. And when she is sure, she stands over the creature, raises her arms over it, and sings out. That is when the rib bones and leg bones of the wolf begin to flesh out and the creature becomes furred. La Loba sings some more, and more of the creature comes into being; its tail curls upward, shaggy and strong. And La Loba sings more and the wolf creature begins to breathe, and as she sings, the wolf opens its eyes, leaps up, and runs away down the canyon. Somewhere in its running, whether by the speed of its running, or by the splashing its way into a river, or by way of a ray of sunlight or moonlight hitting it right in the side, the wolf is suddenly transformed into a laughing woman who runs free toward the horizon.
The ancients called the desert the place of divine revelation and transformation. Perhaps that is because the desert is a place where life is very condensed. The roots of living things hold on so that the last tear of water is preserved. The flower hoards its moisture by only appearing in the early morning and late afternoon. Life in the desert is small but brilliant, and most of what occurs lies in wait underground.
So often, we live desert lives: operating in scarcity, holding on to what little sustenance we can, storing it up because we are never sure of when the next rainfall will come. Many of us live in the desert: showing signs of life here and there, but rooted in dryness and despair, our spirits lying in wait underground.
When the Lord told Ezekiel to prophesy over the dry bones in the desert, God was not only performing miraculous signs, giving sinew and flesh to the bones on the ground. God was showing Ezekiel what the dryness of despair looked like. “These bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’” Before God brings life back to the dry bones, God shows Ezekiel just how personal it all really is. It’s about how greatly God cares for God’s people, that God sees the death of their despair, and reminds them that God will not leave them to be a pile of dry bones buried in the sand of the desert.
We all [come to God], at least at some point in our lives, as a bundle of bones lost somewhere in a desert, a dismantled skeleton that lies under the sand. And we come to God seeking the story of La Loba, of Ezekiel – seeking the story of the resurrection of our dry bones. Our Collect of the Day prays that God would grant us the grace to desire what God promises, but I don’t think we need that prayer to desire God’s promises. The truth is, we desperately desire God’s promise to “open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people” and bring us back to the promised land. The promise to put God’s spirit within you, so that we might live. We seek the promise that if we sing the song of faith, God can call up the remains of the dry bones of our despair and darkness, and give them life again.
One of the reasons we pray, dance, drum, make theater, write poetry is to do the work of gathering all the bones together. But [then], we must sit at the fire and think about which song we will sing over the bones, which creation hymn, which story, which symphony. We must sit next to God, who asks us, “Mortal, can these bones live?” and faithfully proclaim, “O Lord God, you know.” We must look, not toward the certainty of our convictions that we can do it alone, but the promises of God that with
God’s help, with God’s song, the dry bones can live. [1]
It is this promise of God that Jesus is proclaiming when, with tears still streaming down his face, he raises his dear friend Lazarus from the dead – the final sign of wonder he performs as he foreshadows his own death and resurrection. It is the promise that God breathes new life into that which we think is dead.
In the words of the scholar Karoline Lewis, “Simply to believe in the resurrection comes nowhere close to what resurrection means. … Once you are sure in your confession, “Christ is risen,” you should stop and think. Really? What makes me so sure? What convinces me of this creed? What secures this so- called salvation?
This is the heart of the story of Lazarus. Resurrection is not a confession. Resurrection is not a theory. Resurrection is not some sort of ambiguous promise. No, resurrection is real. Resurrection is relationship with God. Resurrection is now. We are so determined to say “resurrection is…” followed by something boringly theoretical. …We desperately preach that Easter matters for some sort of guaranteed future when actually, at least for Lazarus, Easter is first nothing other than reclining on Jesus and having dinner.””[2]
Resurrection is now. Resurrection is the song that puts sinews and flesh on our dry bones. New life, arising out of a heavenly symphony.
“Mortal, can these bones live?” Can that which has died – your faith, your hope, your trust – live again? Can you collect that which is in danger of being lost to the world, and play the music that gives it new life? Can you sing the song that proclaims, “Yes, Lord, you know: these bones can live again?”
Amen.
[1] Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wile Woman Archetype. pp. 27-38.
[2] https://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx? post=4847
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Fourth Sunday in Lent
- 1 Samuel 16:1-13
- Ephesians 5:8-14
- John 9:1-41
- Psalm 23
The question is, How do you know what you know? I mean really. How do you know?
There’s a long study of this question in the world of philosophy. It’s called epistemology – investigating how it is that opinion becomes ‘justified belief,’ in the words of the OED. We arrive at what we know through several different routes. We figure something out through logic and reason – I have thought this through, and it makes eminent sense, so I know it is true. Or we know based on intuition, the felt sense that operates on a deeper level than reason, where we know how someone is doing even before they tell us. We know things because we’ve experienced them, certainly, it happened to us. We know things because someone else gave testimony to them and we trust what they say. And, some philosophers allow, we might know something because of divine revelation, a knowing that comes in some way from beyond our faculties. Of course, every kind of knowing involves the possibility that we might be wrong, or that our subjective experience – who we are, our experiences and background, how we’re feeling that day – is shaping our knowledge. That certainly comes up when it comes to matters of faith, questions about God. It’s one thing to say that we know the pew is hard, or that the train is late, or that a friend seems sad. It’s another to say with certainty that we know God is present here and now. That kind of knowing – well, how do you know what you know?
One thing I know is that this is the Lent of long gospels, as the deacons will tell you. They’re great stories, but long ones, all from the gospel of John. But they’re also each focused on one compelling character: the Pharisee Nicodemus, the woman at the well, Lazarus, the beloved friend that Jesus raises from the dead. And today, this man born blind, and the long state of confusion that follows after Jesus heals him and brings him sight. These are stories rich with symbolism – nighttime darkness and the bright light of day, water and thirst, seeing and not seeing, death and life.
But they are also stories with characters who are real, vivid and knowable. I’ve always had a particular soft spot for the man in today’s reading. There are a number of stories in the gospels about people who are blind being healed by Jesus, all with great rejoicing and delight. In this one, Jesus sees the man, and in response to his disciples’ stupid question about sin, heals the man’s sight. But then the story spends most of its time on the mostly negative reaction everyone has to this miraculous healing. Through it all, the man just keeps repeating his story over and over – working in some pretty great zingers along the way too. He healed me. I was blind but now I see. How do I know if this guy is a sinner? All I know is that he healed me. You want the story again? You wanna be his disciples too? …But for all his pains, the leaders and Pharisees throw him out. Too much truth-telling can be unpopular.
One commentator pointed out that this man who is healed follows a trajectory exactly like the one Jesus does in the gospel of John. His identity is questioned, even though he tells them clearly, I am the man – paralleling all of Jesus’ famous ‘I am’ statements in the gospel; he speaks frankly and logically, asserting the facts, but no one believes him; he resorts to sarcasm and truth-telling to put the Pharisees in their place, only to be cast out completely from their community. This is also the story of the early Christian community that produced John’s gospel, cast out from the mainstream Jewish community for their belief in Jesus. The Pharisees in this story are people who do not want to be troubled with the facts. None of what the man says, or what Jesus says throughout the gospel, is enough to persuade them. They simply can’t see the truth.
In our Lenten forum series, we’ve been exploring what the Bible says about reparations, the action to redress wrongs done to those whose enslavement built this country. It turns out there’s a lot the Bible has to say about this, numerous passages throughout Hebrew and Christian scriptures that call us to make our repentance and reconciliation tangible and meaningful. Slavery is often assumed in the biblical worldview – but so is the need to make restitution for it in the community of God’s people. Pair these scriptures with the facts of our American history, including our economic history and the history of the church, and it is not hard to make a case for morally and financially redressing the wrongs done. But the idea of reparations remains controversial in our country and in our churches – to put it frankly, it’s hard to give up money and status. It’s obvious that conveying the facts alone is not enough to persuade people to take this uncomfortable step. It is only when we connect with empathy, shared feeling, to one another that the conversation turns from ‘why should our group do something for your group?’ to ‘we all have suffered this, we all need this healing.’ Empathy, not the facts, leads to a different way of seeing that takes the conversation from us-them to us-we. And from there, we can begin to take action to change.
This is just one example of an issue we are struggling with in our world today. We live in an age when facts often fail to persuade, and facts are subject to opinion far more than the other way around. Yet we return to facts over and over again, attempting to get others who disagree with us to see, as if we can argue them into seeing differently. It never works. And if we do some honest self-evaluation, we have to admit that we also aren’t always accepting all the facts. Just notice how the same set of facts about COVID resulted in such a wide array of responses from us, to take one recent example. Our own worldview, whatever it is, our assumptions about what is right and how things came to be, that also blinds us to what may be obvious to others. We all struggle with knowing what we know – even more so with acting on it. We all struggle with truly seeing.
The beloved hymn ‘Amazing Grace’ – which we’ll sing later on in this service – quotes from this gospel story today: ‘I once was blind, but now I see.’ John Newton, the slave ship master, came to see and realize the great sin of the work he was doing. But not all at once. He was converted to Christ after surviving a terrible shipwreck – but he kept on in the slave trade for many more years. It was only in the midst of an illness that something at last showed him the full horror of his ways, and he made such a full repentance that he became a committed abolitionist, seeking to ban the trade he’d profited from before. Something helped him truly see, and then truly change his ways. Somewhere in there he had to make a choice. It couldn’t have been easy, and yet it saved him – and the hymn he wrote has saved many of us ever since.
The man who is healed in the gospel story is healed by Jesus, made to see by the pure grace of God’s action in his life. But he comes more truly to see as he engages more and more with this miracle, telling the story over and again in the face of opposition. When Jesus finds him again at the end of the story, he sees clearly who Jesus is: the Messiah, the Son of Man. First his eyes are made to work again – but what truly changes him is the healing he receives – he sees and believes Jesus when no one else does, because he has a full, deep experience of the presence of God. His life is changed and he knows it. And he chooses to know it: ‘Tell me, sir, that I may believe in him.’ No facts told him by someone else could have opened his eyes this way. He knows God because he has felt God, and lived into what it means to feel God, and chooses to continue to know God in his life, and to share that for the good of others. From a man known only as ‘the man born blind,’ this man is fully healed to become a true apostle of Jesus’ good news.
How do you know what you know? And what difference does it make?
The thing is, in the life of faith, we are often asking ourselves that question. We experience God, and then we don’t. We see healing, and then we see suffering. We think sometimes how irrational faith is, and yet we feel something deeper than ‘rational’ all the same. We hear the testimonies, we read the stories, and sometimes, maybe only rarely, we feel a spark. Or perhaps we live and breathe the presence of God every single moment, light and air all around us. It is different for each of us; it is different throughout our lives. And yet, somehow, we know what we know – or we choose to know – or we long to know. And we choose to live accordingly. Jesus see us, and says, You have seen God. I am he, the one who is speaking with you. I am. God is. Love is. There to be seen. So now live.
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Third Sunday in Lent
- Exodus 17:1-7
- Romans 5:1-11
- John 4:5-42
- Psalm 95
“Jesus left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria.”
We have here a (very long) story about Jesus going through Samaria, a place where good, devout Jews do not travel, to get where he’s going. It’s important to know that Jews and Samaritans did not associate with each other. Samaritans and Jews had the 1st century equivalent of separate water fountains. There is a very long history between these two peoples. Roughly 1,000 years before Jesus, Israel divided into two kingdoms. The northern kingdom kept the name, Israel, and formed their own nation. Two hundred years later, Assyria conquered Israel. Assyria had a policy: In order to discourage nationalism and rebellion, it removed skilled people from the conquered territory and replaced them with people from other conquered countries (II Kings 17:24). In addition they changed the name of the country from Israel to Samaria. Intermarriage followed, producing what Jews considered a nation of mongrels and half-breeds who had also corrupted the religion of Judah. Over their history there were many instances of intrigue, betrayal and war and this produced centuries of hatred and mistrust. Everyone was keeping score in the hope of someday settling the score. It was in this state of antagonism that Jesus decided to travel through Samaria on his way to Galilee, even though there were other ways to go.1
And this provides an encounter with the Samaritan woman. In Western Christianity, she is only known as “the woman at the well.” In the Eastern Orthodox Church she is considered a saint and has a name, Photini, which means “bringer of light”, because St. Photini brought an entire city of people to know the light of Christ. Jesus’ conversation with Photini is longest recorded conversation he has with anyone in Scripture.
That tells us that Jesus’ encounter with Photini is significant. Because their dialogue is so elaborate, there is a lot to draw out of it. So I want to highlight some interesting and important things about this encounter with Photini:
1) Photini is at the well at noon. The sixth hour of the day. The brightest, hottest time of day. This is significant for a number of reasons:
– It stands in stark contrast to Nicodemus, who encounters Jesus in the middle of the night
– It is odd behavior, because women typically came to the well to draw water in the early morning, while it was still cool
– Photini is alone. It was customary for people to travel to the well with companions.
2) There’s the question about Photini’s past; she had 5 husbands and is now living with a 6th guy. That’s a little excessive, even for our recent American presidential standards.
– Was she a loose and promiscuous woman? This is often the assumption based on the fact that Jesus could have chosen to talk to her about anything, but he chose her marital history, pointing out her multiple husbands. And it’s easy to hear an accusatory tone in Jesus’ words, as if the subtext is, “you’re correct, you don’t have a husband, but you’ve had FIVE husbands, you dirty harlot!” A woman like that would certainly have been divorced by her husbands. But the truth is, a woman committing adultery on such a scale would have been stoned to death long before a 5th marriage.
– While it would make an intriguing Agatha Christie novel, it is probably NOT likely that she killed each of her husbands…
– Though it IS possible that her husbands all died, making her a widow five times over… And this might have marked her as a cursed woman. It would also explain why this 6th guy wasn’t so eager to marry her.
– It is also possible that she was infertile, resulting in multiple divorces. Remember that in Jesus’ time, women’s value was in bearing children, especially sons. A woman who could not produce children could easily have been divorced by every man she married.
3) Regardless of the reason, Photini has a really questionable past. And Jesus a).Somehow miraculously knows all about it; and
b).seems to have no problem with this. There is no judgment. Simply an acknowledgement of the facts of life.
And these things together – his knowledge of her past, and his acceptance of her as she is – show her that he is indeed the Messiah. Jesus is recognized not only by the signs and wonders he performs, but by the equally miraculous unconditional love and acceptance he shows to a Samaritan – a person who least expects to receive any dignity from a Jew. She can’t believe it – and she she does not mince words in her response, “Hey, dude, remember your people and my people don’t mix?” Jesus’ encounter with Photini shows her, and her entire Samaritan city, and us, that human boundaries are no barrier to God’s love.
Photini is the culmination of the primary two female biblical archetypes. First, is the archetype of the barren woman who becomes part of God’s saving activity with God’s people. She had no children, since she’s not living with a son, but with a man who is “not her husband.” She falls right in line with Sarah, Hannah, and Elizabeth.
Photini is also the foreigner through whom redemption comes. Throughout Scripture, women outside the tribe of God’s chosen people helped to bring about God’s saving purpose. She falls right in line with Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba, women who weren’t Israelites but still brought redemption to God’s people.
As the culmination of these two archetypes, Jesus speaks with her. She is, in a sense, the first Gentile disciple – the first person to spread God’s saving grace beyond the Jewish people. God’s saving purpose for the whole world is revealed and made manifest through her.
But none of this makes any difference if we forget how this all started: “Jesus left Judea and started back to Galilee. But he had to go through Samaria.”
Cutting through Samaria is the shortest route from Judea to Galilee, but Jews from Judea would often cross the Jordan and go around Samaria in order to reach Galilee. There’s no indication that Jesus was in a rush to get to Galilee, and just figured “what the heck, I’ll risk it.” So why did he “have to” go through Samaria?
The original Greek shows us that in the gospel of John, the word for “had to” is used on occasions that signify divine will. Jesus wasn’t trekking through Samaria for convenience. The theologian and preacher Fred Craddock says, “Jesus’ decision to follow this route is not a statement about historical or geographical necessity. Jesus’ obligation to pass through Samaria is a theological statement, consistent with [John 3:16,] ‘for God so loved the world.’ Jesus is inaugurating the expansion of the gospel beyond the Jewish people. There was a different route that could have avoided “those” people. But he had to go.”2
Jesus is in Samaria on purpose. And he initiates a life-giving conversation with the Samaritan woman Photini, a conversation that leads to conversion, offering her the living water he provides. Even she, a Samaritan, is worthy. Jesus in in Samaria because it was God’s will for the whole world, even the places and people we think should be left out, to be held in God’s saving and loving arms.
So, friends, in this season of Lent, in this time of self-examination and renewal, I think this poses a critical question to us: What is the Samaria that God is calling YOU individually, and us as a church, to walk through? What are the geographic and spiritual place you would rather avoid?
How is God directing you, and directing us as a community, along a more difficult route, outside our comfort zone, one that reaches people we would normally avoid, people we might even hope to exclude?
There will always be ways to bypass Samaria and play it safe, to avoid certain people and places we would rather not deal with. But the Gospel tells us that those are the places we meet Photini at the well. Those are the places where living water springs up, where a close encounter with the “other” allows us to meet the new, the different, and the unexpected. We, too, have to travel through Samaria in order to discover and bear witness to the depth and breadth of God’s love for the world.
So let’s leave Judea, and head back to Galilee. Samaria awaits us.
———
1 A Centering Moment by The Rev’d. Douglas Spencer (sacramint@rochester.rr.com)
2 Feasting on the Gospels: John (Homiletical Perspective), p. 89.
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Second Sunday in Lent
- Genesis 12:1-4a
- Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
- John 3:1-17
- Psalm 121
Today’s Gospel reminds me of a memoir I read “Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus: A Devout Muslim Encounters Jesus.” Given the provocative title, I thought it might help me to demystify a religion some vilify and discover what I could learn from another man’s journey of faith.
Nabeel Qureshi’s experience immediately reminded me of Nicodemus. He too came to Jesus by night. He too tinkered on the margins of Christianity seeking truth. And his journey taught me how our faith must be lived.
Curious about a faith others vilified, Nabeel was drawn to Christ. Something deep in his heart beckoned Nabeel to Jesus, just like it did Nicodemus. Despite the risk of losing his family, friends, and status in the community, he willingly questioned his and his families deeply held Islamic beliefs. In the darkness of night, ladened with these apprehensions and fears, the light beckoned him forward.
On this second Sunday in Lent, we are invited to do some interior work, just like Nabeel and Nicodemus, to break ties with the familiar, explore our beliefs, and pursue a deeper relationship with God and others. And, if we are to stretch the metaphor, we too come to Jesus this Lent in the darkness of these past few years, suffering so much loss, isolation, fear, the breakdown of so many things central to our lives, that have weakened our bodies, minds and spirits, and maybe even brought us some doubt. Yet the light of Easter beckons us forward.
In today’s Gospel, John provides Nicodemus timidly guiding the way, but he does little to introduce us to him. We know that he is a Pharisee, a member of the Sanhedrin, one of 70 men on the Supreme Jewish Council of chief priests, scribes, and elders. As a leader and a powerful man in Jewish circles, Judaism was central to his beliefs, his way of life, his family, and his relationships. His encounter with Jesus puts him at considerable risk.
Yet, something deep in his heart moves Nicodemus to emerge out of the darkness to seek Jesus. And understandably, he’s not quite ready to fully commit. He hovers on the margins, lurks in the shadows, remains cautious, discrete, unwilling to risk power, prestige, and relationships.
Despite his hesitation, there is something genuine and heartfelt about this encounter with Jesus. It’s as if Jesus is extending his hand in outreach and Nicodemus desires to accept. Yet the experience seems to leave Nicodemus confounded.
Just like the events of the past few years leave me confounded from time to time.
As he questions Jesus, Nicodemus seeks empirical evidence, confirming facts that Jesus is of God. “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs you are doing if God were not with him.”
All Jesus had to do was to give him a simple answer. Tell Nicodemus, “Yes that’s true.” But not surprisingly, Jesus doesn’t respond as expected; he uses the moment to teach Nicodemus about faith. And Nicodemus doesn’t immediately know what to make of it, Jesus’ response is confusing and vague.
“No one can enter the kingdom of God unless they are born of water and the Spirit.” / “Flesh gives birth to flesh, / the Spirit gives birth to spirit.” / “You must be born again.”
This is the moment where most, including Nicodemus, probably want to pray the “Jesus Really Prayer,” a patient taught me. It goes like this, “Jesus REALLY!”
Obviously, we know that one can’t physically be “born again.” And, yes, these are powerfully charged words with all sorts of connotations.
Yet, Jesus’s words are theologically rich if not provocative. He challenges Nicodemus and us to do some interior work, to think more deeply about faith, /what it means to live in relationship with God, /what it means to live fully into relationship with others.
Nicodemus learned that faith grows beyond our knowing facts, compiling evidence, or gathering answers.
He discovered that faith defies rational understanding and sometimes confounds us; /faith is nourished when it is felt in the heart, / experienced through actions.
Nabeel Qureshi learned this as he tried to understand his Islamic faith. As he and a Christian friend debated the merits of their faith, they sought to explain their belief by gathering facts from their scriptures. But as in the encounter with Nicodemus, Jesus had something different in mind for Nabeel. And he too left the encounter with his friend and Jesus somewhat confounded.
Something took hold of Nabeel’s heart that defied his understanding. Jesus captured his attention, his world was rocked, his heart forever changed. He became a Christian.
Much like Nicodemus, he was challenged to understand that living faith is far beyond having all the answers, it’s hearing Jesus’s voice inside you, a call of the heart that we respond to, best expressed, and deepened by experience and action.
In a very poignant moment, Nabeel shares a cherished memory, an Islamic action that nourished his faith. At the time of birth, his father gently whispered the AZAN (uh-zaan), the daily Muslim call to prayer, into his ears. “God is great. There is no god but God.” He used the story to illustrate how powerful a simple daily gesture of faith, an action can be.
Moved by this story I decided to adapt the practice. Each morning I say the words said at Baptism. “You have been sealed by the Holy Spirit and marked by Christ’s own forever.”
As I start my day, this morning prayer helps me to remember not only who I am, but also whom I belong to in a world that tries to tell me otherwise. It helps me to remember the Baptismal call, the promise to live our faith through experience and action. And the commitment I made as a deacon to help you do the same.
Through our Baptism, we are born anew in water and spirit, “sealed by the Holy Spirit,” “marked as Christ’s own forever, sharing in the Divine Life given to us sacramentally.
Reborn in this way, /reborn into God’s family, we are shaped and sustained by the Spirit who enlivens spiritual gifts within us that aid our ministry as we build God’s reign on earth.
If we are “marked as Christ’s own,” and possess spiritual gifts, we have a responsibility to move from faithful curiosity, to one of action, leaving our “marks of faith” in a world that desperately needs us to.
The Anglican Church offers us these “five marks of mission.”
TELL – To proclaim the Good News of the Kingdom: To be willing to boldly come out of the darkness of night and to step into the light sharing our faith experience with others.
TEACH – To nurture our faith through study and education, to share what we know so that others might come to Christ.
TEND: To respond to human needs through loving service.
TRANSFORM – To transform unjust structures of society, / to pursue peace, reconciliation, and reparation, /eradicate injustice, /advocate nonviolence, /purvey forgiveness, work to end discrimination, and ignorance, /to dismantle all that blocks Christ’s love from filling the world.
TREASURE –strive to safeguard the integrity of Creation, to sustain and renew the life of the earth, to commit to be good stewards, to observe and promote practices of sustainability, conservation, and renewal.
This is our faith in action.
This is what it means to be “marked as Christ’s own, for us to leave our mark as we work to build the reign of God.
This is what it means, despite the darkness, to be “born of water and Spirit.”
This Lent, the light of Easter, beckons us to come out of the night, like Nabeel and Nicodemus into the light, to move forward in grace.
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The First Sunday in Lent
- Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7
- Romans 5:12-19
- Matthew 4:1-11
- Psalm 32
And just like that, the Lenten springtime has begun. 40 days of preparation and renewal, getting us ready for the joyful celebration of Easter. It feels like it was just Christmas, but here we go.
In the invitation to a holy Lent that is part of the Ash Wednesday service, we lay out the history of Lent in a few short sentences: Lent historically was the season of the church when new converts to the faith prepared for baptism, preparing to join the community; and when those who had been separated from the church by ‘notorious sins’ could be restored and reconciled to the community. 40 days to be made ready to join, or to rejoin, the community of God’s people. So Lent is a reminder to us of God’s forgiveness, and of our need to continually repent, reset our lives and reclaim that forgiveness. As Fr Frank said in his sermon on Wednesday, it’s not just about the chocolate. This season is serious business.
The season of healing and reconciliation, a time to mend broken relationships and end our isolation from one another: These forty days are our chance to set things right. We all could use a little time to work on getting back into right relationship.
Our two scripture stories today take us right there, to the breaking and healing of relationship. Adam and Eve are created and put in the garden, living in a world of mutual trust with one another and with God – but then they are tempted, they fall prey to distrust and pride, and they pull away, from God and from one another. Whose fault is it? It’s his fault; it’s her fault; it’s the serpent’s fault. Even in the question of blame, the problem is made clear: The union we were made for, between us and God and between us and each other, is broken.
But then we come to Jesus in the wilderness preparing for his ministry, clarifying his vocation, knowing/fearing that if he chooses this path, he will have to give up everything. For forty days he struggles with this. And he grapples with the temptation to stay separate and not to reconnect in that union – to be self-sufficient, to gather power into himself, to distrust God’s mercy and provision for his life. But he resists, and stays steadfast in his faith in God – and because he sets forth on his path, we are shown the way back to ours. The way of Jesus leads back to love and to life lived in union again.
But looking at the world as it is now, it’s obvious that it remains such a strong temptation for all of us to pull away from one another. To pull into groups and tribes at war and conflict with each other – we’re one year into the Russian war on Ukraine, and so many more years into endless other wars and conflicts in our own country and all over the globe. To isolate ourselves from God and even from those we love – our collective mental health is at an all-time low, manifesting most of all in young people. We continue to succumb to the temptation to disconnect from the ground of our being and union in love. And we suffer because of it.
You could say that this disconnect comes to us naturally. I’ve been reading a few books on animal cultures, exploring the idea that cultural differences can be observed among animals in the wild. We’ve tended only to use the word ‘culture’ to refer to human society, yet learned and shared behavior and language is prevalent among animals as well. Even amongst others of their own species, animals will gather into groups, associating with those who vocalize the same as they do or have the same hunting habits, or even with those who share the same perception of beauty. Orcas in northern Puget Sound won’t mix with orcas in southern Puget Sound, even though they’re genetically the same. Certain flocks of Amazon parrots make similar sounds that can only be described as regional dialects, different from other flocks nearby even though they are the same species. Crows make tools, passing along techniques from one animal to others, which then become normal for their group – but different from how other crows make their tools. Animals have distinct cultures, even tribes. There’s something natural, apparently, about gathering with others who share a common culture – and natural, too, about fighting with those who are in a different group.
And yet most of us humans feel called to reach beyond these ‘natural’ boundaries we experience, to find the common humanity we share despite differences of culture, language, color. Babies seem to do that naturally; we all have to work to do it as we grow older. It is one of our ongoing struggles of living together in a diverse world, seeking to move beyond differences, to live into the vision that is also a part of our spirits and souls, the vision of connection across all peoples. That’s a way that we are called to move past what comes naturally, the temptation to separate into us vs them. That’s one kind of reconciliation work we are called into as Christians, hard work as we interrogate our assumptions, our behaviors, our souls.
That work involves overcoming what comes ‘naturally.’ And yet in other ways we struggle to live in what should be an entirely ‘natural’ way. Human beings also are social animals – we need each other in order to thrive and survive in this world. It is natural for us to be with each other. And yet we seem to have a regular temptation to do what is not natural, to withdraw and go it entirely alone. To act as if we can be self-sufficient and a god unto our own selves. ‘It is not good that the man should be alone,’ God says in the creation story, and God first creates other animals, and then creates multiple humans, created in open and honest relationship with one another, naked and vulnerable to each other and to God. But as that story shows, we find so many ways to turn from that relationship. So many ways to wall ourselves off even from family and friends; walling ourselves off from God in our very center. It’s not natural at all, but we do it all the same. Restoring natural relationship with others around us, and the source of our life within us, is another kind of reconciliation we are called into.
So our invitation to you for this holy Lent is to work on connecting to God and to one another again. This has been a long strange time of crisis, these last few years. We have lost some of our sense of how to be in right relationship with others. Lent can provide a reset, a time to stop and turn to a new path. Time to wonder and explore: What are the habits that have crept up on us over these last few years, that are keeping us from connection with others and with God? Too much indulgence of the instinct to stay in and stare at the screen? Fear of other people as agents of contagion? Social awkwardness because you just haven’t spent time lately with people besides your close family? or with anyone? Too much alcohol consumption, maybe? The temptation to see others in categories, rather than as actual people? Too much attention to our own fragility and ‘triggers’? Laziness – let’s be honest – because it’s just too much work to put shoes on and go somewhere? These are the notorious sins that have been keeping us separated from one another. But they’re not inevitable. They are habits that we can break, with God’s help.
Instead, we can nurture the habits that lead us back into right relationship: setting and keeping a regular prayer time, where we sit in vulnerability with God, acknowledging our needs. Finding time to read from scripture and other nourishing texts, wisdom from others for our path. Making an 8-minute phone call to one longtime friend every week. Prayer and study and real conversation with a small group, or a spiritual companion. Regular attendance at church, where you mix with people you may or may not know well, who may not be just like you. Cultivating curiosity about other people who think or talk or act differently from you, to know and understand them beyond the news headlines or the curated feed of social media. Looking more deeply in order to find our common humanity.
This is work we need as people of faith, in this time and in this place. And it is work that our world needs us to model and share, too. I invite you into it, to take this on as your discipline during this season of preparation. Ours is a reconciling faith, this message of Jesus – reconciling those who have been opposed to one another in this life, and reconciling us to the deep love of God at the heart of all things. The good news of Easter lies ahead of us, news that we can celebrate together, in community, restored to God and one another. In these 40 days and beyond, may God overcome our temptations, and lead us into hopefulness and joy. Amen.
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Ash Wednesday
- Isaiah 58:1-12
- 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
- Matthew 6:1-6,16-21
- Psalm 103 or 103:8-14
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Last Sunday after Epiphany
- Exodus 24:12-18
- 2 Peter 1:16-21
- Matthew 17:1-9
- Psalm 99
I had my first mountaintop moment on a real mountaintop. Nestled in the shores of Saranac Lake in upstate New York, I was attending a Christian camp for high school kids. High school kids are notoriously difficult to impress, but this place pulled out all the stops – our daily activities included canoeing, swimming in a pool with a 50-foot water slide, parasailing, ropes courses, and more. But these thrilling activities, designed to allow us to enjoy God’s creation, were not the transformative part of the week; it was the nightly “talks” where a pastor would talk to us about faith. I was transfixed by the message, so much so that one night I found myself waiting until the hundreds of teenagers had cleared the room so I could talk to the pastor. I told him that I’d been feeling really distant from God, and his talks had made me realize just how distant I’d gotten, that I wanted to reconnect to God, and I had no idea how to do that or even if God would want me back. He listened gently, and then he took a piece of paper, wrote something on it, and handed it to me, and said, “Take this, grab your bible, and find a quiet spot to sit for a little while.” As I walked away, I looked at the paper, which had one simple question written on it: “How does God feel about Julie? Luke 15:11-32.”
With my Bible in hand, I climbed onto one of the rocks lining the lake, and under the moonlight, I opened it to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 15, verse 11. I was only one sentence in when I realized I was reading the parable of the prodigal son. As the soft evening breeze whispered through the trees, it felt as if God herself was whispering to me to return home, to return to God’s loving, open arms. I wept. Never before had Scripture felt so deeply personal; never before had God’s unconditional love for me felt so real. It was a tremendous mountaintop moment, on a literal mountaintop, a profound experience of God’s loving presence in my life, and a transformative turning point in my own faith. I climbed down from that rock feeling like a completely different person, and returned home with a vigor and joy I hadn’t had in a long time.
A few days after I’d returned home, I was talking with my mother, about how amazing this retreat was and how much it had changed me, how on fire for God I was. She said, “I remember going on retreats and coming home feeling like that, you’re on a spiritual ‘high’ for a little while afterwards. It doesn’t last, but it feels good for a little while.” In the moment, it upset me, like she was completely invalidating my experience – “gee, thanks for being a buzzkill, mom.” But of course, she was right. Those mountaintop moments are profound, but fleeting.
Perhaps that’s why Peter, James, and John wanted so desperately to capture their mountaintop moment with Jesus. This Messiah, this leader they’d been following, who had caused a lot of stir and quite a bit of controversy, was revealed for who he really was – God incarnate. Literally standing in the dazzling presence of God, with God’s voice booming overhead, who can blame them for wanting to capture the glory of that moment forever?
Religion is designed, in some ways, to give us mountaintop moments. And sometimes I worry that this is where religion fails us. It gives us the mountaintop, an escape from the valleys and harshness of he world we live in. We worship in a sanctuary – literally and legally, a safe and protected space. We construct temples and sacred spaces and erect works of art and tiffany windows and pray liturgies and sing hymns that are ancient and comforting. We come in our Sunday best, or our Sunday comfortable, we celebrate the diversity and the good will here, and for a brief moment, we can have a break from the brokenness that surrounds us.
But as much as religion acknowledges the valleys we inhabit, I wonder if it truly prepares us for them.
I wonder if we come to religion for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.
Like Peter, James, and John, we would prefer to set up camp in the safe and happy places. We are still living in the valley of the shadow of the pandemic, in the dark shadows of police brutality where unarmed Black men continue to be murdered, in the sinister wells of white supremacy, in the literal earth-shattering devastation of natural disasters, in the valleys of our own grief, and fear, and anxiety. I don’t know about you, but those are some valleys I’m happy for Jesus to lead me out of and away from.
But like my mother said to me so many years ago, Jesus says to his disciples, “Get up,” and when they look up, it’s all gone. What a buzzkill Jesus was (I think he learned from my mom), and how disappointed his disciples must have felt (I can relate). Their Lord and Savior gave them this amazing moment of grace – and it was so fleeting they were barely able to enjoy it before he forced them to get up and face reality.
The tension point of the Transfiguration is that Jesus leads his disciples up to the mountaintop … and then, he leads them back down away from it. He leads them to something glorious and wonderful. Then, he leads them back to the valley. Back to the place where there is illness, and poverty, and all manner of difficulty. The disappointing truth is that if we follow Jesus, all our mountaintop moments will end.
But is that really disappointing?
Let us not forget what really happened on that mountaintop so many years ago. Jesus’ disciples had a profound, transformative moment with their Lord and Savior, a moment where they experienced the deep love, abiding hope, and steadfast faith that comes from God. They want to remain in that moment, on that mountaintop, and Jesus says, “You cannot stay here.” And if that was all Jesus said, it would be very disappointing indeed. But that’s not all Jesus says. The gospel account says that “as they were coming down the mountain,” Jesus spoke again to his disciples. Jesus does not send his disciples back down the mountain alone; he accompanies them. Not only does he accompany them; he leads them. He says, “Follow me back down the mountain, and together, let’s get to work.”
Last week, Fr. Frank gave us a good word and reminded us that the greatest gift God gives us is the power to make choices. I wonder how each of us, in our own way, consciously or not, are choosing the mountaintop and avoiding the valley. I know there are valleys I avoid.
But we are about to enter the season of Lent, a time we often take up a particular discipline or practice. As you consider what will your Lenten discipline be, I wonder: How will you encounter the world more, in all its brokenness? What can you do that will build the practice of walking into that world with Jesus by your side?
How will you let Jesus lead you – and trust that even if it is to a place you do not want to go, that he is there with you, the whole way?
It might not feel like good news to know that Jesus doesn’t lead us to mountaintops and let us stay there. But it is good news that he leads us no matter the altitude. The promise is true: God will not leave us or forsake us.
Now let us walk into the valley. Amen.
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The Sixth Sunday after Epiphany
- Deuteronomy 30:15-20
- 1 Corinthians 3:1-9
- Matthew 5:21-37
- Psalm 119:1-8
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The Fifth Sunday after Epiphany
- Isaiah 58:1-9a, [9b-12]
- 1 Corinthians 2:1-12, [13-16]
- Matthew 5:13-20
- Psalm 112:1-9, (10)
The post February 5, 2023 – The Rev. Deacon Eva Bogino appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
- Micah 6:1-8
- 1 Corinthians 1:18-31
- Matthew 5:1-12
- Psalm 15
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The Third Sunday after Epiphany
- Isaiah 9:1-4
- 1 Corinthians 1:10-18
- Matthew 4:12-23
- Psalm 27:1, 5-13
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The Second Sunday after Epiphany
- Isaiah 49:1-7
- 1 Corinthians 1:1-9
- John 1:29-42
- Psalm 40:1-12
The post January 15, 2023 – The Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Feast of the Baptism of Our Lord
- Isaiah 42:1-9
- Acts 10:34-43
- Matthew 3:13-17
- Psalm 29
Happy Epiphany (season)! Christmas is officially over and today celebrate the baptism of Christ and the start of his ministry. For me, this is the beginning of Jesus’s story. Christmas is wonderful, don’t get me wrong—I look forward to years of sermons on the life-affirming wonder that is the incarnation. But Jesus was just a baby. I don’t know how many newborns you have been around recently but they tend not to be the most impressive beings. Wondrous, beautiful, life-shattering little creatures. But even the son of God would have been asleep most of the time and those awake bits, well, a dozen soiled diapers a day gets old pretty fast.
But Jesus, the man—the man who we all follow, the reason we are here this Sunday morning—that story begins here, with his baptism. This past fall I took a class on Jesus’s healing and exorcism stories in the Gospel of Mark and the story of Christ’s baptism held a special significance. There were a few biblical scholars that we read who interpreted Jesus as shaman or a spiritual healer. For these authors, the moment of Christ’s baptism and anointing by the Holy Spirit should be read as a trans-formative rite of passage in which God’s Spirit overcame Jesus, possessed Jesus, and filled him divine power. The very power that enabled him to heal the sick, to exorcise demons and perform miracles.
I am sharing this not to convince you of this particular scholarly interpretation—to be honest, I’m not sure what I think—but, rather, I hope it offers a re-framing of a touchstone moment in the gospels. As I was preparing for this sermon, I realized that I had generally thought of Jesus’s baptism as a coronation of sorts—something changed, spiritually/metaphysically, but it wasn’t a surprise. It was a birthright, destined to happen eventually. The Spirit alighting on Jesus merely affirmed something he always knew. But what if it was shock? What if the Spirit of God seized Jesus, claimed him as “my Son, the beloved”? Pulled him out of the water and into a whirlwind of a life that would change the world forever.
And if we look at Jesus’ baptism through this lens, what does it mean for our own baptism? Having been baptized as an infant—actually, right over there, 30 some odd ago—I have no touchstone for that transformation. I’ve essentially always been a baptized Christian. There was no conversion experience, no before and after. But we actually do acknowledge this change in our baptism liturgy in a way that is remarkably similar to the language of possession noted earlier. “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.” Just reading those words I get chills. I feel a deep sense of awe and humility in the face of the divine. I am nothing and yet I am God’s. As the psalmist sings, “What is man that you should be mindful of him/the son of man that you should seek him out?” I feel so small, so insignificant in the face of God who has claimed me.
But perhaps that response is not exactly right. Not to say that there is no value in owning one’s own relative punyness. I firmly believe that the world would be a better place if we did a better job of remembering just how small we are and vast the universe is. But maybe God doesn’t need me to grovel. Maybe fear and trembling isn’t the only way to face the divine. What might be possible if I own the very fact that God wants me? That God has claimed me. That I belong to God.
Reflecting on this, I remembered an interaction I had recently with a parishioner at St. Ann’s—the parish where I am currently serving as a seminarian. I have a young son—18 months old—who I bring periodically to church with me and I was speaking with this parishioner a few weeks ago about him. She was being very kind and talking about how she had seen me interacting with him as a parent and the love and affection she had seen us share. And then she spoke about what it will be like for him to grow up in the church, to feel sense of belonging in the places I serve, how he will “walk into church with his chest puffed out, so proud of his daddy.”
I tell this story because I wonder if that’s what I’m supposed to feel about God. That sense of ownership, that sense of pride, that sense of belonging. That God has claimed me and I can claim God in return. That I can walk around with my chest puffed out, so proud of the God who loves me. And if I do that, if I can actually stake my place in the Kingdom of God assured of the hold that God has upon me, what else becomes possible? How will that shape the way I live my life?
This is where our reading from Isaiah comes in. “He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice.” God’s call is not one of accolades or triumph. We care for dimly burning wicks here, we are not building bonfires for our own glory. We shouldn’t expect heaps of attention. There is humility in Isaiah’s words but it comes from a place of strength, not debasement—it is a quiet confidence born of deep security, the blessed assurance that we belong to God. That is the ground on which we stand. Claiming God as our own and quietly working, “faithfully [to] bring forth justice.”
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The Feast of the Holy Name
- Numbers 6:22-27
- Galatians 4:4-7
- Luke 2:15-21
- Psalm 8
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Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord
- Isaiah 52:7-10
- Hebrews 1:1-4,(5-12)
- John 1:1-14
- Psalm 98
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Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord
- Isaiah 9:2-7
- Titus 2:11-14
- Luke 2:1-14(15-20)
- Psalm 96
“And when we give each other Christmas gifts in His name, let us remember that He has given us the sun and the moon and the stars, and the earth with its forests and mountains and oceans–and all that lives and move upon them. He has given us all green things and everything that blossoms and bears fruit and all that we quarrel about and all that we have misused–and to save us from our foolishness, from all our sins, He came down to earth and gave us Himself.”― Sigrid Undset (Norwegian-Danish novelist)
That beautiful quote was in the Christmas card from old friends of ours this year, parents of one of my best friends. Enclosed with the card was a letter that began with the announcement that at the age of 80, my friend’s father had given up nicotine, caffeine, and alcohol. It was a hard physical withdrawal (which he details in the letter at some length), and now as he sits to write he feels bitterly the loss of his pipe and coffee. But, he wrote, he remembers how his Midwestern Norwegian mother always used to say, ‘Oh well, you won’t have that problem in the grave.’ And, he says, it cheers him up right away. (The letter just gets better from there, by the way.)
The juxtaposition of those two things, the beautiful Sigrid Undset quote and the morbid humor, tells you a lot about this man. But this is hands down my favorite Christmas letter of all time. Because I think it gets right to the heart of it all. Everything is a gift – freely given, freely received. And when we hold it lightly we receive it all the more.
We gather tonight around this old, beautiful, simple story of the Nativity. And what a story it is. It’s such an unlikely story for someone who accidentally became the founder of a new religion (which Jesus didn’t think he was doing, by the way – Jesus was Jewish, a deeply faithful Jew of his time and place, important to remember in these days of rising antisemitism). It’s not much of an origin story for a superhero, all those poor people in a backwater place, no glitz and glamor at all. Just shabbiness and smells and uncertainty. It is amazing, truly amazing, that this is the location for our story of God coming to be one with us, Emmanuel.
But perhaps it was entirely intentional. Perhaps God didn’t come as a baby born in a palace because we might get all the wrong ideas from that. And it can be hard in a palace to keep your integrity. There’s a lot of power in a palace. There’s a lot of gold and comfort and deferential treatment. The lifestyle can make it all too easy to compromise.
Because later this baby will grow to a man, and before he begins his public ministry he will go out into the desert to prepare himself. There he will meet with three temptations – to turn the stones into bread, for he is famished; to command the angels so he won’t get hurt; to take control of all the kingdoms of the earth[1]. In other words, he will be tempted to grab power and purpose for himself rather than to live into God’s purposes for him. Which is basically our temptation, there, in a nutshell. How much harder it might be for Jesus if he’d already been used to comfort and plenty.
No, at Christmas we start with the simplest of all stories. We go back to the story of the baby laid in the manger and the poor young couple, and the shepherds, no one else of any account. It’s no wonder the secular world tries to leave this story behind in the celebration of Christmas, in the watered down references to ‘the Christmas spirit,’ whatever that’s meant to be. We struggle with the lowliness of Jesus, because we don’t want that lowliness for ourselves. This story of poverty and smallness is an affront to all we try to hold onto for our own meaning and purpose.
At a deeper level we know this, of course: that’s why we keep making and watching all those classic Christmas movies like It’s a Wonderful Life – your worth is measured by how you help others, not by your success. Or Miracle on 34th Street – the profit motive even for Macy’s isn’t as important as caring for one another. Or A Christmas Carol – you gain nothing by holding onto your wealth. Even Home Alone and Elf: all the high-powered jobs or fabulous vacations in the world aren’t as good as your family being together. All these secular stories about ‘the Christmas spirit’ – we watch and re-watch them because our hearts know better, even if we can’t quite get our lives to line up with our wisdom.
Meanwhile the health of the retail business depends on our Christmas shopping. 942.6 billion dollars is the forecast this year. The economy hangs on what we are buying. And we keep doing it, despite fears of a recession, and we are frantic about getting more. I still remember the Christmas I worked for customer service at a catalog company, taking call after call from people who were deeply angry and upset that their packages hadn’t arrived. You’re ruining her Christmas, one man told me, when I apologized that the holiday-themed blanket for his daughter couldn’t get there in time. It was a deeply unsettling experience, working that job.
But it’s not just the holiday consumption. It’s how anxious we are when the stock market goes down. How stingy we can be with our giving of time and money. And how tied up in guilty knots we are about all that we have, when so many around us have so little. It’s hard to live in our palaces, as God knows. (And it leads us into all kinds of loudly spoken and fervently held opinions about the world – smokescreens for our own lack of integrity. I’m convinced that this guilt over inequality fuels much of our political discourse these days, on both sides of the aisle.) Blessed are the poor, Jesus said, and I think he meant in part because in scripture to be poor, or poor in spirit, means being off to the side and out of the limelight, unencumbered with the complications of wealth and possessions, aware in every moment of our dependence on God alone. Our self-sufficiency trips us up a lot, in so many ways. We are glutted and anxious, all at the same time.
The truth is that we were created to live in abundance – look at the story of Adam and Eve. They weren’t placed in an arid desert to scrabble out a meager existence, even though that was the context of the location the story came from. They were placed in a lush garden, with everything they could possibly want and need. There as a gift. There to be received, with gratitude. There to be nourished by. But not to grab hold of and amass, Eve with her pile measured against what Adam had managed to hoard. And not there to forget who it was who gave it all to them, who it was who liked to walk with them in the garden in the cool of the day. They were created and not the creators, part of the beauty of creation, part of the abundance all around them. As are we.
What if this Christmas began the year for us to come back to that simplicity? I’m not talking about what is or isn’t under the tree, or how much Christmas spirit you have, or whether your week matches the secular vision of a perfect holiday. I mean what if we start again tonight with accepting who we are – each one of us God’s beloved child. God’s beloved, given so much. God’s children, naked and lowly and humble in birth and death. God’s beloved, shown in Jesus what it looks like to live fully surrounded by and dependent on God’s love – nourished through the good and the bad, upheld through fat times and lean. God’s beloved who don’t have to pile up securities and second and third and fourth homes to feel safe because we already are. Held by God in the wilderness, fed when we need it, led through the valley of the shadow of death, never abandoned.
The simplicity of the story – it is our story as well. Whether we were born in plenty or in scarcity, whether tonight we go home to much or to little. We are children of God’s abundance, meant to live in joy and gratitude and to hold it all lightly – ready to give it to others, ready to give it all up. Because it is God who holds us, tightly, powerfully. So we can let go. Merry Christmas. And blessings to you all.
[1] I owe this idea to Barbara Brown Taylor’s talk on Evolving Faith in the Wilderness
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Third Sunday of Advent
- Isaiah 35:1-10
- James 5:7-10
- Matthew 11:2-11
- Psalm 146:4-9
- or Canticle 15
Gaudete! Christus est natus ex Maria Vergine! Gaudete!
Rejoice! Christ is born of the Virgin Mary! Rejoice!
“Gaudete,” meaning “rejoice” in Latin, is the theme for our third Sunday in Advent. This word is taken from Paul’s letter to the Philippians,
chapter 4 verse 4: “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I say, rejoice.”
But does rejoicing in the third Sunday in Advent, when we are still waiting for the birth of Jesus (even if we know what happens already) not seem preemptive? I find myself asking, is it not too early to rejoice?
There’s an urgency as we await the birth of Christ. During what I consider to be one of Manhattan’s busiest seasons, I notice the extra urgency that our neighborhood and our city impresses upon us. I’m rushing to finish my final exams, to finish this sermon, to send out all my Christmad cards, to make sure everything’s ready to travel for the holiday, that all my gifts are bought!
We’re waiting for Christmas to come, it often feels like, so it can be over.
We want to get to the part where all the cards are mailed, all the gifts are opened, the morning Christmas service has been celebrated, and we get to take a Big Christmas nap! Or at least know we won’t be caught in the throes of peak tourist season or SantaCon.
But what might it look like to cherish these moments leading up to the Christmas holiday, and especially to the birth of Christ, a little bit more — so we might rest in them as well?
In his 2014 Gaudete Sunday homily, Pope Francis said that Gaudete Sunday is known as the “Sunday of joy”, and that instead of fretting about “all they still haven’t” done to prepare for Christmas, people should “think of all the good things life has given you.”
I like this image, as difficult as it may be to envision when we’re already so stressed.
But – you may ask – what is joy? What is Pope Francis even talking about, when there’s so much to do and things to remember and sermons to write and cards to mail and finals to finish and bills to pay?
Is joy a cup of coffee or a piece of chocolate, a moment alone or of quiet when your kids aren’t clamoring for attention or the subway isn’t totally packed during rush hour?
Theologian Thomas Aquinas described the difference between joy and happiness.
Happiness is the final end of man, eternal contemplation of God, which is an act of the intellect. It’s essentially man-made and can be achieved “on our own” through doing things we enjoy for the sake of our own benefit.
Joy, however, is itself not a virtue, but is an effect of the virtue of charity, or love. The act of giving one’s self, for the sake of others, or for the greater good of humankind, sparks joy, to quote Marie Kondo.
But who else does that sound like? Giving one’s self for the sake of others?
Joy is not manufactured, it is bestowed, and only through a true breakthrough of love.
So, what makes joy different from happiness?
The distinction brings to mind the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ.
The very notion that Christ was born & died for us, that we ourselves might be saved from sin & grow closer to God as God’s own children – is that not something worth rejoicing in, in feeling and knowing the joy of God’s love?
Now of course, I’m getting ahead of myself here when it comes to our liturgical seasons, you may say. But Advent is almost Lent-like, if we can let it be – the church life is cyclical – in experiencing the waiting twice a year, there’s a need for rest, for pausing, for coming into that joy through Christ.
The waiting in this season of Advent is to remind ourselves that through the recollection of the birth of Christ we might remember Christ’s true divinity and the need for his resurrection and our redemption.
That’s similar to what Paul’s noting with his letter to the Philippians. He wrote this letter as a word about his upcoming sentence in Rome, and of his optimism in the face of death.
He was imploring the Philippians to rejoice in the Lord despite one’s circumstances, just as he did, and as others of the Christian faith did, have done, and will continue to do.
He gives the Phillippians the reminder to rejoice in the Lord with the conviction that his and their salvation is within Christ, and through Christ, and Christ’s works are what will redeem us all.
Our reading from the Gospel of John for this Sunday also lays this claim, as it describes the mission of John the Baptist through the eyes of Jesus, connecting John even deeper with Advent.
Jesus praises John, as he is out in the wilderness and in the world heeding the call from God. He’s not wearing a golden – or even a white – robe, nor is he loudly condemning sinners. He’s not doing anything beyond the simple act of baptism – of bringing people to water and recognizing their divinity.
Jesus knows this, and emphasizes how John is conducting the work God has called him to do, and is in dialogue with the ways Jesus engages the community in the same manner of grace and love.
Jesus is reminding us that those who act on their recognition of humanity and the need to do good works are those who will sustain us.
They are the ones who will bring us joy, and the places they create are the spaces where joy can enter in.
We can’t simply slip into complacency or avoidance – that’s not what God is calling us to. It takes action, real, tangible, communal action, to create joy.
It’s easy to hope & to believe that God is near solely through partaking in the Eucharist, but time & time again we see the way Jesus calls us into action – the way Jesus is begging us to recognize the means by which we too might experience joy.
Think about our country at this moment. In the midst of a battle over queer rights, same sex marriage is slated to be codified into law. It took a majority of House and Senate to make that happen – along with countless voices calling for it to become a named reality, for the joy of families and communities to feel safe and secure within that codification.
During such a volatile and uncertain time for our country, where joy often feels far and hatred is creeping in, Rapahel Warnock won his Senate seat, giving (to my knowledge – despite all things I’m anything but a politician or lobbyist) Democrats the Senate and a fighting chance at equity and justice in our country. He couldn’t have done that without this community, near and far, rallying around him, and empowering others.
Warnock said that a vote is like a prayer, and I think there are many actions that contain the same righteousness and God-guided action.
If joy is achieved through the works of charity enacted with inspiration from God, caring for our neighbors through programs like Saturday Kitchen or even voting for someone who will protect our most vulnerable neighbors are a substantial opportunity for joy for ourselves as well as our community.
I’ve talked a lot about what we can do and what we have done, but I also recognize it’s taken a lot to get to where we are right now, and we’re likely pretty exhausted.
With that, I think it’s also really powerful to realize just how amazing it is to notice all these opportunities that have shown themselves in the acts of community and country to care for each other, as well as in the silences in between where we might feel God’s presence and know God.
While we ask for more, and continue to do more, can we not find joy in celebrating these achievements?
Rest itself is an act of charity, and a means for joy, especially at this time. We might feel closer to God as we make room for these sacred pauses.
I have seen the means by which this congregation touches joy, especially as we are embodied, full, and entering in with our complete and messy selves.
I’ve watched the way this congregation has continued to be refreshed and reinvigorated by one another, by living in the image of God.
Last week, our “mini-bazaar” raised over 500 dollars for the Masaka Association of People with Disabilities Living with HIV/AIDS and even more money for Saturday Kitchen.
We also celebrated the Jollys before their departure to their Australian homeland, and moved right into conversations about the Saint Nicholas Gift Drive, the Greening of the Church, and the Christmas Pageant and Brunch.
That’s a lot of work, done with the intention of seeing the God-given dignity of our neighbor, and of cherishing this community we hold so dear.
There’s also silence as we take more time during our service to pray silently, to look at the images in our stained glass, and to let God enter in.
This joy we’ve created can be our restoration and our hope, too, as we love our neighbors, our community, ourselves, and God. The world is a dark and scary place, but I find optimism to be a means by which I can be refreshed. Sometimes – most times – I need someone else to remind me that this optimism is part of being reinvigorated, so I can do the hard work. And I find that here, with each of you, and I find it as I continue to pray and remember the birth of Christ, While we continue to patiently await, we can also remember that when Christ comes – Gaudete!
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Second Sunday of Advent
- Isaiah 11:1-10
- Romans 15:4-13
- Matthew 3:1-12
- Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19
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First Sunday of Advent
- Isaiah 2:1-5
- Romans 13:11-14
- Matthew 24:36-44
- Psalm 122
We finally took part in the experience of watching the Macy’s parade on Thursday. My friend Ann Kansfield, who preached here earlier this year, is a chaplain with the Fire Department, and because of that, she was able to invite friends along to a prime viewing location along Bryant Park. I’ve never watched the parade before, but there we were, hot chocolates in hand, cheering the high school bands and wondering who the celebrities were (well, the teens knew, but the rest of us were clueless). It was a beautiful day, and ok, it was pretty dang fun – one of those times big city NYC turns into kind of a small town. And as you all know, the parade, which begins with fall leaves and turkeys, reaches its pinnacle at the very end, when Santa and all the Christmas performers make their way to Macy’s on 34th Street. Enough with the Thanksgiving spirit, here come the real holidays, and Santa is here to bring you everything you want, which you can buy at Macy’s!
Ready or not, here we are: Santa is installed at Santaland and the holidays have begun.
So in response to all of this, we’ve built in a little more Advent to the worship. In the place of one of the readings, we gave you…quiet. You’re welcome. We’ll offer this the next few Sundays as well, with a reflection question and prompts for how to use the time – but you can also just sit there and close your eyes. We all need this kind of time, even just 3 minutes. Maybe you can try adding in something like this for your every day.
The season of Advent is the season of preparation, of waiting and longing for God to be with us, to come to be one of us at Christmas. But of course God already has come to be one with us, and always is one with us, even as we can often feel like we’re still waiting. The seasons of the church year express different aspects of our spiritual lives that are always true, but it’s like we hold up different aspects for focus and intent at certain times of the year – spiritual growth, penitence, the experience of resurrection, the light of God, and so on, all parts of our lives always, but highlighted in the church at certain times of the year. So too, Advent, the season of waiting, is the season we’re always in really. We are always longing for God; we don’t always feel like we have found God.
I’ve been listening to a podcast with the writer and teacher James Finley, about the mystic Julian of Norwich. Julian was an anchoress, a solitary who lived in the 14th century in Norwich, England. She was led to this life commitment by a profound vision she had as a young woman, when she was on what she thought was her deathbed from a serious illness. The priest came to give her last rites and held up the crucifix before her, and as she gazed on the face of Jesus, she had a powerful experience of Jesus’ suffering and redemptive love – so powerful that when she recovered from this illness, she devoted the rest of her life to writing and meditating on this vision, and counseling others in their spiritual path.
In her work, Julian writes about her vision, which she called ‘Showings,’ and then writes, “I wanted to see more. I was answered in my reason, if God wishes to show you more, God will be your light. You need none but him. For I saw him and I sought him.” “I had him, and I lacked him.”
With these words, Julian names one of the basic truths of the spiritual life. We have some experience, some moment, when we get a glimpse of God – perhaps when we’re a small child, maybe in a time of prayer. But it also might come in a situation where we don’t think of it as God, when a piece of music overcomes us, or our breath catches a little at the sunset, or we find ourselves tearing up in conversation with a trusted friend. And maybe it’s only later that we come to call it God, this inner awakening, this feeling of God. But it doesn’t stay, this feeling, and we want to feel it again – so we embark on the spiritual path. We saw God, we caught a glimpse, and then God wasn’t right there anymore. So we start seeking after God. We have God, we grasp God all in a moment, and then the next minute, we realize we don’t have God at all. We long for God, and we have to live in that longing.
So here we are today, gathered together in our longing. This time of year is an easy time to get distracted by other things – the busyness of the holidays, the demands of the job at year-end, the family drama, the money woes. And we are so often easily distracted from our longing. We try to seek to plug the gap with other things besides God – anesthetizing ourselves with drugs or alcohol or food, turning our spiritual desire into unhappy romance, subverting our desire for spiritual growth into professional ambition. But just as the holidays provide all kinds of ways to distract ourselves, they also seem to bring us reality checks, as we see that our lives don’t stack up to the ideal visions around us. The pictures and images of this season show people at peace with one another, in warm and loving families, surrounded by an abundance of good things. When we are in strife with our loved ones, or living alone or in poverty, or dealing with trauma, those images can show us all too starkly how far we are from our ideal. Just as the church season of Advent highlights the waiting and longing that are always part of our spirits, so too the secular holiday season highlights all the ways we try to avoid it. No wonder everything feels so keyed up this time of year. We feel our longing even more acutely, even while everything around us tries to pretend that longing isn’t there.
But Julian’s words also include the deeply comforting idea that as we seek God, we can trust that we are exactly where we should be: ‘I wanted to see more. I was answered in my reason, if God wishes to show you more, God will be your light.’ As James Finley words it, ‘God’s presence is completely given to you. And the love of God’s given to you completely as where you are, not where you think you’re supposed to be. And when you do see more, God will be the light in which you will see more.’
In other words, whether we see God or don’t see God, whether we feel God’s presence or don’t, God is completely present and completely loving us in that moment. It doesn’t depend on us getting it right, as if only when we pray correctly or get more religious will God show up for us. God’s love is pure grace, right here and now. We keep seeking, and God shows us more and more, in God’s good time. Every year we come around again to the season of waiting and anticipation; every year we come further and further into the mystery of God’s love for us. And we don’t have to do anything at all to receive it.
So welcome to Advent, again. Welcome to the time where the conditions around us get especially in our way on the spiritual path; welcome to the time when the conditions around us put us even more firmly on that path. Both are true. So take a little quiet where you can find it. And may this time be holy for you – holy in your longing, holy in the emptiness, holy in the wisps of joy that point us toward God. God loves you now and always. Always.
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Christ the King Jeremiah 23:1-6 Psalm 46 Colossians 1:11-20 Luke 23:33-43 From our reading from the letter to the Christians at Colossae: May you be made strong with all the...
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The Twenty-Third Sunday after Pentecost Malachi 4:1-2a Psalm 98 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13 Luke 21:5-19
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All Saints’ Day Job 19:23-27a Psalm 17:1-9 2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17 Luke 20:27-38 Earlier this week, I came across the following tweet by organizational psychologist Adam Grant: “Too many people...
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The Feast of St. Simon & St. Jude Deuteronomy 32:1-4 Ephesians 2:13-22 John 15:17-27 Psalm 119:89-96 And Jesus said to his disciples, I am giving you these commands so that...
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Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost Jeremiah 14:7-10,19-22 Psalm 84:1-6 2 Timothy 4:6-8,16-18 Luke 18:9-14
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The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost Genesis 32:22-31 Psalm 121 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 Luke 18:1-8 “And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” Rabbi Abraham...
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Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7 Psalm 66:1-11 2 Timothy 2:8-15 Luke 17:11-19 Most people go to seminary seeking some sort of satisfaction. Satisfying a bishop’s requirements, or...
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The Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost Amos 6:1a,4-7 Psalm 146 1 Timothy 6:6-19 Luke 16:19-31
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Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost Amos 8:4-7 Psalm 113 1 Timothy 2:1-7 Luke 16:1-13 Every now and then I come across a headline that restores my faith in humanity. I hope...
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Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost Deuteronomy 30:15-20 Psalm 1 Philemon 1-21 Luke 14:25-33
The post September 4, 2022 – The Rev. Katharine Flexer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost Sirach 10:12-18 Psalm 112 Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 Luke 14:1, 7-14
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Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost Isaiah 58:9b-14 Psalm 103:1-8 Hebrews 12:18-29 Luke 13:10-17
The post August 21, 2022 – The Rev. Katharine Flexer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost Jeremiah 23:23-29 Psalm 82 Hebrews 11:29-12:2 Luke 12:49-56
The post August 14, 2022 – The Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
In this episode of the St. Michael’s Podcast, Damon Hankoff talks with Mother Kate about themes from her sermon on Sunday, May 22nd.
The post Episode Seven: Discussing Spiritual Practices with Mother Kate appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost Genesis 18:20-32 Psalm 138 Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19) Luke 11:1-13 The hard thing about summer is that it’s really hot in church, people are on vacation,...
The post July 24, 2022 – The Rev. Katharine Flexer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost Genesis 18:1-10a Psalm 15 Colossians 1:15-28 Luke 10:38-42
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The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost Deuteronomy 30:9-14 Psalm 25:1-9 Colossians 1:1-14 Luke 10:25-37 A lawyer stands up to test Jesus and asks him this question: what must I do to...
The post July 10, 2022 – The Rev. Katharine Flexer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost Isaiah 66:10-14 Psalm 66:1-8 Galatians 6:(1-6)7-16 Luke 10:1-11, 16-20 Many years ago, one of my cousins got married in Charlottesville, VA. Now there’s nothing particularly...
The post July 3, 2022 – The Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Third Sunday after Pentecost 1 Kings 19:15-16,19-21 Psalm 16 Galatians 5:1,13-25 Luke 9:51-62
The post June 26, 2022 – The Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Second Sunday after Pentecost Isaiah 65:1-9 Psalm 22:18-27 Galatians 3:23-29 Luke 8:26-39
The post June 19, 2022 – The Rev. Katharine Flexer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
Trinity Sunday: Youth Sunday Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31 Romans 5:1-5 John 16:12-15 Psalm 8
The post June 12, 2022 – Allison Okimoto appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Day of Pentecost Genesis 11:1-9 Acts 2:1-21 John 14:8-17, (25-27) Psalm 104:25-35, 37 Take a deep breath. Maybe put your hand on your chest. Feel your lungs expand...
The post June 5, 2022 – The Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Seventh Sunday of Easter Acts 16:16-34 Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21 John 17:20-26 Psalm 97
The post May 29, 2022 – The Rev. Kate Flexer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Sixth Sunday of Easter Acts 16:9-15 Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5 John 14:23-29 Psalm 67
The post May 22, 2022 – The Rev. Frank Hakoola appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Fifth Sunday of Easter Acts 11:1-18 Revelation 21:1-6 John 13:31-35 Psalm 148
The post May 15, 2022 – The Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Fourth Sunday of Easter Acts 9:36-43 Revelation 7:9-17 John 10:22-30 Psalm 23 Theme: Good Works – the tool for our Witness This week was one of those sad weeks...
The post May 8, 2022 – The Rev. Frank Hakoola appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Third Sunday of Easter Acts 9:1-6, (7-20) Revelation 5:11-14 John 21:1-19 Psalm 30
The post May 1, 2022 – The Rt. Rev. Andrew Dietsche appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Second Sunday of Easter Acts 5:27-32 Revelation 1:4-8 John 20:19-31 Psalm 118:14-29
The post April 24, 2022 – The Rev. Sam Owen appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Feast of the Resurrection Isaiah 65:17-25 Acts 10:34-43 John 20:1-18 In our household, we love funny movies and TV sketches. But even more than watching them, we love retelling...
The post April 17, 2022 – The Rev. Katharine Flexer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Great Vigil of Easter Genesis 7:1-5, 11-18, 8:6-18, 9:8-13 [The Flood] Exodus 14:10-31; 15:20-21 [Israel’s deliverance at the Red Sea] Isaiah 55:1-11 [Salvation offered freely to all] Ezekiel 37:1-14...
The post April 16, 2022 – The Rev. Julie Hoplamazian appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
Good Friday Isaiah 52:13-53:12 Hebrews 4:14-16; 5:7-9 John 18:1-19:42 Psalm 22 And so we’re here to commemorate and remember and relive a terrible, tragic death that happened 2000...
The post April 15, 2022 – The Rev. Katharine Flexer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
Maundy Thursday Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14 1 Corinthians 11:23-26 John 13:1-17, 31b-35 Psalm 116:1, 10-17
The post April 14, 2022 – The Rev. Frank Hakoola appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Fifth Sunday in Lent Isaiah 43:16-21 Philippians 3:4b-14 John 12:1-8 Psalm 126
The post April 3, 2022 – The Rev. Frank Hakoola appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
The Fourth Sunday in Lent Joshua 5:9-12 2 Corinthians 5:16-21 Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32 Psalm 32 I’m an only child. I know nothing of sibling rivalry and family jealousy. Yet, I...
The post March 27, 2022 – Eva Bogino appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.
In this episode of the St. Michael’s Podcast, Damon Hankoff talks with Tamara Plummer about themes from her sermon on Sunday, September 26th. Find Tamara’s podcast Pursuing Call on Spotify:...
The post Episode Six: Discussing Liminal Space with Tamara Plummer appeared first on Saint Michael's Church.