Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025, “The future ain’t what it used to be” by the Reverend Jeannie Martz

Probably one of the most unintentionally profound things my favorite “theologian,” the late baseball great Yogi Berra, ever said – other than “Pair up in three’s” – was “The future ain’t what it used to be;” and certainly Mary Magdalene, weeping in the early morning darkness outside Jesus’ empty tomb, can relate to that.

          For her and for the other disciples, the future isn’t at all what it used to be, because the future used to be filled with Jesus.  Until his arrest on Thursday and his trial and crucifixion on Friday, Mary’s future and the future of all of Jesus’ disciples was filled with his preaching and his teaching, his compassion and his healing – filled with his very presence and, through him, filled with the presence of God...but now he’s gone; and on this sad morning during a sad Passover celebration, Mary has come to weep for whatever is left of the future.

          Much to her surprise and her shock, however, Mary finds the tomb wide open and empty, with the huge stone blocking the entrance rolled away and Jesus’ body nowhere to be seen.

She runs to tell Simon Peter and “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” who is assumed to be John, that Jesus’ body has been removed from its resting place, and the two of them run to the tomb to see for themselves.  Finding it just as Mary has said, no stone, no body, and as John tells us in this account, with them not yet understanding the scripture, the two men basically scratch their heads in puzzlement and go back to their homes.    

Mary has followed the men back to the tomb where her heart lies and she remains, convinced that Jesus’ body is still around there somewhere, if she can just find someone who will tell her where it’s been moved to.  She asks two angels who she doesn’t realize are angels; she asks a gardener who she doesn’t realize isn’t a gardener; and then she hears her name spoken by a familiar voice – “Mary!” -- and suddenly it’s deja vu all over again, and the future ain’t what it used to be once more!

          As Ps. 30 says a little less colloquially, “Weeping may spend the night, but joy comes in the morning.”

          Joy does indeed come in the morning, joy and excitement, especially on this Easter morning when we come together to celebrate our new future, and our new life; when we come together to celebrate joy with each other.  One of the prayers in both the Good Friday and the Easter Vigil liturgies asks God to “...let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new...” and certainly Easter answers this prayer:  things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and the future ain’t what it used to be.

          Now, the road to the cross, and our participation in the violent reality of the cross, had put our future in jeopardy, as we turned from being a group of disciples into an angry, bloodthirsty mob.  Well, the blood we wanted was the blood we got – and as the violence against Jesus cast us all down, so does the blood of Christ raise us all up; so does the blood of the risen Christ transform the mob into a community of faith – and a community of faith is probably the best place in the world to pair up in three’s.

          One of St. Matthias’ regular supply priests, the Rev. Rob Bethancourt, is a good friend and a former Dean of Deanery 9.  As Dean, Fr. Rob was the preacher at my service of institution as Rector of Trinity, Orange back in 2008 – but his being the preacher hadn’t been the original plan.  I was under the impression that Bp. Sergio Carranza, the instituting bishop, was going to preach.  With 20 minutes to go until the beginning of the service, standing in conversation with Bp. Sergio and Rob+, I learned that the bishop was under the impression that anybody BUT him was going to preach; and he wasn’t comfortable suddenly winging it on the fly in English.  After a very long Holy Spirit moment of silence during which I think I stopped breathing, Rob+, bless his heart, said, “I’ll preach.”

And it really was a Holy Spirit moment, because there couldn’t possibly have been a better and more appropriate sermon celebrating new leadership and my presence at Trinity!  In his sermon, Rob+ gave me advice that he borrowed from our common love of scuba diving, and one of his pointers, in addition to “don’t hold your breath” and “have fun,” the first of his pointers, in fact, had to do with community:  always have a buddy, he said.

          Well, always having a buddy, sharing in the support and presence of a faith community, is good advice for all of us; and in fact, it’s more than just good advice:  being in community, supporting each other, bearing one another’s burdens and sharing one another’s joys, is part of the essence of Christianity.  Our faith is a communal faith:  our sacrament of initiation, baptism, is our entrance and welcome into the community.  Our central act of worship, the Holy Eucharist, transforms us into the Body of Christ as together we “re-member” the Lord.  Our central commandment within the faith community, the new commandment given to us by Jesus himself, is a communal commandment:  Love one another as I have loved you.  We can’t be Christians by ourselves, not by definition, and certainly not in fact.  Our faith is, and always has been, counter-cultural.  We need the mutual strength of the Body gathered to enable us to witness, and to stand firm against the ways and the powers of the world.

          And so we pair up in three’s:  you, me, and the Risen Lord, present with us in the strength of the community; present among us in the power of the Spirit; and present within us through the water of baptism and the breaking of bread.  As (for real) theologian Marcus Borg has written, “The truth of Easter is grounded in the continuing experience of Jesus....Easter is God’s ‘yes’ to Jesus,” says Borg, “the affirmation that he is the decisive disclosure of what God is like, and of the life which is full of God.”  (LP, “Easter”, p. 17)

          That life full of God is sustained here, in community; and our continuing experience of Jesus is nurtured here, in community.

          To go back to that Vigil prayer in its entirety:  “O God of unchangeable power and eternal light:  Look favorably on your whole Church, that wonderful and sacred mystery; by the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation; let the whole world see and know that things which were cast down are being raised up, and things which had grown old are being made new, and that all things are being brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made, your Son Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.”  (BCP 280)

          All things have been made new; the Lord is risen indeed, and the future, our future, ain’t what it used to be – alleluia, alleluia, alleluia! 

Amen.

Palm Sunday, April 13, 2025, "Were we there?" by the Reverend Jeannie Martz

Especially in light of our just-completed Passion reading, one of the most powerful songs we often sing during Holy Week is the much-loved African American spiritual “Were you there?”  (The Hymnal 1982, #172)

              “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?  Were you there when they crucified my Lord?  Oh!  Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.  Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” 

              “Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?  Were you there when they pierced him in the side?  Were you there when they laid him in the tomb?  Sometimes it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble…Were you there?” 

              In his 1942 best-selling novel The Robe, and then later in its 1953 film adaptation, author Lloyd Douglas touches on this same theme, focusing on the robe of Jesus, that seamless, one-piece garment, and on the Roman tribune Marcellus who, loosely based on Scripture, wins the robe in a game of dice played in the shadow of the cross while he oversees Jesus’ crucifixion.  Focusing on that robe and on the effect that owning it has on Marcellus in the wake of his actions, Douglas’ story traces Marcellus’ emotional and spiritual deterioration as he is increasingly haunted by the memory of what he’s done. 

              “Were you there?”  “Were you out there?” becomes the question that Marcellus asks again and again in his misery, the question he asks everyone he meets about the experience he cannot escape or forget.  “Were you out there?”

              With a nod to Marcellus, and speaking theologically, the Greek word anamnesis is a term that refers to the spiritual action of bringing a past event into the present, our present, so that we here become participants in the event just as much as the original participants were.

              For example – and a very timely example it is, as Passover 2025, on the Jewish calendar Passover 5785, began yesterday evening at sundown – and for Jesus in his time and for all Jews through the centuries, the Seder dinner, the ceremonial dinner eaten on the first night of Passover, last night, the Seder dinner is all about anamnesis.  As the lamb shank is eaten with bitter herbs and unleavened bread, as the youngest person present asks, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”, as all the pieces of the ritual and of the story fall into place, the very first Passover with its flight from Egypt is re-membered, put back together, brought forward from Biblical times into the present; and as God’s deliverance comes forward in time, God brings all the children of Israel in every generation out of bondage in Egypt once again.

              In our own Christian worship, anamnesis is at work in our Eucharistic prayers as we tell the story of Jesus’ final Seder, which we call the Last Supper.  “On the night he was handed over to suffering and death, our Lord Jesus Christ took bread,” we say, bringing the meal in that upper room forward into our time so that we too are disciples sitting around that table, we too are eating that bread and drinking that wine in the presence of the Lord.

              So, although we were not “out there” at the cross in the literal sense that Marcellus means, through the anamnesis of this Sunday of the Passion, through the anamnesis of the services of Holy Week, we are in fact “out there.”  Today especially, we are out there to wave palms and to shout “Hosanna;” and we are out there as well to shout, “Crucify!”

              As I’m sure many of us remember, amidst much advance publicity, back in 2004 actor and producer Mel Gibson released his take on Jesus’ crucifixion in his very graphic movie “The Passion of the Christ.”  Personally, I had mixed feelings about “The Passion” at the time, and through the years my opinion hasn’t really changed.  I think the film tells us a lot more about Mel Gibson himself and about the very rigid form of pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism he embraces than it does about the actual Passion of Jesus, and about God’s love and self-emptying on the cross…but that might just be me.

              This being said, however, “The Passion of the Christ” does serve as a very powerful reminder that we who do shout “Crucify!” – and we all do shout “Crucify!” even if we think we wouldn’t have at the time – Gibson’s film is a reminder that we do all have blood on our hands.

              A Wake Forest University professor named Eric Wilson reflects on his own response to a gory Passion play he attended some years back at a megachurch in South Carolina.  In a book called Everyone Loves a Good Train Wreck: Why We Can’t Look Away, Wilson writes that he had gone to see the play because he was curious about why, like the Gibson film before it, why modern-day, live Passion dramas have a reputation for being excessively violent.

              “Is exaggerated violence in Passion plays merely a product of our baser natures?” he wonders, “Or does the savagery actually have a proper place in the crucifixion’s meaning?”  (Christian Century, 2/22/12, p. 10)

          What Wilson discovered about himself at that play surprised him.  Disgusted by the brutality of Jesus’ arrest and torture, and pleased with himself for being so, Wilson suddenly hit the wall.  “Just as I was settling into smugness,” he writes, “the crucifixion occurred.  The visceral torture, only ten feet from where I was sitting, tore me from my aloofness.  Exploitation or not, the episode moved me.  I had never seen pain performed so intensely, and the agony gripped me, jerked me toward empathy:  I imagined as palpably as I could what it would feel like to be starved and dehydrated, bruised all over and cut to shreds; to have thorns lacerating my head and nails hammered into my hands and feet; to have my limbs strained to the point of rending.”

              The Passion play Wilson attended finished with the appearance of a resurrected Christ all in white, with cheering, and with a fireworks display; and Wilson admits, “The violence had moved me.  On the most basic level, I was, I had to admit, titillated by the torture.  It gave me a physiological rush – increased pulse, tingly skin.  But the violence also whipped my emotions to high turbulence.  Fear was there, and pity, too, and an array of other feelings – remorse, anxiety, nostalgia, affection.  The intensity was enlivening; the aftermath, serene….”

              He continues, “All depictions of violence are dangerous, I realized, especially in performances of the crucifixion:  they threaten to stir up sick thrills alone and drown out any higher moral message.  But precisely in the risk,” he writes, “I also understood is the power:  brutal representations of the Passion can inspire intense acts of empathy.”

              In his book, Wilson finishes by asking whether or not the risk is worth it and then he says, “When the savagery works to reveal difficult truths or moral challenges, when the luridness isn’t an end to itself, the answer, for me, is yes.  The artist creating the violence must hope that the better natures of the audience will prevail, that empathy will transcend exploitation.”  (Ibid., p. 11)

              Unlike the Passion play that Eric Wilson attended at that megachurch in South Carolina, the Passion narrative we just heard this morning ends with death, not with resurrection; and certainly not with fireworks.  It ends with that pronouncement that turns everything upside down, the pronouncement that starts to devour Marcellus and, for a while, his sanity.  In the Gospels of Matthew and Mark, today’s story ends with the centurion’s recognition that “Truly this man was God’s Son.”

              Here in Luke, things are slightly different.  The centurion does witness to the dead Jesus’ innocence, but Luke leaves it to others to recognize Jesus’ divinity on Easter Day.  At this point in Luke, Jesus is dead and Marcellus has won himself a robe.

              Even so, this is still Passion Sunday, and we still have blood on our hands.  If ever we have cause to tremble; if ever we are called to empathy, it’s here and it’s now.

              We are out there today, as we will be again on Good Friday.  We are all out there, and we stand at the foot of a cross slick with blood; blood that we in our blood-lust, blood that we in our “physiological rush” and our mob mentality have clamored for; and as the curtain of the temple is torn in two, as heaven and earth collide and groan, only now do we hear the centurion say that truly, truly – or as Scottish commentator William Barclay would say, “look you” – only now do we hear that look you, this man was innocent; this man was the Messiah; this man is God’s Son.

              And, so, what?

              This is today’s question, the question each of us needs to think on, to pray on, and to meditate on throughout this Holy Week:  so what?  What difference does all of this make?  What difference does any of this make?

              At the end of the day, what difference does Jesus make?  What difference does his life and ministry make in my life?  What difference does his crucifixion make?  Who am I with his crucifixion, and who am I without it? 

And it’s not just all about me:  What difference does the crucifixion of Jesus make in your life, and in the life of your family?

              Were we out there when they crucified our Lord?  And if we were…so what?

Amen.

The Fourth Sunday in Lent, March 30, 2025 by the Reverend Jeannie Martz

Just as the third Sunday in Advent brings a lighter feel to a season of reflection with the lighting of the pink candle on the Advent wreath; with the reading of Mary’s song, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord;” as well as with Paul’s reminder to his churches to “Rejoice in the Lord always;” so here on the fourth Sunday in Lent we also have a change in the seasonal atmosphere.  We also have a lightening of our hearts as we hear the promise of new life.

              “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation,” Paul writes.  “Everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”  The coming of Christ has made all the difference, he says.  All things, “including time, history, and all that goes to make up life and the world as we know it, are created over again….A new age has dawned….For those who are “in Christ,” says one commentator, “a new [world] order has begun.”  (Craddock, 157) 

Through Christ, we have been made new, we have been reconciled to God and our very relationship with God has been made new as well.  Not restored, not put back the way it was before, but in Christ, made entirely new, starting from a whole new footing.

              And because of this new relationship with God, which is ours as followers of Jesus and as participants in his resurrection, we ourselves are called to go forth and bring the same reconciliation and healing into the world – reconciliation with God and with each other, reconciliation even at the level of our most intimate relationships; and as today’s readings from Scripture attest, the key to bringing reconciliation is to first engage in forgiveness:  to engage in the process of forgiving, and also in the process of being forgiven.

              Here on this fourth Sunday in Lent, it’s no accident that all of our readings – not just 1 Corinthians, but Joshua, the psalm, and Luke as well, deal with issues of forgiveness; and three years ago, at Trinity in Orange, we used as our Lenten study book the late Archbishop Desmond and his daughter the Rev. Mpho Tutu’s joint book, The Book of Forgiving.  I don’t think you’ve ever used this book here at St. Matthias, but I’ll put in my vote for its power and its ongoing relevance, especially in these days.

              Not surprisingly, Archbp. Tutu and his daughter are by no means the first clergy to write a contemporary book about the dynamics of forgiveness, as well as about the importance of forgiveness for our own spiritual, emotional, and physical health.  Back in 1992, in my former Diocese of Southeast Florida, a priest named Bob Libby wrote, “…when we are unable to let go of the past and so to forgive, our identity is defined by who we hate and who has hurt us.”  (The Forgiveness Book, 36)

              Fr. Libby went on to say, “As much as I often want to tell someone that what they need to do is forgive, I know that isn’t the way to go about it…The best we can do is to be witnesses to the experiences we ourselves have had of forgiveness.”  (125)  And, as Fr. Libby himself was many years in recovery, he knew what he was talking about in terms of experiencing forgiveness in his own life.

              Witnessing to their own experiences of forgiveness as well as the experiences of others, especially in light of the work of the Reconciliation Committee in South Africa, is exactly the approach the Tutus take in their book.  They also break down the steps involved in what can be the very difficult and very emotional processes of forgiving and of being forgiven; and they emphasize above all that whichever side of the dynamic we find ourselves on, whether we’re the one forgiving or we’re the one asking for forgiveness, going forward into reconciliation is a choice we make and a journey we undertake for ourselves.  We make this choice for our own freedom, and for our own future.

              Yes, the Archbishop and his daughter do agree along with Paul that by walking the path of forgiveness in solidarity and in companionship with others, we ourselves do become ministers of God’s reconciliation in the world.  First and foremost, however, we walk the path of forgiveness for our own sake.

              And what does walking this path entail?  I’m going to talk about the details in a moment, but before I go on, I first want to state very clearly that no 15 minute sermon, and certainly not this one, can do justice to the emotional and psychological seriousness of forgiving and of being forgiven.  Forgiveness is a complex, time consuming, and intimate undertaking; and depending on the offense or offenses in question, a lot of bad memories and a lot of pain can be stirred up in us.  I want to emphasize that none of us should take either these memories or these experiences lightly, because forgiveness may be the work of a lifetime. 

Additionally, if these words today lead any of us to want to know more about walking the fourfold path in our own lives and we have any hesitation, I encourage us to speak to a trusted friend, clergyperson, or other qualified helper about any concerns going in.

              All this being said, one of the gifts of The Book of Forgiving is a visual diagram of what the Tutus call the Revenge Cycle and the Forgiveness Cycle.  Any time we’re injured or insulted or diminished in any way, they say, we stand at a fork in the road with a decision that is in our power to make:  we can choose to retaliate and seek revenge on the one who has hurt us; or we can choose to move forward towards healing and forgiveness – realizing that moving forward towards forgiveness does NOT mean forgetting, denying justice, or letting the offender off the hook.

              If we choose the path of the Revenge Cycle, the Tutus say, we are choosing to remain in a closed loop that will perpetuate the cycle of pain, continuing to deny the humanity we share with the one who has hurt us.  If we choose revenge, we are choosing to remain a prisoner of the past as we cycle around, again and again, “rejecting our pain and denying our grief.” (Tutu, 50).  And, as Fr. Libby pointed out, if this is the choice we make, the Revenge Cycle will become the source of our basic identity.

              However, the Archbishop says, it doesn’t have to be this way.  “Instead of rejecting our pain and grief,” he writes, “in the Forgiveness Cycle we accept our pain and grief.  If it is a small slight to our dignity or a small harm we have experienced from a spouse, this might be the end of it, and we might be able to forgive that person quite quickly and easily.  However, if we have been hurt deeply or have lost someone or something that is precious to us, this part of the Forgiveness Cycle may be intense and long.”  (51)

              He goes on to say, “When we face into and accept our pain, we start to recognize that we don’t have to stay stuck in our story.”  (52, emphasis mine)

              We don’t have to stay stuck in our story.

              If we choose to move into the Forgiveness Cycle, there are four steps in the overall path – and this is where here in the pulpit on Sunday morning, I can only offer these steps as food for further thought. They are totally not the whole enchilada. 

The first step is “Telling our Story,” telling what’s happened to us as many times as we need to, to whoever we feel safe telling it to, as through the telling, we work to make sense of the situation for ourselves. 

The second step is “Naming the Hurt,” being able to identify our feelings in response to what’s happened to us; naming the feelings in our story, and accepting them. 

The third step – and there can be a long, long time between steps two and three.  This is where things can’t be minimized – the third step is recognizing the common humanity we share with the one who has hurt us, and “Granting Forgiveness” – and again, very important, to grant someone forgiveness is not to condone or forget what they’ve done, not to deny ourselves justice for the injury we’ve experienced.  “Forgive and forget,” either as a behavioral directive or as a quote, in NOT in the Bible.  NOT.

              Going back to “Granting Forgiveness,” as Mpho Tutu writes, referring to an ongoing struggle with granting forgiveness in her own life, “It isn’t as if the feelings go away once they are named.  This is so important to realize.  The Fourfold Path isn’t a path where you step off one piece and step completely into another.”  (134).  As with the stages of grief, which are also involved here, the steps go back and forth, two steps forward and three steps back, and so on.

              Finally though, when we’re ready, the fourth step is “Renewing or Releasing the Relationship” – and to clarify, as in 1 Corinthians, “renewing” a relationship is not to restore it, not to make it like it used to be.  To renew a relationship, whether with God or with another human being, is to make it a new creation, starting from a new place…and sometimes a relationship does need to be released instead.

              Now:  the steps involved in asking for forgiveness (as opposed to granting forgiveness) are similar to those just discussed.  The differences are that “Confession,” or admitting what we’ve done, replaces “Telling our Story”; and “Taking Responsibility” for the harm we’ve caused and making restitution, however and whenever possible, replaces “Naming the Hurt.”  

              Interestingly enough, the steps of asking for forgiveness can be seen in this morning’s psalm, Psalm 32. 

Taking a look at the text in our worship booklet, in verses 1 and 2 the psalmist celebrates the completion of the cycle and celebrates the joy of having been forgiven:  “Happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven, and whose sin is put away!”  In verses 3 and 4, he reflects on the destructive nature of not telling his story, of keeping his wrongdoing a secret and not confessing. In verses 5 and 6 the psalmist chooses not to conceal his guilt any longer and he names the harm, acknowledging his responsibility for the spiritual damage he has caused.  In verses 7 and 8 he celebrates his renewed relationship with God, claiming God’s assurance of protection and deliverance; and in verses 9 through 12, the psalmist goes on to instruct others, becoming a minister of reconciliation as he witnesses to his own experience of forgiveness.  This is the fourfold path at work, long before it got its contemporary name.

              We get a somewhat different spin on forgiveness in the parable Jesus tells in Luke, because at the end of the day we’re left with a true-to-life cliffhanger.  Traditionally known as the parable of the Prodigal Son, some scholars say that a better designation is actually the parable of the Loving Father, because it’s on the father that Jesus himself places the emphasis:  “There was a man who had two sons.” 

Through the course of the story, both of the man’s sons will need their father’s forgiveness, which he gladly gives; and the implication here is that as the earthly father forgives, so much more will the heavenly father forgive. 

As I said, both of the sons will need forgiveness, but will they both be willing to receive it?

              In the parable, the younger son starts out as a wealthy young Jew who over the course of time and through his own self-indulgence, ends up destitute and starving in a non-Jewish, or Gentile, country, reduced to feeding unclean pigs and coveting their unclean slops.  Coming to his senses and seeing how low he has sunk, he chooses confession as the first step in regaining his personal dignity.  He travels home to his father and according to plan, asks for forgiveness, making it clear that he’s not asking to have their relationship restored to its former state:  “I am not worthy to be called your son.”

              This is actually the last thing the younger son gets to say in the parable, because in his own compassion and joy, the father has run out to meet his son in the road and welcome him home.  He grabs his son in an embrace, cuts off his confession mid-sentence, and gives orders for a huge celebration.  The young man is clothed in finery as the feast’s honored guest, and the festivities get underway. 

(This is how we know they’re actually Episcopalian!  ;-D )

              At this point, enter the older brother who, when learning about his brother’s return and hearing the music and dancing, becomes angry and refuses to go inside.

              Pointing out that this parable was triggered in Luke by grumbling and discontent because Jesus himself was eating with collaborators and social pariahs, a Presbyterian pastor writes, “…anger doesn’t manifest itself in a singular way, because [anger] is tied to other emotions like grief, loneliness, sadness, insecurity, and more.  [Anger] isn’t just tantrums or outbursts or rage….[B]ehavior communicates.  How a person behaves…can give us a glimpse of their inner world, if we pay attention.”  (Christian Century, 3/9/22, p. 19). 

Are those who grumble about Jesus morally offended, or is there more going on inside them?  And what about those who might grumble against us?  What’s really going on?

              Back with the parable, is the older brother angry because he’s jealous, or because he’s tired of trying to keep things going; tired of trying to make up to their father for the loss of his brother?  Does he stay outside because he’s still processing the fact that his brother’s not dead after all, or does he have no desire to forgive his brother for leaving in the first place?  Does he have no interest at all in renewing their relationship?

              Both the parable and this chapter in Luke end with the father’s words of forgiveness to his older son and his assurance that the older son won’t be displaced; but even with these words, both the parable and the chapter end with the older brother still standing outside.

              Which path will he walk?  Will he choose to hold on to his anger and stay locked in his resentment?  Will he cycle round and round, caught in bitter thoughts, forgiving neither his brother nor his father?

              He made a start to telling the father his story, a telling that expressed his pain and his sense of injustice.  (“You never even gave me a young goat to celebrate with my friends!”)  Will he continue?  Will he try again?  We don’t know.

              All we can do here is to reflect on how we respond to God’s forgiveness of the righteous and the sinners alike.  All we can do is to choose which path we will take in our own lives.

              “God is forgiveness,” we sing in a popular Taize chant.  “Dare to forgive and God will be with you.  God is forgiveness.  Love, and do not fear.”

              We have been entrusted with God’s ministry of reconciliation in the world, and in our own hearts.  We are called to be witnesses to the world of the forgiveness we have experienced, and continue to experience, in our own lives, that all may find new life – and may we all have the courage to do so.  May we all dare to forgive.  May we all dare to be made new.   Ame

The Third Sunday in Lent, March 23, by the Reverend Jeannie Martz

Lent is nothing if not up front about death.  The season itself begins with the reality of death literally being in, and marked on, our faces:  “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

              We are all dust; we are all finite; we are all mortal.  Our time on this earth is limited – it has had a beginning and it will have an end.  We know this, we all know this…but knowing it doesn’t necessarily make it any easier to live with.  The moment we’re born, the meter starts running; and our very first breath brings us that much closer to our last.

              Even so, it’s still a shock when we hear our mortality articulated.  “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” is bad enough.  “You have a week; you have a month; you have a year to live”; this is something else altogether – and it’s something some among us already know.

              Some here have had these or similar words said to us, others have heard them said to people we love.  These words turn our world and our stomachs upside down, and they suddenly cast us into a surrealistic landscape where nothing is familiar, and nothing is safe.  Life itself mocks us here; our friends and loved ones become strangers; and for a time at least, even God seems to turn God’s face away.

              “You have a year to live; you have only a year to live…but you do have a year to live.”

              We do, all of us, we pray, have (at least) a year to live…even though the limited nature of that year becomes apparent in today’s Gospel reading.  The first warning that time is short was sounded to us back in Advent when we heard John the Baptist crying out, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.”

              “Get your act together,” John said then, “for [e]ven now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”  The root that ax is lying against is ours, and according to John, we have a limited amount of time left before it strikes.

              Immediately after the Feast of the Epiphany, Jesus read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth and he proclaimed that the centuries of waiting on God’s promises are over, that the year of the Lord’s favor, a year of liberation and pardon and healing, that this year is here, and that the kingdom of God has even now come among us.

              And yet, at the same time, today on this third Sunday in Lent we have the still-barren fig tree and the householder’s exasperated order, “Cut this thing down!  Why should it be taking up space that a fruitful tree can use?”

              We also have the gardener’s plea, “Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it.  If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.”  If there’s still no fruit next year; if there’s still no fruit after one more year, he says, you can cut it down. 

              Today, Jesus says, today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

              This, here and now, for you and for me, this is the year of the Lord’s favor, the year of the Lord’s digging and fertilizing; this, here, now, for all of us is God’s gracious gift of one more year.  We have a year to live; what will we do with it?  What does God want us to do with this year?

              As clergy in this pulpit have probably mentioned before, back in the first century, in those earliest years of the Church, Jesus’ followers expected his return, expected what we call the Second Coming, at any moment; and when it didn’t happen, when Jesus didn’t come again in that time, there were a lot of questions and doubts, and there was a lot of distress among the believers.

              Peter himself had to deal with this crisis of disillusionment in his own community, and what he said about Jesus’ delay in returning then, is still worth hanging on to today.  To the naysayers and to the faint of heart, Peter said, “The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.”  (2 Peter 3:9)

              The Lord doesn’t want anyone to perish, the Lord wants everyone to come to repentance.  According to Peter, the Risen Jesus is intentionally delaying his return for our sake, to give all of us time to catch up; and so the real question is, what does each of us need to do in this year?  What aeration and fertilization do we need to become aware of so that we can all come to the repentance that Jesus wants for us?

              “To repent” means to turn around, and to come back to God.  It’s an action, not a feeling.  In one sense, it means to lay before God all the things we’ve done and left undone while we were turned away; all of the things we’ve said or should have said; all of the things that deny the image of God in which we’re made.  When we repent, we turn around.  We come back and we lay these things before God so that we can be free of them, so that we can be released from the power of regret and of shame that they have over us.

              One author writes, “Without being forgiven, [without being] released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.”

              And yet this is the year of the Lord’s favor, the year of restoration through repentance and forgiveness, the year of a whole new beginning for the future and a whole new meaning for the past…if we take the gift of this one more year seriously, embracing the grace of God that is part of the dynamic of our coming back.  “Repentance,” one pastor writes, “acknowledges that God can redeem, God can set right, God can make whole…. Repentance is not a trade we make with God.  It is a leap of faith that our deepest hopes will not leave our lips unheeded.”  (Christian Century, 2/27/19, Reflections, p. 19, Eric D. Barreto).  Repentance is a leap of faith that our deepest hopes will not leave our lips unheeded.

              Jesus knows our deepest hopes.  Jesus has come as the fulfillment of our deepest hopes, that we might have life, and might have it more abundantly, in this year and for all time; and now is the time to accept his offer and his invitation.  Jesus has invited us to abide in him just as he wants to abide in, rest in, be intimate with, us…so why are we still making him reschedule his return?

              Author, poet, and Roman Catholic nun Macrina Wiederkehr has suggested, “Perhaps we don’t spend enough time dwelling in God to fall in love with God.”  Perhaps we don’t spend enough time dwelling in God, don’t spend enough time being with God, to fall in love with God.

              From out of a bush that burned but wasn’t consumed, a little bit of God-planned bait in the wilderness that enticed Moses to turn aside and come closer, from out of this living heat and light, God spoke:  “I have observed the misery of my people; I have heard their cry; I know their sufferings; and I have come down to deliver them.”  I am intimately involved with my people, says God; I know their deepest hopes; and I have entered history to bring them to wholeness and new life.

              In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God…and the Word became flesh and lived among us…God fell in love with us, came to dwell with us a long, long time ago…and I wonder how much time we need to spend with God before we fall in love with God in return.

              Our time is limited; how much will be left when we finally take that leap of faith and start to trust God with who we are?  How long will it take us to understand that in this year of grace our focus needs to be on God, and on the quality of our relationship with God?

              “[C]ome, I will send you,” I AM said to Moses; “Come, follow me,” Jesus says to each one of us.  Follow me; spend time with me; come, get to know me better.

              Thinking of his childhood in Greece, author Nikos Kazantzakis wrote, “I remember frequently sitting on the doorstep of our home when the sun was blazing, the air on fire, grapes being trodden in a large house in the neighborhood, the world fragrant with must.  Shutting my eyes contentedly, I used to hold out my palms and wait.  God always came – as long as I remained a child, He never deceived me – He always came, a child just like myself, and deposited his toys in my hands:  sun, moon, wind.  ‘They’re gifts,’ He said, ‘they’re gifts.  Play with them.  I have lots more.’  I would open my eyes.  God would vanish, but His toys would remain in my hands.”

              The toys of God, the gifts of God, the blessings of God, the presence of God, are all around us.  They’re here with me in the pulpit and with you in the congregation.  They’re shining, glooming, blowing through the windows, and coming in from Sunday School.  They’re messages on the phone, emails in the inbox, obligations at the office, and opportunities for mission and for ministry every day.  The gifts of God are for the people of God…every single day of our lives.

              We have a year to live, a year to fall in love with God; a year to turn back and prepare for life in the midst of death.

              Back in 1985, at the age of 35, a woman named Amy Harwell was diagnosed with cervical cancer and given a 0% chance of surviving five years.  After extensive surgery, radiation, and chemo, her primary tumor disappeared, but then reappeared in one of her lungs in 1987.

              More treatments and surgery, serious involvement in a leg, and then in 1995, ten years after her original diagnosis, Amy wrote, “With cancer in my recent past and likely to reappear in the near future, I had planned accordingly.  I had been so ready to die.  It was as if I had picked a destination, packed my bags, hurried down the terminal corridor, looked up at the departure monitor, and saw flashing ‘Trip Delayed.’  Now what do I do?  Stay put and wait?  Go home and come back again?  Rebook another route?... But I couldn’t stay in the terminal forever.  Nor could I idle away.  I needed to renew my commitment to life.”  (online, and in her book Ready to Live, Prepared to Die)

              In the midst of death, Amy needed to renew her commitment to life.  We have a year to live…and we also need to renew our commitment to life, to life in God’s kingdom.  We need to dwell with God, to spend time with God, to abide in God, so that we can fall in love with God as God has fallen in love with us.

              Repent, come back; for the kingdom of God is at hand and even now the ax is lying at the root of the tree.  If in this year of life we turn again and bear fruit in mission and ministry, in baptism and grace; if we turn again and fall in love with God, confident that our deepest hopes are not leaving our lips unheeded; if we take that leap of faith that is repentance, then this last year will be the first year of the best years of our lives.    Amen.

The Second Sunday in Lent, March 16, "Preparing for a Party" by J.D. Neal

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18 / Ps. 27 / Philippians 3:17-4:1 / Luke 13:31-35

Most of you have heard me preach at least a few times, so you know that my usual schtick is to really try to open up the Gospel reading, usually by doing a bunch of close-reading, paying attention to the other lessons for the day, and almost always by backing up to look at some historical or scriptural context.

I want to do something a little bit different today, because today is the second Sunday in Lent. Besides Christmas & Easter, Lent is probably the most well-known part of the Church year. Many people who have never set foot in a church probably have some vague, gloomy idea about what Lent is and probably at least know that lots of religious people fast for a while around this time each year.

When we get to these big seasons and moments in the Church’s calendar, I think it’s really important to spend at least a little bit of time reflecting on what exactly we’re doing and why we’re doing it, because it’s easy to forget, to lose sight of what this season is supposed to be for, and just to go through the motions year after year and miss all of the goodness on offer for us when we participate in the Church year.

So that’s today’s question: what is Lent all about? I think our reading from Genesis this morning actually really helps to answer that question. In the reading, Abram has just returned from a great battle in which he and his men defeated the armies of several kings in order to rescue his nephew, Lot. He has refused to keep the spoils of war, so that it would be clear to all of the surrounding peoples Abram’s success comes from ‘the Lord, God Most High’ alone, that no other king has made Abram’s household prosper.

After this, God appears to Abram and promises him an heir of his own flesh and blood and a great multitude of descendants, despite the fact that Abram is old, his wife is barren, and he has no hope of having a child of his own. This is not the first time God has made a promise like this to Abram, there’s something new here. This time, in the face of a promise that seems impossible to fulfill, Abram believes God, trusting that God will make a way where there seems to be no way — “and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.”

What follows is a strange and mysterious passage, but the gist of what many scholars think is happening here is that God appears and enacts an ancient near eastern ritual to make a covenant with Abram. The odd thing is that this covenant is one-sided; God fulfills both parts of the ritual, seeming to indicate that Abram will not need to do anything for God to fulfill the oath. God binds Godself to Abram, to fulfill this promise — all because Abram made the choice to trust God, even though he did not understand how God could make good on his promise. And, of course, we know how the story goes: after some ups and downs, God makes good on the covenant. Abram’s barren wife Sarai gives birth to a son, and a whole nation springs up from this promise that lives on to this day, and also here we are, millenia later, the spiritual children of the fulllment of this promise to Abram.

So, what does any of this have to do with Lent? This is a season where the Church traditionally fasts, where we give up some of the things that usually sustain us. This is also a season of penitence, where we start off our liturgy confessing our sins and asking for God’s restoration and mercy. But what is all the fasting and penitence for? Are we just putting ash on our heads and beating ourselves up to try to gain brownie points with God for being extra humble and contrite? No! Lent is a season of preparation.

Historically, the season of Lent developed as an extension of the practice of baptizing new Christians at Easter. In the days leading up to their baptisms, the candidates for baptism and their sponsors would enter into a special period of preparation where they would dedicate themselves to study and service and prayer, often accompanied by some kind of fasting. Eventually, this practice grew to include a period of preparation for the reconciliation of those who had been excommunicated, and later expanded to the whole Christian community.

At its root, however, Lent is not about penitence and fasting for their own sake or even primarily about repentance and forgiveness. Lent is about preparation for a great celebration; it is a season dedicated to preparing for a feast, for resurrection and new life — for a promise fulfilled. This is why Lent came to be a period of 40 days associated with Jesus’ 40 days in the wilderness and the Israelites’ 40 years in the Sinai desert. For Jesus also, these 40 days of fasting and prayer were not an end in themselves, but a preparation for the Spirit to overflow with healing and life in his ministry. The Israelites spent 40 years in the desert not because God enjoyed watching them suffer in the heat and dust but to prepare them to receive the promised land. In the wilderness, Jesus and the Israelites fasted. They were stripped of many of the things that we rely on to sustain us — our favorite foods and comforts, our wealth and security. That stripping away created a space where they encountered the sustaining power of God, where they learned that they could trust God to provide, to be with them, to fulfill God’s promises. This preparation made them the sort of people who could walk into the promised land and trust that God would hand it over to them, despite the powerful nations they found living there — made Jesus the sort of person who could just flip the bird at Herod in today’s Gospel, because he knew that God had given him a job to do and would provide for him, no matter what Herod might try to do to kill him.

In Lent, we are invited to become like them. We are invited to join with the earliest Christians and with Abram in learning to trust God. We fast and pray and set aside this Lenten space to sharpen our ability to believe that God will make good on God’s promises, to believe that the God who made a nation spring from barren old Sarah and Abraham is the same God who raised Jesus from death to life and who has promised to make new life spring from death in each every one of our lives. This is not an easy thing. Imagine how long Abraham and Sarah had grieved their inability to have children, how deep that hurt must have run within each of them and within their relationship. It is hard to trust God, especially when we are in the dark and in the wilderness. I know that it is much easier for me to muddle through, work hard, and distract myself in periods of pain and difficulty rather than to give up some of those distractions in order to create the space necessary to bring my grief to God. I know that it feels much safer to trust my own efforts and abilities (which I have some control over) than to make myself vulnerable by opening myself up to trust that God really might bring healing and new life to those places of deep pain, that Christ really might be offering me new life, and that I really might have to do nothing but wait and receive the gift.

This opening up, this trust, is the work of Lent; that is what all this fasting and preparation is for. Christ is risen, Christ will come again — and in Lent we prepare to celebrate our share in Christ’s risen life and the promise of restoration to come. I’ll close with the last verse of today’s Psalm: O tarry and await the Lord’s pleasure; be strong, and he shall comfort your heart; * wait patiently for the Lord. Lord, we believe; help our unbelief. Amen.

The Last Sunday after the Epiphany, March 2, "The Transfiguration: Listen to Him!" by The Reverend Judith F. Lyons

“This is my Son, my chosen, Listen to Him!”  

Listen to Him!  That’s our theme for this morning.

I read a startling statistic recently that said that the average listening attention span of an adult in the United States – that is, the amount of time one gives one’s full attention to listening – is 18 seconds. 

I don’t know if that is true or not, but we all know that listening is becoming a lost art.  And if we are becoming less and less able to listen to one another – how on earth are we able to listen to God?      Particularly at this time when we really need God!

Today is the Last Sunday in the season of Epiphany, the season of discovery, revelation,

the revealing of who Jesus, as God, is. 

Luke’s Gospel has led us through those reveals

in the presence of many witnesses. 

And today’s Gospel gives us the biggest reveal of all:  The Transfiguration. 

It is such an important reveal that it appears twice in the lectionary for us to take in – once on August 6th, Transfiguration Sunday, and today, the last Sunday before our journey into Lent and the Passion of Christ.

It is an extraordinary scene,

fit for space odysseys and aliens.  

It appears in all three Synoptic Gospels,

each attempting to put into words what happened there --  

the cosmic bending of time and space,

the glimpse into a world beyond this one,

the voice of God, directly, to a trio of cowering disciples.

Ignatius of Loyola, in the 16th century

understood that our intellect

can only take us so far in our understanding

of the power and mystery of God.

He understood that although knowledge and study

are important, we can get stuck there. 

Knowing stuff is not the same as sensing,

understanding, and believing from within.

Knowing stuff doesn’t help us Listen.

Ignatian practice, still going strong today,

Asks us to enter into the stories of scripture

And the stories of our everyday lives

With God’s greatest gift to us – our imagination.

So, let’s do that, let’s enter in, imagine,

and experience the Transfiguration for ourselves.

In Luke’s telling of the story,   

Jesus is leading the way up the mountain to pray.

What a hike that must have been

with Peter, James and John following behind

the long, sure strides of Jesus, all the way to the top. 

I imagine everyone, except Jesus, is out of breath –  

bent over, hands on knees breathing heavily.

It is a mountain after all and not a hill.   

Once at the top,  Jesus begins to pray. 

We’re told the disciples were

“weighed down with sleep, but managed to stay awake” --

and so they must have been able to see

not only Jesus’ body but his face.

I imagine Jesus standing to pray,

arms slightly out by his sides,

face tilted upward to the heavens.

And then it happened.  The air changed,

the light changed, the sounds changed,

the clouds moved, and Jesus’ face became almost translucent

and his clothes dazzling white,

nearly blinding the disciples,

whose hearts were pounding out of their chests

and their mouths agape.

This man they loved was turning into something else.

Suddenly there were two other men there,

standing with Jesus,

and somehow the disciples knew instantly

that it was Moses and Elijah – also dazzling.

Moses whose face shined so brightly when he brought down the law

from God to the Hebrew people, that he had to wear a veil. 

And Elijah, the most revered of all the prophets,

who ascended alive into heaven.

There they were -- the Law and the Prophets speaking with Jesus about “his departure which he was about to accomplish in Jerusalem.”

I can’t imagine that those words, affirming the upcoming passion,

registered with them at all,

as they watched, frozen in place.

The second part of this story is even scarier than the first. 

Peter, having regained some of his wits,

wants to build dwellings for the three holy men before him.

And then something else happened.

The air changed again and the cloud cover

began to move and shape itself and descend,

overshadowing the frightened disciples.

I imagine it almost like a spaceship of cloud

that lowers over them as a voice like none other

speaks 9 words: two phrases and a command.

“This is my Son, my chosen, listen to him!”   

The vibration rattles their bones.

Listen to him!  Listen to Him!

And isn’t that the whole point?

How much listening do we really do?

How much time to we take to be quiet enough

to let God in and to actually listen and remember?

The disciples forget almost as soon as they get down from the mountain.

Back down in the world they lose the thread,

succumb to doubt, argue with each other

and forget what they have experienced,

what they have seen with their own eyes.

Thousands of years later, we do the same. 

We tend to forget our personal experiences with God,

we lose the thread, minimize the experience

or begin to doubt whether it happened at all. 

God is drowned out, we grow distant,

and we believe less and less that God

will concern Himself with this wicked,

broken world.

I think The Transfiguration story asks us to tell our stories

about how God has worked in our everyday lives—

how we’ve actually Listened sometimes

– and tell what we’ve seen, heard, experienced.

If we tell our stories to one another,

even if we’ve told them before,

we remind ourselves that we are in this together,

that God is always present,

that we are not alone

that God is alive in the small and gargantuan.

Telling our stories.  Listening together in the quiet of prayer,

using our imaginations to remember –

That is how we love

That is how we trust

That is how we strengthen our belief that God is bigger

and more powerful than we are or this world is.

That is how we face the truth

That is how we generate hope.

We must tell our stories.

Ok, I’ll go first.

In 1985, in Iowa City, I sat on the floor

of the front porch of the old house I had rented, weeping…     not knowing what to do. 

My 11 year old daughters were spending the afternoon at a friend’s house. 

I had just completed my MFA in Directing,

having taken a year off from my job teaching

at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale,

where I had recently been divorced. 

I did not want to go back there for so many reasons. 

The smart thing to do, however, is to go back to my job and then get a job from a job. 

I had applied for the only three jobs in the country

that were available in my field and at my rank.        

I flew to be interviewed for all three

and came in second in all three. 

I was exhausted.

I sat there for a long time, my tears had gone,

and I stared out at nothing. 

Quietly, I heard a voice.

I thought it was more of my rambling, disconnected brain,

but it repeated the two words I had heard. 

I sat up.  It was kind of scary.

And I began to listen, really listen.

The quiet voice said “Go Home.” 

It was gentle but it was not my voice. 

I asked, what do you mean? Do you mean just go?? 

And I heard again, “Go Home.” 

As I sat there, with my heart pounding,

I could feel a shift in my whole body.

I felt oddly light.

I cried again but these tears were different.

Long story short:

I sold 2/3 of my library and most of what we owned,

and I moved back to California with twin daughters in tow,

to stay with my mother until we found a place of our own.

None of it was easy, but it was a decision that changed our lives,

pointed us toward new life.   I listened.

It was a decision I never would have made on my own.

That’s one of my stories, one of my encounters with the Divine.

Most others have been less dramatic, but they have been real nonetheless. 

OK, Now it is your turn—

to share your stories, when you listened,

when you felt the spirit moving in your everyday life.

Let this Lent be a time of growing our attention spans larger than 18 seconds. 

Let this Lent be a time of sharing and remembering when you heard and listened to God.

Let the telling give you a renewed commitment to follow Christ to the cross and on through to the Glory of Resurrection.

Let the sharing give you courage and hope with each other.

And remember…..always Listen to Him!

AMEN

7 Epiphany, February 23, 2025, "Continue being the mystics you are" by The Reverend ('Mo') Lyn Crow

Come, Holy Spirit, Come.
Come as Holy Fire and burn in me
Come as Holy Wind and cleanse me
Come as Holy Light and lead me
Come as Holy Truth and teach me
Come as Holy Light and dwell in me
Come as Holy Power and enable me
Convict me, Covert me, Consecrate me
Until I am wholly thine for thy use
Amen.

Reflecting on my journey to ordination, I remember the first day of seminary – write a paper regarding:  what is your favorite gospel and why?

I knew right away – John – because I love his images of light, and sheep, and bread, and water, and wind, and the vine, and the branches.

Later in that same class I learned that John is known as the mystic of the evangelists because of the use of these symbols in his writings.

For instance, in today’s gospel, which is the one appointed for the celebration of St. Matthias whom we honor today – Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you.  Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.”

That is an example of John the mystic teaching a passage about the mystical life and how to experience oneness with God.

Later Jesus says, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you, abide in my love.”  Another version of the Bible says, “Remain in my love”.

The words of a mystic.

I have always had a special interest in the mystics.  And so on my first sabbatical as a priest, I called my three-month time of study:  “Walking in the Footsteps of the Mystics.”

I studied:
         Teresa of Avila
         Catherine of Siena
         Hildegard of Bingen
         Mechtilde of Magdeburg
         Bernard of Clairvaux
         Benedict of Nursia
         Therese of Lisieux
         John of the Cross
         Meister Eckhart
         Ignatius of Loyola
         Simone Weil

I spent almost three months in Europe traveling alone on local trains and occasional buses, staying in convents and monasteries.

I went to the places the mystics were born, grew up, did ministry, and where they are buried – all of the time, reading their works.

I came to understand that mystics have a certain set of characteristics:

a.    They believe that God is within them.
b.    They peer into deeper realities that lie hidden beneath ordinary experiences.
c.    They surrender themselves to God in order to be close to God.
d.    They ask the questions “Why are we here?” and “Why am I here?”
e.    They believe that there is a plan behind everything, and they trust God even if they don’t know what the next moment will bring.
f.     They do not try to force their future; they allow it to unfold.
g.    They feel a connection to every living thing.
h.    They trust in their own intuition.
i.      They believe that religious ritual is not done to appease a powerful God but to connect to God and to trigger insights and transformation.
j.      They believe that love powers everything.
k.    They believe that love does not originate with us but flows through us.
l.      They believe that they don’t know everything but there is always more mystery to discover.

Did you resonate with these characteristics?  Did you recognize them?

Well you should!  I’ve been with you long enough that I can tell you – and I have absolutely no doubt about this – this church is a community full of mystics.

No wonder so many people who end up here say they can feel the love the minute they walk in the door.

Or they feel something different about the place, they just aren’t sure what it is, but they want more.

You are all mystics!  Look around you.  Look at the person next to you.  That’s what a mystic looks like.

It shouldn’t surprise you that the One we emulate, Jesus, was a mystic.

He taught in a mystical way, he said things like “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you.”

He taught things in such a way that he pushed his followers to the edge of what they understood about the spiritual life.  Things like “Abide in me as I abide in you.”

As a mystic, what he wants for his disciples, his heart’s desire is that they would become mystics so that they could enjoy life in the Spirit as he did.

There was a method to his madness.  He pushed his disciples to the point that they would see the impossibility of the task he was teaching about, hoping that in exasperation they would say – “It would take the grace of God to do that” or “God help me, how do you expect me to do that or to understand that?”

Jesus knew if the person really wanted to achieve what he had set before them and knew it was humanly impossible, just maybe they would open their heart and allow God to do it through them.

That step, that surrender, that giving up, is what opens the door to God working in and through us – well, almost.

In today’s gospel Jesus talks about abiding and bearing fruit.

And what is the fruit of one who is abiding?  It’s love!  Love of God, and love of neighbor.

And where do those fruits, that love come from?  From God who is within you.

That is if a person gives up trying to do it on their own and instead asks for help.

See – to bear fruit – you have to take dancing lessons.

And here are the steps of the dance of love:

a.    Know what love looks like
b.    Want to do it
c.    Know it is impossible
d.    Ask for help from God
e.    Let the love flow through you

That’s the dance of love – that’s how to bear fruit in the Kingdom of God.

That’s pretty much the way a mystic abides in God.  That’s how a mystic does ministry.

May we continue to practice the dance steps of love, to abide in God the way God abides in us.

May we continue to be a community that abides in God and bears much fruit.

Continue to be the mystics you are – doing the loving thing.

6 Epiphany, February 16, 2025, "Living a Cross-Shaped Life" by The Reverend Jeannie Martz

Not too long ago, I was reading a magazine article on today’s Gospel reading and I was struck by the author’s use of the phrase, a “cross-shaped life.”  The author, a Lutheran pastor named Amy Ziettlow, writes, “On Thursday evenings I teach ballet class.  In constructing barre exercises that help warm up the body for more intricate steps, I aim to balance the use of muscle groups.  The practice of moving en croix, in the shape of the cross, creates both tension and balance in the body.  Each exercise is completed with the foot tracing the shape of a cross on the floor, once to the front in fourth position, to the side in second position, and to the back, again in fourth position.” 

To the front, to the side, and to the back, back and forth, again and again. 

She goes on, “The dancer stands in the center of the cross, and the limbs move to explore the space where the well-worn path of the cross leads them.

              “Luke’s opening to the Sermon on the Plain,” Ziettlow writes, “invites us into the tension of living a cross-shaped life.”  (Christian Century, 1/26/22, p. 23)

              The opening she’s referring to, of course, is Luke’s version of the Beatitudes, which we also hear in a more expanded form in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount.  (Lk. 6:17-26)

Here in Luke, although Jesus is teaching and healing in a level place, hence the designation as the Sermon on the Plain, just before this Jesus has in fact been on a mountain.  As is his custom in Luke, before making a major decision or choosing a significant course of action, Jesus has spent the previous night in solitary prayer on a mountainside – traditionally, a place to literally be closer to God. 

When morning comes, he calls his disciples to him on the mountainside and he chooses twelve of them to be apostles as well as disciples; to be those who will be both followers and leaders; those who will be sent forth to carry Jesus’ teaching and ministry into the world.

              They all come down the slope together and now in this level place they’re joined by even more disciples, joined by those who are also here to learn and to follow; joined as well by “a great multitude,” Luke says, from as far away as the cities of Tyre and Sidon, both located to the west on the Mediterranean coast.  They’ve come to hear Jesus’ words, yes – but many of them have also come to be healed, healed of physical disease and/or spiritual unrest…and this being said, I think we need to consider verse 19 again, because it tends to get lost in the shuffle.  When we read this verse, I think our eyes jump over it and our mind moves ahead to deal with the Beatitudes themselves.

              Verse 19 reads, “And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them.”  (Emphasis mine.) 

Power came out from him and healed all of them.  All of them.  The power of healing, the power of reconciliation, the power of restoration to community, the power of forgiveness and compassion and love came out from him and washed over them all – and only then did he begin to speak:  four blessings, and four woes; four invitations and four challenges.

              Now, I’m emphasizing verse 19 because I believe it shows us that this Sermon on the Plain is a setting of major healing, not a setting of major recrimination.  I think many of us, if not most of us, tend to hear the Beatitudes both here and in Matthew as recrimination; as reproach; as a major reminder of our failings, our fears, and our shortcomings. 

In spite of how we think or fear these words may sound, however, we are not in fact being blessed as sheep or condemned as goats by Jesus here.  Instead, his words recognize that our human reality is such that at one time or another, we all find ourselves in each of these places. 

As Pastor Ziettlow writes, “Living in the equal tension of Luke’s Beatitudes is to stand en croix, tracing the shape of the cross into the sacred ground beneath our feet in both confession and forgiveness.  We stand in the center between receiving God’s grace and comfort in times of poverty, physical hunger, tears, and revilement and confessing the ways that we [ourselves] contribute to the hardship of others, place false trust in our abilities and assets, and fail to bring comfort to our neighbors.”

              This is to say that the circumstances of both the blessings and the woes can distort our sense of self as well as our understanding of our relationship with God and with each other – and it helps to remember that “blessed” here as Jesus is using it doesn’t simply mean “happy.”  Instead, “blessed” means having “the knowledge that one is being included in the realm of God.”  (LP, Water, 29)

              Having the knowledge that one is being included in the realm of God.

In times of deprivation and sorrow, times of being on the receiving end of the scorn and dislike of others, we may feel unworthy, despairing, or forgotten; and we turn away from the God that we may well feel has turned away from us.  Here Jesus calls us back into relationship, assuring us that we continue to be recipients of God’s grace and love, that we continue to have a place in God’s kingdom, and that in spite of how it may feel, we are never out of God’s sight.

              Likewise, in times of plenty and success, times when we find ourselves held in high esteem by others, we are equally prone to turning away from God; but in these instances we turn away through self-centeredness and neglect.  We turn away through trusting in our own righteousness, our own abilities, our own gifts – and perhaps we turn away through listening a little too much to the voices of others.

Here, says Pastor Ziettlow, “Jesus calls out, ‘Whoa!’ and in [the holy pause that follows] we can repent, [turn back, step back], and make room for God’s presence in our lives.” 

              In 1 Corinthians, Paul is also calling out, “Whoa!” to a congregation that has taken the bit in its teeth.  He too has been inviting the faithful to live a cross-shaped life -- but a cross-shaped life has resurrection at its heart, a cross-shaped life has the power of God and the ultimate defeat of death at its heart; and resurrection, the power of God and the ultimate defeat of death, is being questioned and even being denied by some in the Corinthian church.    

              Now, I want to be clear:  it’s not Jesus’ resurrection that they’re questioning.  What they’re questioning is what Paul is referring to here as “the resurrection of the dead.”  They’re questioning their own resurrections; they’re questioning everyone else’s resurrection, both the living and the dead; the resurrection that Paul teaches will take place when Christ returns in glory.  This is the issue that’s behind their very contentious discussions – and yet, Paul argues, the resurrection of Christ and the resurrection of everyone else are not separate events.  Although they may be separated in our own perception and experience as we live here in chronos, in chronological time, in God’s time, in God’s “eternal now” of kairos, these resurrections are in fact one and the same. 

Christ has been raised, Paul insists, as the “first fruits” of the harvest, the offering that sanctifies the entire crop of the faithful.

              Now, in terms of background, it’s helpful to remember that the congregations in all of Paul’s churches were made up of both Jews and Gentiles – and that neither of these groups spoke with one voice about belief in an afterlife.

              Among the Jews, the Sadducees flatly denied the existence of life after death; while belief in resurrection was embraced by those who, like Paul, came from a Pharisaic background. 

For the Gentile Greeks, the issue was even more complex as various classic schools of philosophy had differing stances on the question of an afterlife – especially a physical afterlife.  As I think I’ve mentioned before, matter, the physical world, and especially the physical body, were seen by many in the Greco-Roman world as being inferior to the spiritual realm.  The divine spark within oneself was said to be imprisoned in one’s physical body, freed and reuniting with its divine creator only after death – so why would anyone want the prison of their body resurrected?

              Still others, perhaps those in the Corinthian congregation who felt they were superior to their brothers and sisters in Christ, others insisted they were already living the resurrection life.

              All of these conflicting beliefs are anathema to Paul because, “For Paul, Christ’s resurrection and that of everyone else stand or fall together.”  (Craddock, 101).  We are linked to Christ, says Paul, and our destiny is linked to Christ’s destiny.  Our very identity as Easter people is grounded in the resurrection of Christ, and we can’t deny our own resurrection without denying the foundation of our faith.

              In fact, says Paul, denying our resurrection, and therefore denying the resurrection of Christ, completely destroys our faith:  our faith is “in vain,” our faith is “futile.”  Why?  Because for Paul, “faith” isn’t intellectual consent to any particular dogmatic position.  “Faith” is relationship; “faith” is “the dynamic, proper relation of people to God.”  “Faith” is dynamic, dynamos, in the sense of being power-filled.  Faith is, as one commentator says, “the powerfully established, powerfully effective, and productive right relationship to God” – and denying resurrection distorts this relationship with God and renders our faith mataia, as Paul says: renders it “empty, useless, and power-less.”  (The New Interpreter’s Bible, 1 Corinthians, 983-984)

              “If for this life only we have hoped in Christ,” he writes, “we are of all people most to be pitied.”  (1 Cor. 15:19)

Our oneness with God in Christ, our oneness with the resurrection of Christ, this is the living water of our complete dependence on God; the water of life that sustains us in the desert, that sustains us in our times of woe and calls us to the turning back of repentance in times of plenty.

For the prophet Jeremiah, the times of woe for himself and for Judea were ever-present.  Called by God to prophesy defeat and exile to the people of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians because of the people’s unfaithfulness to God, Jeremiah tries to prepare the people for the reality of what will, in fact, be their new normal:  the new normal of traumatic change, of dislocation, of physical and emotional exile from everything they’ve known.  As he does, he tries to save them from spiritual exile as well, calling them to choose the sustaining water of faith and trust in God.  If you depend on yourselves in these times, he says, if you put your trust in mere mortals, you will find yourself in a very parched place.

We too may feel that we have been exiled into a new normal, exiled by COVID and by bird flu and by contemporary politics into times of woe and uncertainty, exiled into an unfamiliar future – and yet sadly, these are not the only threats we face.  Each of us at one time or another is at personal risk for being exiled from good health, exiled from employment, exiled from relationships that we thought would last forever, exiled from the familiarity of the life we knew. 

None of us is exempt from the threat of exile – and so, listening to Jeremiah, we also turn to the promise of water in a barren time:  the water of our baptism, the water through which we die, and yes, through which we also rise with Christ; the water into which we sink our roots for stability, for sustenance, and for life itself.

I want to read again what Pastor Ziettlow said about the warm-up exercises at the barre:  “Each exercise is completed with the foot tracing the shape of a cross on the floor, once to the front in fourth position, to the side in second position, and to the back, again in fourth position.  The dancer stands in the center of the cross, and the limbs move to explore the space where the well-worn path of the cross leads them.”

The limbs move to explore the space where the well-worn path of the cross leads them.

What muscle groups do we need to exercise on the well-worn path of the cross?  We need to exercise the muscle groups of Blessing.  Weakness.  Repentance.  Forgiveness.  Dependence.  Compassion.  Trust.  Faith.  Relationship.  Love.  Always love. 

And at the heart of the cross, we need to exercise and celebrate the power of resurrection.   Amen.    

5 Epiphany, February 9, 2025, "Leaving Everything Behind" by The Reverend Jeannie Martz

“When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.”

               “They left everything and followed him” is a statement we hear more than once in the Bible in relation to Jesus – and in fact, we hear it enough times that it begins to sound formulaic and kind of slides through our consciousness without sticking, like our brain is coated with Teflon.

              But – as we’ve all been doing for the last month, when we think about what our fellow Episcopalians and their friends and neighbors and family members in Pacific Palisades and Altadena experienced in January as they too “left everything” to escape the Eaton and Palisades fires; when we think about that horrible reality and its aftermath, we can begin to reclaim some of the intense emotional shock and trauma of really “leaving everything behind” – even when the one leaving everything behind is leaving for the sake of something they believe is a greater good.

          Following Jesus, we affirm through our faith, is such a greater good.  As the late Swedish economist and diplomat Dag Hammarskjold once wrote, “I don’t know Who – or what – put the question.  I don’t know when it was put.  I don’t even remember answering.  But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone – or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.”  (Synthesis, 2/7/19)

              At some moment, I did answer Yes. 

One of my favorite hymns comes out of the Iona religious community in Scotland and is called “The Summons.”  With a simple melody that’s been running through my head ever since I wrote this sermon, the hymn’s lyrics are both haunting and profound.

              “Will you come and follow me if I but call your name?  Will you go where you don’t know and never be the same?  Will you let my love be shown, will you let my name be known, will you let my life be grown in you and you in me?”

              These are questions that Simon comes face to face with in today’s Gospel reading as Jesus sits in Simon’s boat and presents him with a “Dag Hammarskjold moment,” challenging Simon to reassess his own understanding of who he really is, and what his life is for.

              But this “Dag Hammarskjold moment” doesn’t happen in a vacuum here in Luke.  Ever since the revelation of Jesus to the Gentiles at the Feast of the Epiphany in early January, we’ve been hearing about the beginnings of his public ministry:  his baptism in the Jordan with God’s confirmation of him as God’s Son; his days in the wilderness and then his return to Galilee filled with the power of the Holy Spirit and his -- for the most part -- successful preaching. 

              Last Sunday was Feb. 2 – yes, Groundhog Day, I was listening to Fr. Rob Bethancourt’s sermon online, and also the Feast of the Presentation of the Infant Jesus in the Temple.  As such, the readings for the Presentation took precedence over the regular readings for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, which we would have heard if Feb. 2 had fallen on any other day of the week than Sunday.  You may remember that two weeks ago, the last time I was here, the Gospel reading from Luke talked about Jesus preaching in the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth.  I said in my sermon then that he shocked everyone in the synagogue when, after reading from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, he said, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

          Had we heard the Epiphany 4 Gospel last week rather than the Presentation Gospel, we would have still been in that synagogue in Nazareth; and at the end of that same sermon of Jesus and the discussion that followed it, we would have heard Luke’s account of this event finish with these words:  “When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.  They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.  But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”  (Lk. 4:28-30)

              Today, after this rage-filled response to his claim to be God’s anointed, we learn that Jesus has come down to Capernaum, the city on the Sea of Galilee that from now on will serve as his home base.  With the Nazareth experience behind him, he has taught in the synagogue here on the sabbath and has had a much more positive response from the worshipers, also successfully healing a man of an unclean spirit in the process.

              Now, in between then and now come a couple of verses in Luke that our lectionary doesn’t include, which is too bad because they do provide an interesting background for today’s Luke passage.  The verses read, “After leaving the synagogue [in Capernaum] [Jesus] entered Simon’s house.  Now Simon’s mother-in-law was suffering from a high fever, and they asked him about her.  Then he stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her.  Immediately she got up and began to serve them.”  (Lk. 4:38-39)

              This little snippet is the first mention of Simon in Luke’s Gospel, and it’s actually located four verses before today’s reading – so now we know that even before Jesus gets into Simon’s boat, Simon has heard Jesus preach, Simon has seen Jesus heal, and Simon has in fact entertained Jesus in his own home.  Simon already knows that Jesus is someone special.

              The fact that the two men already have a relationship is probably why Jesus chooses to get into Simon’s boat and also why Simon, busy washing nets, is willing to get back in and put the boat out a little ways so that the crowd can hear Jesus better – and the fact that Simon has seen Jesus’ power at work in the synagogue as well as in his own home probably explains his compliance when Jesus tells him to go out deeper and let down the nets in spite of a long night with no fish.

              This directive to go out deeper is, in essence, Jesus calling Simon’s name, because once those nets go down into the water, nothing is ever going to be the same again for Simon – nor for James, nor John, nor for their father Zebedee and all the other family members and friends who will be among the “everything” that the men will leave behind.

              Whether it’s the moment the first fish get caught in the nets, the moment the nets begin to break, or the moment the men finally haul all the fish into their boats, Simon, like Isaiah centuries before him and Paul a few years after him, Simon suddenly recognizes that he is in the presence of the radical Holiness, the radical Otherness of God – a presence and a Holiness that mortals with unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips, cannot survive.

          “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” he cries.  Everything in Simon’s life has suddenly changed:  his filter, his lens, his self-understanding.  Nothing in his life will ever be the same because at this moment he knows he is in the presence of God, and he is afraid.

              Like I said, Isaiah could relate to this.  Today’s passage from Isaiah refers to the prophet’s own consecration – that is, the action of his being made holy through the use of the burning coal on his lips.  In relation to this cleansing, one commentator says, “…to consecrate someone or something is not simply to transfer that person or object into the safe world of what is holy.  On the contrary, there are lasting consequences to consecration.  ‘To consecrate means…to derail from normalcy.’”  (F, I, P, 314, 316)

              As another author puts it, “Call has consequences.  Following has a price.”  (F, L, T, 336)

              In our own days of uncertainty, chaos, and the fear of being derailed from normalcy and possibly having to leave everything behind, we are all learning this all too well.  Call has consequences.  Following has a price.

              Shifting major gears here (MAJOR gears), in a far more mundane and far less sacred way, I felt that I was on the brink of being derailed from normalcy the day before my younger son was born.  My then-husband Tim, our just-under-two year old son Ian, and I were living in the suburbs north of Chicago in a rented Victorian house with a wrap-around porch and life was good:  we were two wanna-be Yuppies with a charming portable child, and a second child, who we were sure would be equally charming, about to arrive.

              Even so, as I sat on the stairs watching Ian play, I was suddenly overwhelmed by a tremendous sense of loss, a sense of our normalcy being derailed, and I began to cry.  Tim worked from home, so he was close by when the tears came and he hurried out of his office to ask me what was wrong.  I gestured around at everyone and everything I loved and said, “It’s never going to be the same.”

              Now, in the 22 years we were married, there were a few times when Tim got a gold star, and this was one of them.  All he said was, “That doesn’t mean it’s not going to be better.”

          That doesn’t mean it’s not going to be better.

              With these simple words, Tim offered me a new reality, a new perception, a new lens through which to see not the loss, but the abundance that lay ahead in our new family configuration.

              Jesus does the same thing here in the boat, as the huge number of fish and the recognition of his holiness threaten to derail Simon and the others.  “Don’t be afraid,” he says; “this doesn’t mean things aren’t going to be better.  From now on you will be catching people.”

              Jesus offers the fishermen around him, and offers us, his new reality – a reality where our request for him to leave us in our sinfulness, leave us in our unchanged sameness, is met with acceptance, with love, and with reassurance; and also met with the promise of abundance, as he charges us to reach out to others, whoever they are, in his name.

              The abundance of discipleship that Jesus invites all of us into, scary as it may be, is better – and it’s better because the Greek word in Luke that is translated “catch, as in “catching people,” actually means “to take alive in the sense of rescuing from death.”  (Craddock, L, 98).

              Jesus is inviting us to join him in “taking [people] alive in the sense of rescuing [them] from death;” Jesus is inviting us to become spiritual First Responders; in a fishing sense, he is inviting us to catch and release into his hands.

              To catch people, to rescue people, is to share with them the good news of the Gospel and the abundance of life that is found in Jesus – and better yet, to share these things through being who we already are and through doing what we already know how to do.

              The story is told in the Jewish midrash, or commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures, of Rabbi Zusya.  “Reflecting on his own life, particularly in relationship to the Jewish patriarchs and prophets of the Old Testament, [Rabbi Zusya] reportedly said, ‘In the coming world, they will not ask me:  Why were you not Moses?  They will ask me:  Why were you not Zusya?’”  (Walk in Love, pp. 259-260)

              God comes to us where we are, while we’re busy doing what we’re already good at.  We’re not called to become somebody, or something, we’re not.  Through our baptism and through the power of the Spirit dwelling within us, we’re called to allow ourselves to be transformed into the people God has already created us to be, using the gifts God has already given us, for the good of all of God’s people.

              One Lutheran pastor writes, “Cast your nets, write your papers, teach your students, balance financial accounts, design the buildings, pour the concrete, make the lattes, lead the meetings, administer the IVs, answer the phones, sing the arias.  Do what you know how to do, and Jesus will use it to draw others into the kingdom of God.”

              Jesus will use all of who we are to help catch people.

              To go to the last verse of my hymn from Iona, “Lord, your summons echoes true when you but call my name.  Let me turn and follow you and never be the same.  In your company I’ll go where your love and footsteps show.  Thus I’ll move and live and grow in you and you in me.”

              “Never being the same” doesn’t mean “not being better.”

              Amen.

3 Epiphany, January 26, 2025, "The Spirit of the Lord is Upon Me" by The Reverend Jeannie Martz

Now, you may have heard this before from Fr. Bill or perhaps from one of your other supply clergy because, whatever school we went to, this is a standard seminary Old Testament truism:  one of the essential characteristics of a true prophet, as opposed to false prophets who seek only to further themselves or the status quo; one of the essential characteristics of a true prophet is that in their forth-telling of God’s word, their message “comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.”  True prophets comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable...which is why true prophets get very few repeat dinner invitations!

              While I’m not necessarily assigning her the status of a prophet, we all saw a bit of this dynamic last Monday as the Rt. Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde, the bishop of the Diocese of Washington, DC since 2011, made a bold plea for compassion in the face of power.  Whether or not Bp. Budde had a reputation before Monday, she definitely has one now -- God bless her.

              Jesus too has been gaining a reputation and in today’s Gospel reading, his reputation has preceded him to Nazareth.  Looking back, God’s Spirit had come upon Jesus at his baptism; and then this same Spirit had driven him into, and sustained him through, a time of testing and temptation in the wilderness.  Now, filled with the Spirit’s power, Jesus has returned to Galilee.  He’s beginning to teach in the synagogues and so far, unlike Bp. Budde, he’s been praised by everyone.

              He hasn’t done any healings yet, he hasn’t yet performed any miracles as Luke tells the story – there’s no changing of water into wine here I’m afraid – although there will be parties – but the 12 year old who amazed the scribes and the elders with his knowledge of Scripture at the Temple in Jerusalem has grown up; and he’s beginning to teach.  Filled with the power of God’s Spirit, Jesus is beginning to open up the Scriptures is a whole new way.

              Now he’s back in Nazareth, his home town, the place where not only does everyone know his name, they know his parents too (or at least they think they do). They know his siblings and they know his own habits and quirks, because they’ve watched him grow up.  They’ve known him his whole life – which is why, when he says in the synagogue, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” they all look at him in shock.

              Jesus catches his neighbors completely off guard; and the reason he catches them off guard is that by making this seemingly simple statement, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus is claiming everything he’s just read from Isaiah for himself.  Most importantly, most shockingly, and most dangerously, in this statement he is specifically saying that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him; that the Lord has anointed him; and because “anointed one” is the literal translation of the word “messiah,” in this statement Jesus is, for all intents and purposes, claiming to be God’s messiah.

              Just as shocking as this statement to his listeners in the synagogue, is that by choosing this specific passage from Isaiah to read – and Luke tells us that Jesus took the time to look it up – by choosing this specific passage Jesus is defining the messiah’s mission as a very un-military mission of servanthood and of healing.  A very un-military mission of compassion.

              Now, this was a red flag to everyone who was listening to Jesus because in first century Judea, the memory of Judas Maccabeus’ successful rebellion against Greek occupation two centuries earlier, a rebellion that had led to a very brief 100 years of independence for Judea, this particular memory of deliverance was still very fresh in the minds of all the people in Jesus’ day.

              Everyone knew that God’s Messiah would be another warrior who would lead Judea and all of Israel to independence once again, this time independence from the Romans; and therefore, Jesus’ messianic claim of servanthood makes no sense at all.  As both the spiritual and the political implications of what Jesus has said sink in, the hometown crowd begins to reconsider its welcome….

              As one commentator has so truly observed, it’s a lot easier to deal with a messiah who WILL come than it is to deal with a messiah who HAS come.  It’s a lot easier to debate abstract possibilities than it is to have push actually come to shove…and yet our Christian faith is faith in push having come to shove; it’s faith in a messiah who HAS come; and this messiah has entrusted the ongoing work of servanthood, the work of God’s ministry of reconciliation and compassion to us, and to all the faithful through the centuries who have followed him.

              Jesus has entrusted the work of God’s reconciliation to the Church in all times and in all places, and because of this, it only makes sense that the first place this ministry of reconciliation begins is within the Church itself.  This was the implication for the church in Corinth and it remains the implication for the wider Church today:  become reconciled within your own house first so that then you can truly be a light to the world.  But who wants to look at their own stuff first?  Talk about a yukky implication!

              The best way to avoid dealing with yukky implications, of course, is to argue about what they really mean – and this is what the Church has always done.  There’s never been a golden age of the Church in terms of no bickering.  We’ve always argued about what it really means to follow Jesus and about what it really means to love our neighbors as ourselves, what it really means to love our enemies, because the more time we can spend bickering and splitting hairs and pointing fingers, the more we can put the real work of faith on the back burner.

              The church in Corinth that Paul had founded argued about a lot of things:  they argued about in-house morality, about a church member who was sleeping with his mother-in-law; they argued about the proper attire for, and proper behavior during, worship; and they argued about some of the well-to-do members coming early to communal meals and eating all the food so that the poorer members who showed up on time got nothing.  They argued about which among them was more advanced in their theological expertise and further along on their spiritual journey, and they argued at great length about spiritual gifts – about what they were, about who had them, and about which gift of the Spirit was the best.

              (I’m sure their Annual Meetings were a lot of fun!)

              All this and more is what Paul is dealing with in today’s 12th chapter of his First Letter to the church in Corinth.  As we heard in last Sunday’s New Testament reading, Paul has just finished telling the Corinthians that “there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.  To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”  (1 Cor. 12:4-7)

              Today, Paul continues the theme of the common good by talking about what commentator William Barclay has called “the supreme glory of the Christian” – which is to be “part of the body of Christ upon earth.”  (Barclay, Corinthians, 114)

              Although his 1950’s phrasing sounds outdated, Barclay continues, “[Christ] has no hands but our hands/To do his work today;/[Christ] has no feet but our feet/To lead men in his way; [Christ] has no voice but our voice/To tell men how he died;/[Christ] has no help but our help/To lead them to his side.”  (114)

              And as another more recent author has said, “[Paul] considers that believers as believers are already the body of Christ, and he exhorts [the Corinthians] to relate to one another in a manner appropriate to what they already are.”  (IDB, 1 Cor, 948)

              Paul’s tremendous vision of the interdependence of Christian believers, the interdependence of you and me and all of us through the centuries who call ourselves Christians is both exhilarating and daunting, because as Paul points out, the Body needs its members to be different; and especially in these days, we don’t tend to be all that comfortable with differences.

              What we are comfortable with in this time of heightened polarization is like-mindedness; and we would be even more comfortable if “unity” meant “uniformity” or if “oneness” meant “sameness”, but they don’t…and this is important to emphasize:  “unity” does not mean “uniformity.”  “Oneness” does not mean “sameness.”

              “Unity does not exclude diversity,” one author has said, but that means we’re stuck with implications again, the implications of a messiah who HAS come,  a messiah who loves diversity; and so, like the Christians in Corinth, our preference is to cling to our fear and our discomfort and to say to those who differ from us both in the Church and in the world, “I HAVE NO NEED OF YOU.”

              What a terrible thing to say.  What a terrible thing to hear!  I HAVE NO NEED OF YOU – and yet we say it often, one religious group to another; one political party to another; one friend or family member to another:  I HAVE NO NEED OF YOU.

              Back in 2010, 15 years ago, at Trinity in Orange we had a Lenten series that focused on forgiveness.  Our presenter was a mediation consultant named Jim Calhoun, and I’m going to read something that Jim wrote at the time about his program because it has direct relevance to any of us “having no need” of one another – and remember Jim’s words are 15 years old.

              Jim wrote, “Forgiveness is an essential part of the process of reconciliation.  In my practice as a mediator and conflict resolution specialist, I find that the most common obstacle to forgiveness is not the desire for revenge, but the practice of contempt.  Wide spread contempt, a particular feature in a culture growing increasingly narcissistic, allows us to believe that we are better than, more worthy than and more special than others.  In turn, we allow ourselves the ‘pleasure’ of treating others with disgust, disdain, and spite.  Healthy relationships,” he says, “healthy relationships cannot survive contempt.”  Healthy relationships cannot survive contempt.

              I HAVE NO NEED OF YOU is an expression of contempt, and it’s an expression the Church through the centuries has learned well; but we need to get over it because we are the Body of Christ and as such, we have work to do.  We have work to do, not only to bring good news to the poor, but also to bring food, and primary education, and prenatal health care to the poor; and freedom to those oppressed by famine, war, and corruption.

              We have work to do, to bring civility and mutual respect back into our common discourse, and to recognize each other’s differences as gifts necessary for our mutual health.  We have work to do, because in that baptismal covenant we renewed two weeks ago in honor of the baptism of Jesus, we promised to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being.”

              “Strive for the greater gifts,” Paul says to the Corinthians in chapter 12, and by this he means spiritual gifts.  “Love,” he goes on to say a few verses later in chapter 13, “love never ends.  But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end….And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.”

              One theologian says, “Paul writes 1 Corinthians 12 to remind the Corinthians of our interdependence in the Church.  He writes 1 Corinthians 13 to remind them that what makes interdependence possible is love.  Because love holds us together it is the greatest gift of all.”  (LP, Church, 37)

              And so The Captain and Tenille had it right:  Love will keep us together.  It is love, and must be love, that keeps and holds all of us together.  We are not just “a body of Christians”; as Christians, we are the Body of Christ, a spiritual and ontological reality that is born of the Spirit and the Cross; born of the water, the bread, and the wine.  To be a member of the Body of Christ is privilege; and challenge; and gift.

              And so, in the name of Christ, let us indeed bring, and honor, our many gifts that differ – because without exception, we all have need of each other.

              Amen.             

2 Epiphany, January 19, 2025, "The Miracle at the Wedding of Cana" by The Reverend Jeannie Martz

Speaking for myself in these days as we anticipate the inauguration of the 47th president as well as honor the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I’ve always been partial to this first miracle or sign – this first miracle of Jesus, which seems so different from his other miracles:  this changing of water into wine in the midst of a community-wide celebration.  I’ve heard of it referred to as a “frivolous miracle,” if there is such a thing, but I disagree with this designation.  I think that Jesus’ changing of water into wine is anything but frivolous.  Even so, this is one of Scripture’s most popular and well-known miracles, and so we shouldn’t be surprised that whether frivolous or not, it gets parodied from time to time.  My own favorite variation on it comes from Garrison Keillor and the people of Lake Woebegon, Minnesota.

              Keillor tells of a time when Pastor Dave, the town’s Lutheran pastor, wanted to get closer to his flock, and so one evening he went down to the local watering hole, the Side Track Tap.  Once there, Pastor Dave sat at the bar and ordered a Wendy’s Beer…and then he began to think about Jesus.  What would Jesus do, here at the Side Track Tap?  Would Jesus order a Wendy’s, like he did?  Or would Jesus maybe order a Perrier, and then turn it into a Wendy’s?

              Alas, we’ll never know!

              We do tend to be intrigued, or amused, or disturbed, of perhaps even offended by this story about jars filled with water becoming jars filled with wine, but we need to be careful that we don’t over focus, that we don’t get stuck in the physical action of the beverage change; “curiosity wallowing in the unusual,” as one commentator has put it – because if we get stuck here in the unusual, we may find ourselves assuming that the simple – or not so simple – change of one liquid into another and the resulting social rescue of a bride and bridegroom, that these are the sum total to this piece of Scripture, even if the change does come through the power of the Holy Spirit.  We might assume, in the words of the old song, that this is all there is to the miracle.  However, the problem is that if we do make this assumption, then we stay forever on the surface of the event and we completely miss John’s point in including it in his Gospel – and of the four Gospels, John’s is the only one that DOES include it.

              We also miss John’s point if we try to explain the process of the change, if we try to tame the miracle, try to domesticate it so that we don’t have to deal with improbables; so that we don’t have to adjust or retool any of our convictions about the world or set aside anything that we already KNOW to be fact.  But again, there’s a problem here:  if we opt out of wrestling with the miracle, opt out of wresting with the impossible, we do end up the poorer for it.

              This is an extraordinary happening in Cana, and because it’s extraordinary, it does create difficulties for us, intellectual and spiritual difficulties; because generally speaking, on a day to day basis, water just doesn’t sit there and turn into wine.  Wine into vinegar maybe, but not water into wine.  It just doesn’t do that; but here, through the action of Jesus, it does.

              Now, Jesus says that whoever has seen him has seen God.  Therefore, whoever has seen Jesus’ miracle has seen God at work.  This being the case, then I think we need to ask ourselves what this particular work of God tells us about God.  We need to ask ourselves what, in this season after the Epiphany, this season of revealings, what does this miracle reveal about the nature of God?

              For one thing, and somewhat obviously, I think the wedding at Cana in Galilee reveals that God is in favor of marriage as a form of relationship and of personal intimacy as a degree of relationship.  In our traditional Prayer Book marriage liturgy we say that “our Lord Jesus Christ adorned this manner of life by his presence and first miracle at a wedding in Cana of Galilee.”  We go on to say that the marriage of two committed individuals “signifies to us the mystery of the union between Christ and his Church.”  As two lovers become spiritually and physically intimate through marriage, so Christ and the Church are married and are intimately joined, the one to the other…for better or for worse – which is Good News for the Church, at least!

              I think this miracle at Cana also reveals God’s positive embrace of creation and of the fruits of all the vines of the physical world.  This isn’t a radical statement today because of our culture’s longstanding embrace of environmental awareness – but things were different in John’s time.  John’s first century world was familiar with classic Greek and other early belief systems that exalted the spiritual aspects of life while completely degrading the physical or material.  Spiritual was good, physical was bad and corrupt.  In this miracle at Cana, however, God counters this viewpoint and clearly says, “My creation is good.  My physical world is good.”

              And not only is physical life in the physical world good in God’s eyes, celebrating this physical life with food and drink and fellowship is good too.  Jesus himself insists on more than one occasion that the kingdom of heaven is like this morning’s wedding banquet; and first century wedding banquets lasted for days and days, and whole towns were invited to join in the festivities – so when Isaiah says that God will rejoice over Jerusalem as a bridegroom rejoices over the bride, he’s talking about God planning to host a very big party; a very big party that all of God’s people, including all of us, are invited to so that we can all celebrate and share our joy with God and with each other. 

              You say the Prodigal’s back?  Let’s have a party!  You have the lost sheep?  You found the lost coin?  Let’s have a party!  College football championship tomorrow?  Let’s have a party!  (What can I say?  Ohio State Buckeyes fan.)

              Now, all this celebration, all this joy, all this physicality, is revealed and affirmed by this miracle at Cana, but even so we’re still skating around on the miracle’s surface.  Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has said that “The God of the Bible is too lively, too engaged, too rich and full of dramatic power ever to be channeled into neat systematic formulations.”  Instead, Brueggemann says, God is “endlessly disturbing and problematic.”  God is “endlessly disturbing and problematic”… so let’s look at Cana again.

              Now, I can’t remember whether I’m thinking of a movie plot or maybe the reversal of the old pencil-and-paper game Mad Libs, but I do remember something that involved a message that was hidden word by word throughout a completed page of writing.  The message was revealed when another piece of paper was placed on top of the first, a piece of paper that had holes cut in it, holes that were spaced according to the message.  Now, take another look at the Gospel reading in our service bulletin:  if I had a piece of paper with holes in it, this is where the holes would be.  These are the phrases that would show through the holes, the phrases that reveal John’s essential message for the faithful who have the eyes to see:  “on the third day;” “the first of his signs;” “revealed his glory;” “his disciples believed in him.”

              “On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee;” “the Son of Man will be killed and on the third day be raised;” “on the third day he rose again.”  For us as Christians, the third day is a day of new life, a day of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom.  It’s a day of promise and of assurance, a day that’s a down payment on the fulfillment of our salvation.

              Until now, first at the visit of the wise men and then again at Jesus’ baptism, God has been the one to reveal Jesus’ glory as the Beloved Son.  With this first miracle after his baptism however, Jesus is now the one who reveals.  By telling us that the wedding is on the third day and that on this third day Jesus reveals his glory, John very clearly links this initial miracle and glorification with the ultimate miracle and glorification of Jesus’ death and resurrection.

              Always the one in control of the action in John, Jesus’ statement here to his mother, “My hour has not yet come,” is balanced by his pronouncement from the cross that “It is finished.”  In between Cana and the cross lie Jesus’ earthly ministry and his signs, and this way of the cross is the path his followers will tread.  This revelation, the way of the cross, is “the first of his signs.”

              Following from this, the Greek word that John uses for “first” here is arche.  Arche does mean “the first in a series,” number 1 of however many, but it also means “the beginning.”  This miracle is the beginning of that which will end, and begin again, at Calvary.  And what is this beginning?  Nothing less than the miraculous provision of such a quantity of wine freely given that it would probably take a parish this size a minimum of two years of social events to consume it all.  I mean, we’re talking about 180 gallons here.

              Abundant, abundant, and even more abundant wine flowing on the hilltops is a powerful Old Testament image of fulfillment, of God’s deliverance and the salvation of the righteous; and here God makes that image of Old Testament fulfillment new, as it becomes Jesus’ first action in ministry, the first revealing of his power and his radiance; and as he provides wine in abundance at the wedding, Jesus soon provides bread in abundance in the feeding of the 5,000, showing forth as he does “the power of an energy” that has been called “the heart, core, and cohesive force of the universe.”

              “And his disciples believed in him.”  Philosopher and mystic Simone Weil once said that of course God does the impossible.  It’s the only thing left to God, she continued, because God has already given the things that are possible to do, to us.  The disciples saw the impossibility and the glory of God in Jesus, and here, at the beginning, with the first of his signs, they believed in him.  The rest of John, the purpose of everything that follows in John’s Gospel is, in John’s words, “so that [we] [like the disciples] may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of God, and that through believing [we] may have life in his name.”

              This life, this believing; this is the point of the miracle at Cana, the point we can’t afford to miss:  this is the jumping off point of our salvation, and it’s salvation that comes through the God of a love that crackles and sparks; the God of abundance who gives and gives and gives for the sheer joy of giving; the God of graciousness who calls and reaches out and feeds, asking only that we too believe in Jesus and follow.

              Remember Brueggemann’s words:  God is “endlessly disturbing and problematic.”  God is “endlessly disturbing and problematic” simply because, and especially because, God insists on being in relationship with us.  God asks us to open ourselves, asks us to trust God with everything, and to hide nothing in ourselves from God.  God asks us to risk being transformed for good.

              How we respond to God’s invitation, how much we’re willing to trust and to give is up to each one of us – but think about it for a moment.  Do we really want to reach the end of our days, to look back at our path and our life and our choices and find ourselves saying, “Oh man – I could have had the wine!”

              Is this a frivolous miracle?  I think not.  All these things, including the miracle at Cana, are written and attested to so that we may have life in the name of Jesus, and may have it abundantly.

              Amen.  

1 Epiphany, January 12, 2025, "The Baptism of our Lord" by The Reverend Valerie Hart

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight or Lord our strength and our redeemer.

Today is the first Sunday after the Epiphany. We sometimes think of an epiphany as a new idea, an opening, as something becoming known to us.  Epiphany can also be translated as manifestation - making known. So the Epiphany is sometimes described as the Manifestation of Christ to the World. The manifestation of God, the God described in Isaiah -  the servant of the light, manifested to all.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Epiphany is a bigger celebration than Christmas. That manifestation of Christ, Christ becoming known, is considered more important than the date of his birth. Most of us, when we think of Epiphany we think of the Magi, the wise ones who saw the star in the East and came and worshiped the Lord. But that is just one of three aspects of the Epiphany. The second manifestation was through Christ’s baptism. And the third manifestation of Christ was at the wedding in Cana, at his first miracle when he changed water into wine.

Today's Gospel reading is Luke's version of the story of Jesus' baptism. Next week the lectionary calls for the reading about the wedding at Cana, thereby honoring the ancient tradition of the three-fold nature of the epiphany.

This past Tuesday I had begun thinking about what I might preach about this morning. As I watched the funeral for President Carter and listened to the eulogies, I was struck by how he had lived out his baptismal promises. No matter what we may think of his polices or politics, we have to respect that he did his best to live a Christian life, to serve the people of this country and the world. He was an inspiration for all of us.

Then in the afternoon I heard, like you, of the wildfires out of control in the Palisades. I knew the sermon would have to change. The water of baptism would have to include the destructive power of fire.

But first let's talk about Jesus' baptism. Luke doesn't describe John baptizing Jesus, rather he has the Baptist say that he is not the Messiah and that someone greater is coming. Then Luke writes, "Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized and was praying, the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven saying, 'You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.'" Jesus being baptized is described in an offhand sort of way, he was just part of a group of people who were in the river.

In Luke's telling, it is the Holy Spirit coming upon him that is important. Jesus was just one of a whole lot of people, but the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, acknowledged him. And the voice from heaven (it isn't clear who was able to hear that voice, just Jesus, Jesus and John, or all the people who were present) saying, "You are my Son."

Those words from the Holy Spirit are for all of us at our baptisms, "you are my child." We are all beloved children of God - part of God's family.

But what about that chaff that John said he would burn in unquenchable fire?

 Right now, in our diocese, a fire of apocalyptic proportions is raging still largely out of control. We have all been touched by it. Perhaps you have friends or family who live in that area, who have lost homes or had to evacuate. Perhaps you remember the shops there, the beautiful views. A church in our diocese has been completely destroyed, another is dealing with losing the residences of two of its clergy. Several have had more than half of their parishioners lose their homes. It is overwhelming, unthinkable. And everyone is asking "Why?"

I don't know why? I do know that it has nothing to do with the burning of chaff.

Let's take a look at John's comment. What he says is, "His winnowing fork is in his hand, to clear his threshing floor and to gather the wheat into his granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire." Like the prophets before him, John tended to exaggerate, using language that would get people's attention. And he used a lot of similes. Jesus lived in a mostly rural society. The people of his time would have understood and seen regularly what John was talking about. As grain grows, a husk develops around the seed in order to protect it, kind of like a shell around a nut. When the grain is harvested, the stalks are cut down and gathered together. The only part that people are able to eat are the seeds. The stalks and the husk are inedible to humans. So, the farmer must find a way to separate the seeds (wheat) from all the other stuff (chaff). In traditional cultures like John's the different parts were all thrown up in the air by a winnowing fork and the seeds would fall straight down, while a breeze would blow the chaff aside. It was hard work separating the wheat from the chaff. It is not that the chaff is bad, but rather that it had served its purpose of protecting the wheat. It was no longer necessary, and in fact it was getting in the way, and therefore was burned.

As we grow through childhood, we develop habits or beliefs that help to keep us safe. We may have fears or self-perceptions that were helpful at one point in our lives, but that we no longer need. In fact they get in the way. If we open ourselves to the work of the Holy Spirit, it will help us let go of our mistakes, our misunderstandings, and the places we are stuck so they can be burned away. Sometimes it is painful to let go, it hurts to give up old habits or addictions, there is a burning that we undergo as we develop healthier self-images and abandon our self-limitations. Spiritual growth is not easy. It takes letting go.

Sometimes it is the difficult points in our lives, our reaching bottom, that helps to loosen the chaff. When we look back at our lives, we may find that the painful moments often helped us to become more loving. It is not that God wants these things to happen to us, it is rather that God can help us to use what we learn from these experiences to grow in love and compassion. The chaff which burns does not represent people or a category of people. It represents our own chaff, those aspects of ourselves that no longer serve us.

As we deal with the horrible fires nearby. As we worry. We worry about all kinds of things. Like how much the fires will spread, what will our air quality will be, could it happen to us, is it happening to ones we love,  and how are we to move forward after this?

Fred Rogers, of Mr. Rogers neighborhood, said, "When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, 'Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping'" He went on to say that that is where you will find hope.

Already you can see the helpers on the news. The firefighters, the ones bringing food and clothing. The people opening their homes to those who have had to evacuate. The red cross, FEMA and so many others. Our denomination is already actively helping. Episcopal Relief and Development, the outreach arm of the Episcopal Church, that helps people all over the world, is already sending resources to our diocese to use to help the people impacted by the fires. Our diocese, The Diocese of Los Angeles is on the ground helping churches, parishioners and neighbors deal with this overwhelming situation.

If you are wondering if there is anything you can do to help, the bishop has sent out the following message: Cash donations are most effective at this time – offering recipients flexibility in using funds for emergency priorities – and may be made through the diocesan One Body, One Spirit annual fund which is now focusing all its resources on recovery from the fires.

You can go to the diocesan web page or contact the church office to make a donation.

Our greatest comfort comes from knowing that we are beloved children of God and that Christ is with us no matter what.

 As today's reading from Isaiah puts it:

God says,

Do not fear, for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name, you are mine. 

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you; 

when you walk through fire you shall not be burned, and the flame shall not consume you. 

Because you are precious in my sight, and honored, and I love you, 

And let us remember Jimmy Carter and his great faith and commitment to helping those in need all over the world. How he would personally help to build homes for Habitat for Humanity. We can, and will, each in our own way, help to rebuild the homes and lives that are being so tragically impacted.

Remembering that we, and everyone this tragedy has and will touch, is a beloved child of God. 

2 Christmas (Year C), January 5, 2025, "The Adoration of the Magi: The First of the Epiphanies or Manifestations" by The Reverend Valerie Hart

A new star appeared in the sky, but only a few people on Earth noticed.  It was a group of people who were searching; they were searching in the sky.  They were seeking something special.  They were seeking some kind of message from God.  They wanted something in their lives, and they studied the sky.  In order to notice that star, a new star rising, they had to have studied the stars for a long time.  They had to spend every night looking and searching.  Finally, a time came when they saw something new, something different, something that wasn’t from the world as they knew it, but led and suggested something more.  So they packed up and left home and traveled.  They traveled a long way.  

These days you can get on a plane anywhere in the world and quickly go to Jerusalem. We don’t think of distances the same way they did back in the time of Christ.  These Magi, these wise ones, traveled across deserts, through various lands, at a time when it was dangerous to travel. There were robbers on the roads, and they carried very expensive gifts.  It was not an easy trip.  But there was something about that star, that new light in the sky, that told them they had to follow it; they had to seek out whatever it was that it pointed to. 

Finally, they came to Jerusalem and met Herod, the current ruler, and asked for directions.  They got the information they needed, went to Bethlehem and found Mary and the child in a house. Matthew does not indicate that it was a stable nor that they had been traveling - this was their home.  Jesus was not an infant in a manger.  He may have been up to a couple of years old by this time. I know this can be confusing, but the birth stories of Matthew and Luke are quite different, we've just merged them together in our minds, in our carols and on our Christmas cards.

When they found Jesus, they saw something in this child that let them know that this was what they had been seeking.  This child was what they had been searching the skies for.  This child was what their hearts yearned for. So they paid him homage, their worship, and they left their gifts, great gifts.

The first gift was the gift of gold. Gold represents kingdom and royalty.  Gold is valuable.  Gold, even in our culture, it represents riches and money. They offered Christ the things of the world, material comfort and security.

The second thing they offered was frankincense.  Frankincense comes from a tree in Arabia. If you cut it the sap oozes out, dries and becomes fragrant crystals. When you burn it, it creates a beautiful smell.  Frankincense was also extraordinarily valuable. During that time period it was used as a major trading item. It was quite literally worth its weight in gold.

Frankincense is usually seen as representing worship, because frankincense was burnt in the temple. There’s a place in the Psalms that says, “May our prayers be like incense and lifted up to you.”  So the incense represented worship, prayer – it represented the spiritual life.

Finally, there was myrrh. Myrrh was used for embalming; it preserved the body, so it is traditional to see the myrrh as looking ahead to Jesus’ crucifixion, to his suffering.  But myrrh was also used in healing ointments.  It was put with other oils on wounds or to treat pain.  In fact, there was myrrh in the wine that was offered Jesus on the cross because it was a painkiller.  So it also had medicinal qualities.  

The Magi laid before the Christ child their pain and their suffering, their death, and their life. Then they got up and headed home, but they weren’t the same as they were when they came.  They couldn’t possibly go back by the same road that they had come.  They had to go back a different way.  Life had changed.  Everything changed with that encounter.

Tomorrow, December 6, is Epiphany, when the church remembers the visit of the Magi. The word Epiphany means a moment of sudden understanding, or sudden consciousness of, something that is very important.

These Magi, these wise ones, represent all seekers, all people who are searching for God.  Part of the idea of Epiphany is that Christ was made known to all people; not just to Christians, not just to Jews, to all people. The wise ones represent everyone who is seeking, everybody who has that sense that there has got to be something more.  Some people may actively be looking for God, but there are a lot of people in this world today who say they are just seeking, that there has to be something more.  

Sometimes we start seeking and searching when things are really tough, when the world is falling apart, when we’ve got an illness, when we’re in grief, when we’re recovering from addiction, when we’re at our bottom and we realize there’s got to be more to life. 

Some people start seeking when they reach the epitome, when they’ve accomplished all their goals, when they’ve gotten the job that they were working for, when they now have the house and the car and the family and the kids and everything that society told them that if they got those then they’d be happy.  Then they realize that there’s still something missing, and they begin seeking, looking, wondering.  All of us here have undoubtedly known a time in our lives when we were seekers, when we were looking for something more. Perhaps you feel that way right now. 

The Magi looked and they saw a light.

Think back for yourselves when you might have been seeking.  What was the light that you saw?  Did you read a book?  Did you talk to a friend?  Did you go to a meeting?  Did you have an “epiphany” in nature?  What was the light?  What was the star?  What was that little something, or big dramatic something, when you said to yourself, “I’ve got to follow that.  I’ve got to find out where that’s going to lead me”?  

Now it can be a very long and complicated journey that goes in many directions. The journey is not always a straight line; it can go across deserts, and through dark places. We can’t make that journey alone.  We have to ask for help.  It might be from parents, or friends, or teachers. It might have come from strangers through a book, or the Bible, or a poem.  We have to be willing to go to even Herod and ask for directions and get guidance, support and help.

Then eventually, if we keep putting one foot in front of the other, following that light is that is calling us, eventually we will find the Christ child.  

You may encounter Christ in a song, on the beach, at church, who knows?  Who knows when Christ will make Christ’s self's known? But you will encounter Christ. And it’s at that moment, at that moment when you have the most important decision of your life to make, because you can either bow down and worship, like the wise ones, or you can react in fear, like Herod.

When we encounter Christ, when we encounter the true king, when we experience the fullness of God's love, our egos can be terrified, because if we really worship and give ourselves to Christ, we’re not in charge anymore.  It’s not about me anymore, and that can be pretty frightening. But if we can get past our fear, we can worship. 

What we’re asked to do is to offer to the Christ child our gold, the material world, the focus on things, the focus on security. To give all that to Christ.  

And we’re asked to give Christ frankincense; our worship, our prayers, our spiritual selves, our devotion.  

And we’re asked to give Christ our myrrh; our pain, our sorrows, our heartbreak, our suffering and our very lives.  

Christ, who already loves us more than we can imagine, will accept these gifts. 

 Once we’ve handed over our gold, then it’s up to Christ to take care of our needs.  When we’ve handed over our worship then we can feel the joy of that relationship.  When we hand over our lives and our suffering, our pain and our sorrow, the myrrh becomes a healing balm in Christ’s loving arms.

Of course, once we’ve made that choice and offered our lives to Christ, we can’t go back by the same road we came.  We’re not the same person.  The rest of our lives go in a totally different direction.  Nobody outside might notice, but inside we know; we make different choices, we take different paths.  Our life is transformed when we finally find that which we seek, when we find that which our deepest soul yearns for.

Or, more accurately, once that which we seek has found us.  

Christmas Day, December 25, 2024, "God with Us" (Isaiah 62:6-12, Psalm 97, Titus 3:4-7, Luke 2:(1-7) and 8-20) by J.D. Neal

Good morning, friends — and merry Christmas. I’m glad to be with you all again this morning. This is the second year in a row where I’ve gotten to lead services on Christmas morning, and while I know that I get the job because all of the priests who usually lead our services would rather be at home resting and enjoying time with their families, it still feels like a gift to me. There’s something special about getting to preach on one of the Big Days in the Church Year; there’s a sort of challenge to it. Days like Christmas are the ones that we feel like we know. They’re big and important and most of us have heard the Christmas story a thousand times even if we don’t go to church very often. It’s familiar, and cozy; we feel like we ‘get it’. Christmas gets enveloped in this warm, fuzzy cloud of family traditions and twinkle lights and greenery and hot cocoa and pleasant images of Jesus in a manger and his parents and visitors standing happily by while smiling animals look on — and none of this stu is necessarily bad — but because of all this, it can become especially hard to actually attend, hear what God might be saying to us this Christmas morning. We can become so familiar with the story, with the word ‘incarnation’, with all the nice Christmas, holiday stu that it can be hard to keep an eye on what it all means for us. I have the privilege of trying to help us (myself included) see Christmas a little more clearly this morning. Thankfully, the Gospel this morning helps, because there’s a lot about this story that is strange. The reading begins with bureaucracy. The most powerful man in the world, the Emperor of Rome, has decided to take a census of his whole empire. He wants to know how much money he’s going to be raking in through taxes and how many soldiers he can expect to conscript into his armies, and so, on the Emperor’s whim, people like Mary and Joseph are forced to interrupt their lives and livelihoods to take a weeks-long journey, mostly on foot, just to ll out some paperwork at the right census location. And it is then, after centuries of prophecy and waiting and longing and hoping, God appears — at the worst possible time. Mary goes into labor, far from home and family, in the middle of an exhausting and arduous journey. The promised Messiah is born, but he is born to the ‘wrong’ people, from the ‘wrong’ part of town, in the ‘wrong’ place. Christ is born to a pregnant, unwed teen from the poor, backwater village of Nazareth, in the midst of a people living under the thumb of Roman occupation. Mary and Joseph are in such a bad position that they are forced to take shelter in a stable with an animal’s feeding trough in place of a cradle. There’s nothing romantic about this; this is not a nice, plastic nativity scene. This is the brutality of childbirth and the sweat of hard days of travel and the stink of animals and no friends or family there to help. This is not where anyone expected God to appear; this Jesus is not what anyone expected the Messiah to look like. Things get stranger from there. Abruptly, the narrator tells us about a group of shepherds in the hills around Bethlehem, working the night shift, keeping watch over their ocks. This is dull, exhausting work — there is nothing idyllic or prestigious about being a shepherd in 1st century Judea — but to these shepherds, the Glory of God appears, and the birth of the Lord is announced by a choir of terrifying angels. In Luke’s version of the Christmas story there are no Wise Men, no rich Magi from the East. When the birth of Christ is announced, in Luke, it’s announced to a group of poor shepherds in the dead of night with no one else around to see. Why? Bethlehem sits in the shadow of Jerusalem, only a couple of miles from the most important city in Judea; home of the Temple — where God supposedly dwelled among his people — and home to all of the religious leaders and priests and ‘holy,’ powerful folks who spoke on behalf of God to the people. But when God appeared among his people, none of these folks knew a thing about it. Luke is trying very hard to get us to see that things are not happening the way they are ‘supposed’ to happen, to get us to ask ‘why would Christ appear like this?’ I think that it’s when we start to answer this question that we get to the heart of the Christmas story, to the real meaning of the Incarnation. When God shows up among us, when he enters in and takes on humanity in the person of Jesus (that’s what we mean when we say, ‘Incarnation’), he does it in this way that Luke describes. God doesn’t take on some sort of idealized version of humanity — some sort of general ‘human-ness’ that we all relate to equally — and he doesn’t become some kind of holy, super-man. God becomes a particular person: Jesus, Mary’s son, a Jewish baby born in 1st century Palestine. And he isn’t born as the kind of person you might imagine that God’s promised Messiah/King would be born as: Jesus is born out of wedlock in a culture where that was a big no-no, in poverty, to a people living under the oppression of the Roman Empire. Matthew tells us that shortly after his birth, he became a refugee, eeing to Egypt to escape political violence. Being from Nazareth, Jesus would have grown up on the bottom rungs of Jewish society, and his habit of associating with ‘unclean’ people as he grew up only put him further and further from being socially or religiously acceptable. This is how God is born, this is how he chooses to reveal himself, to make his debut and show the world what he is about. And who is the glory of God in Jesus rst revealed to? Who does the angel say this is ‘good news’ for? A bunch of poor and tired shepherds, outside the halls of wealth and power and holiness. For many of us who have spent a lot of time in church, it can be easy to slip into thinking that God is like me, that if Jesus was born today, he would look like me, t in with me, that he would be on my side. When we read the Scriptures, we slip into imagining ourselves as the ‘good guys’, the ones who are like Jesus; we imagine that we would have ‘gotten it’ if we were there in the story with Jesus. And for some of us, that might be true, but when I read our gospel passage today, I am struck by how un-like me Jesus is. The birth of Jesus shows me that God identies with the poor, the vulnerable, the oppressed — that God is all of those things in Jesus. And I am none of those things. I am privileged, comfortable, and secure. I have far more in common with the religious leaders who rejected Jesus. I, like them, have grown up with resources and security, with a good religious education. As a straight, white man in the Church, I have never had to wonder if people think of me as ‘less than’ when I walk into a room. I have grown up in a society that has taught me that being a ‘good’ person — a ‘good’ Christian — means that I just have to be respectful and successful, and that if I just work hard and do the right things, God will make me comfortable and secure. These are not the values reected in the incarnation. God doesn’t come into the world privileged and powerful; the good news of God’s favor is not proclaimed to the comfortable and secure on the night of Jesus’ birth. The incarnation shows me that I cannot take it for granted that I am on God’s side, that though Jesus is Emmanuel, ‘God with us’ — I may not always be the ‘us’ implied in his name. In the chapter before today’s gospel, the Holy Spirit speaks through Mary — she sings the prophetic song that we often call the ‘Magnicat’ — in which she talks about how God is about the business of casting down the mighty and lifting up the lowly; of lling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. I am afraid that I may be on the wrong side of that equation. So what am I to do? If the Christmas story shows us that Jesus is one with the marginalized and outcast, that he has come to lift up those who our world considers ‘lowly’, what is the ‘good news’ of the incarnation for those of us who are comfortable and secure this Christmas morning? Remember the parable: “‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the king will answer them, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’” The good news of the incarnation — of Christmas — for someone like me, is that Jesus invites us to be with him where he is. God is there, in the places of humility and pain, asking us to let go of our comfort and security, to make ourselves vulnerable, to lift our voices and use the resources we have inherited in order to join him in being with and lifting up those in need. The incarnation means that we are invited to be with Jesus, but only if we are willing to be transformed — to follow Jesus onto the path of humility and self-giving love — only if we are willing to meet him in the faces of those whom our world has overlooked or oppressed and to receive him there. May we be willing to receive him there. Amen.

Christmas Eve, December 24th, 2024: “Finding Room in our Spiritual Inn for the Calling” by Reverend Hartshorn Murphy

Reverend Hartshorn Murphy’s sermon is in the process of being transcribed.

The Feast of the Nativity, December 24, 2024, by The Hartshorn Murphy

Creator God, on this Holy Night, still our frantic pace and calm our anxious minds so that we might experience the miracle and wonder of Christmas. Send your Spirit to pierce the shadows of these uncertain times, rekindle our Hope for the future and guide us, by The Shining Star of Bethlehem, to the humble manger where your love made flesh awaits. Amen.

The birth story found in Luke's gospel is not a diary of historical events as they happened. It is not biography, nor is it the prose of history remembered; but is rather the poetry of faith. Sadly, in our generation, we have confused factuality with truth. The fact in this story is that a baby boy was born named Yeshuia. That is it. All the rest is myth. Not fairy tale or fantasy but myth. Well, what is a myth? A myth is a profound truth that can only be communicated in a story. Genesis - the Creation story - is not history - though some would have it so - it's a myth. Luke 2 is a myth - A beautifully crafted gift to the Christ child.

And so, we break open the narrative to hear the truths Luke's community in Antioch, hearing this story about the year 80 C.E. would understand.

Gauis Octavius was Julius Caesar's nephew and adopted son and heir. He became the first emperor of Rome having defeated Marc Antony and others who claimed the throne. He sought to consolidate an empire that stretched from northern Britain to Asia to North Africa. Building new cities, paving roads and planting milestone markers, having the military police the highways and thus establishing a Pax Romana, a Roman peace- based in wealth and raw power. It was said of him that he found Rome brick and left it marble.

The Senate gave him the title Caesar Augustus- Caesar sacred. He was called "Son of God." Roman coins proclaimed him savior of the world. And yet, the deified Emperor, as powerful as he was, it was Caesar Augustus whom God used as an instrument to get the Holy Family from Nazareth to Bethlehem. To the City of King David - by Caesar decree. Jesus will proclaim a kingdom that is mightier than Caesar's, one that is unbound by the sands of time or the arbitrary boundary lines of tribes. One that is eternal and which proclaims a peace not based in power but in love.

The Jesus story is about a world saved not by a man who, by self acclamation, became a God but by God, in emptying himself became a man.

Arriving exhausted in the little town of Bethlehem, Joseph and Mary are summarily turned away at the door of the caravansary. There is simply no room in the inn. “If you had only come earlier ", “If I but knew you were coming.”

In truth, the innkeeper is you and me. How often is the metaphorical Inn of our hearts, our lives, simply too full? We are distracted and overwhelmed with too much to do and too much to worry about - when the Holy draws near to us we miss it. Not out of spite or indifference but simply because in the busyness of life, we miss God who comes to us incognito - in a hurting friend, a discouraged coworker, an anxious mother with a difficult child - or a travel weary family on the doorstep, late at night, fearful and alone.

Or was there no room because this couple was obviously poor and were strangers- tattered and patched, unwashed and with a Galilean accent. How easily we dismiss God who comes to us in the guise of the poor. For the tribute, the taxes needed to build palaces and armies, Caesar declared that all shall be registered. A populus on the move including the sick, the infirmed, even a pregnant peasant girl. But there's no room at the Inn and so God comes into our world beyond the reach of the God Emperor. Address-less, unregistered , undocumented - incognito God comes hidden in an unused stable- by Eastern tradition, a Cave. Animal dung is hurriedly swept aside and animal saliva is wiped from the feeding trough to be used as a makeshift cradle- a boy child comes.

The birth announcement is made by an angel chorus. In Hebrew cosmology, the earth is a flat disc with Shoal- the underworld of shadows- underneath. Above the flat earth was the firmament - firm indeed was the great earth covering metal dome. The stars being holes in the dome through which celestial light shines through. Each hole was guarded by an angel lest humankind, as with their tower of Babel, again attempt to storm heaven or mischievous angels attempt to visit the earth without God's leave. It was they who sang the Messiah' s birth. The Jewish people hearing this would be mindful of the question God asks Job,

" Who laid the earth's cornerstone when all the stars of the morning were singing with joy?" The stars witness the 1st creation and now sing with joy at the re- creation in the birth of God's anointed one.

An angel appears to sheep herders. We romanticize these men. Kids scramble to be wise men first with shepherds a close second in the Christmas pageant. But shepherds were a despised group, a lower class than tax collectors and prostitutes. Widely viewed as thieves and drunkards- because they were- and given to an unspeakable lust with the animals they guarded, which they hated themselves for; shepherds were men who had lost land and herds to the rich and powerful; wise men had given up on God who had given up on them. They were filled with hatred and envy; prone to violence and despair.

And yet-and-yet- it was the shepherds in a field that an angel appeared in a vision saying quote I bring you- you! -good news of God's Shalom, meaning peace, well- being, contentment to you and all humankind because God is well pleased with you. The singing stars were heard in the crowded inn and in the homes in Bethlehem. The citizens there cursed at the noisy drunk in the night probably those damn shepherds again. The stars were heard in Jerusalem, in King Herod’s Palace and among the self-satisfied aristocrats, who turned over and snuggled more deeply under their luxurious covers for the winter night was cold.

But the shepherds were naive enough to listen to the angel’s promise and went in haste because they so desperately needed a God who cares. The lesson of the shepherds - men who hadn't bathed in months, who were not uncomfortable with the smell of an animal's stall, who some of them, may have been born in a stable themselves; men who had no address and no names in Luke's story; living in the fields, in the emperor's world yet outside it, unregistered and unrecorded. The lesson of the shepherds to us is that it is the frightened, unloved and despised part in us that can lead us to the presence of the Holy. What is the profound truth of the incarnation revealed in Luke’s myth?

Where once God was thought of as distant and indifferent or revealed in terror and awe. As seen dimly in the low-lying clouds of Sinai mountain or in the dreadful silence behind the curtain of the holy of holies in the temple, accessible only to the high priest and even then, on only one day in the year - on the day of atonement when lesser priests would tie a stout rope around the high priest's waste lest God behind the curtain would strike him dead for the sins of the people and they could pull on the rope to recover his smoldering corpse. The Incarnation is the story of God drawing near to human life as a vulnerable baby, born of a people unregarded and ridiculed. The subversive promise of Christians is just this: that God comes to privilege the unprivileged and to show us a way. God comes intimately to enflesh God's dream for us - A world-filled with Justice mercy and compassion. A friendly people under a friendly sky in harmony with a friendly God - and that hope, that great dream of God - is reborn again, each Christmas, on this Christmas, in each one of us.

This poem is by Ann Weems:
Each year the child is born again
Each year some new heart
finally hears, finally sees, finally knows!
And in heaven There is great rejoicing!
There is a festival of stars!
There is a celebration among the angels!
For in the finding of one lost sheep,
the heart of the shepherd is glad,
and Christmas has happened once more.
The child is born anew.
And one more knee is bowed!

From Kneeling in Bethlehem

December 22nd, 2024: “Rediscovering the Song within Us, and Singing it with all our Spirit” by Reverend ('Mo') Lyn Crow

Jack Kornfield, the American Buddhist monk, writer and teacher tells this story.

In a certain East African tribe when a woman decides it is time for her to have a child, she goes out away from her home a bit and sits under a tree and listens.

She listens until she hears the song of the child who wants to come.

And she begins to sing it to herself.

Then she returns to the man who is her partner and she teaches the song to him.

And while they are making love, they sing it together to call the child to them.

The mother and father continue to sing it to the child in the womb.

And as the time draws near they teach it to the midwives, and during the birth, the midwives sing the song to the child.

As the child grows, the villagers who have learned the song, sing it to him or her.  If the child falls, or gets hurt, they scoop him up and sing his song to him.

When she does something wonderful, they sing it to her.

During the tribal rites of puberty, the villagers sing the song.

During their wedding, the songs of the bride and groom are sung.

When they are old and dying, the villagers gather round the bed and sing it for the last time.

In today’s gospel, Mary sings her child’s song about him and who he will become.

It is the song of the child who wants to come, who wants to do the will of God.

It is a song about the God who is sending this child in order to keep the promises God made to Abraham and all those who followed him.

The church sings the song of the child often, especially during Evening Prayer.

We call it the Magnificat – Mary’s Song.

But it’s really Mary’s song for the child.

And it announces how God, through the child will make everything right.

How the poor and the lowly will have a champion in this child.

The child will stand in solidarity with the weak and the friendless and the powerless.

Each of us has a song, a song deep inside, a song about our purpose, our future.  Do you know what your song is?

If we are not aware of it, perhaps we, like the African woman, need to sit under a tree and listen until we hear the words of our song.

Perhaps our song is a song of hope like Mary’s.

A song for the lowly, the hungry, the homeless, the disenfranchised, the forgotten, the marginalized, the neglected, the prisoners, the refugees.

Perhaps it’s a song that celebrates a God who uses power for mercy.

Who liberates oppressed people.

Who puts down the cruel and powerful people and lifts up the lowly.

A God who cannot endure those who are proud, who take credit for everything God has done.

A God who fills the hungry, those who are literally hungry, but also those hungry for love, acceptance, respect.

A God who fills them all with the good things they long for.

And this God sends the selfish rich away with nothing, which is probably the best thing that could happen to them.

Because it’s only when we have nothing and are needy that we reach out for God.

Perhaps our song is a song about God’s hope and purpose for us.

It is a song our heart will sing at all the important moments of our lives – the good times and the bad.

May we sing our song with our lives.

And when our final hour arrives may we hear God singing our song to us and recognize it as our own.

My soul magnifies my Lord.

And my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.

For he has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant.

Surely from now on all generations will call me blessed.

For the Mighty One has done great things for me and Holy is his name.

His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.

He has shown strength with his arm.

He has scattered the proud in the thoughts of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones.

And he has lifted up the lowly.

He has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty.

He has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy.

According to the promise he made to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his descendants forever.

This is the agenda of our God and the song of Mary’s child.

This is what love in action looks like.

This is the creed of all who follow the God of Love.

May we carry this song in our hearts;  and may it be our rallying cry.

December 15th, 2024: “Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not.” by Reverend Jeannie Martz

When I was 17, I got my first traffic ticket.  That was my only ticket for many, many years…but then I moved to Florida and shortly thereafter doubled my total on the long, wide open stretch of Alligator Alley.  Now, like most of us, when I’ve done something wrong I don’t really like getting caught; but even so, I have very different feelings about these two tickets.  The one I got in Florida – well, I was speeding, I got caught, I went to traffic school, and that was that.  End of story.

            But the one when I was 17?  Not my finest hour.  I still cringe when I think about it.  Let me tell you what happened….

            It was a dark and snowy night in February of 1968, and I was driving home from youth group at the First Congregational Church of Wilmette, Illinois – my home church in my hometown.  I was also giving someone else a ride home.  I no longer remember who was getting that ride, but I do remember that because of this act of kindness, there was even a witness to what followed!

            Well, after I’d gone a few blocks from the church, I looked in the rearview mirror and, to my great surprise and even greater confusion, I saw the flashing red and blue lights of a police car.

            “That’s strange,” I said to whoever my companion was.  “I wonder why that’s there.  It can’t be for me; I didn’t do anything wrong.”

            And so I continued to drive, obviously not remembering the part in Driver’s Ed about pulling over for an emergency vehicle.  I continued to drive…and drive…and drive, with this police car right behind me, lights whirling like the Fourth of July.  We even went through one of the busiest (and most well-lit) intersections in town, so that lots of people got to see the police car in hot pursuit of a Ford Falcon going 35 miles an hour.

            I kept saying, “Why are they following me?  Why don’t they pass me and get where they’re going?”

            It was only when they turned on the siren that I finally realized that they were where they were going, thank you very much, and that it was in fact me they were after…and so yes, I finally pulled over.

            The officer was very kind.  He said he figured I hadn’t seen him because my convertible’s plastic back window was fogged up.  He officially ticketed me for having made an improper left turn back at the church – which is a total crock, by the way – but I think both of us knew that I was really being ticketed for stupidity!

            So now you know why I cringe.  I was so sure I hadn’t done anything wrong; I was so sure, in fact, that I ended up being hindered by my sureness.  To draw on today’s collect, I was sorely hindered; sorely hindered by my own claim to innocence.  It never even occurred to me to pull over; it never even occurred to me that maybe the police officers wanted to tell me about a broken taillight or something like that.  All I could see was my own belief that I had done nothing wrong.  I was sorely hindered by my pride, and by those self-righteous blinders that only let me see the perspective I chose to see.  I was sorely hindered by my sins.

            “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and, because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us….”

            This Third Sunday in Advent is a Sunday with several nicknames and, in the readings, a bit of a lighter spirit – except for that “unquenchable fire” part we just heard!  Today is variously known as Gaudate Sunday because “gaudate” is the Latin translation of the imperative “rejoice” which is part of today’s traditional readings; it’s also called Rose Sunday because we light the pink candle in the Advent wreath today, reflecting that same sense of rejoicing – and, very Anglican, today is also known as Stirrup Sunday because of the opening words of the collect:  “Stir up your power, O Lord….”  Following that, I also have it on good authority that this is also the day that one “stirs up” the Christmas pudding, theoretically adding more whiskey to the mix as it ages.

            All things considered, and with my first traffic ticket to boot, today sounds like a perfect day to talk about…Original Sin.

            Now, the whole concept of Original Sin is distressing and even offensive to many people today, including many Episcopalians.  From the Enlightenment onwards, western Christianity has had an increasingly ambiguous attitude towards sin, and this ambiguity has been made even more complex by the things we now know about human psychology, about the underlying motivations for behaviors, about theories of personality, and so forth.  The idea of Original Sin as something inherited and passed on from one generation to the next without their consent is seen as archaic, and even as unfair in our culture that emphasizes individual action and individual responsibility:  “What’s this ‘we sinned’?” we say.  “I wasn’t there.  I didn’t sin.”

            We don’t generally feel that “one bad apple” taints all of us here in the bushel like the children of Israel did when God through Moses was leading them through the wilderness.  In that day, if one person sinned, it was guilt by association for everyone else:  the whole clan paid the price for that one person’s sin.  Even so, if we say that we don’t believe in the concept or the reality of Original Sin, then I think we need to make sure we know what we’re talking about.  We need to know exactly what it is that we say we don’t believe.

            Even though sin was a late arrival, Genesis tells us that sin got its start in the Garden of Eden.  All of creation, including us, had already come into being and been declared good when sin came along, so the serpent, who was sin’s original vehicle, had his pick of creatures to approach.  More subtle than all the other inhabitants in the Garden, the serpent singled out the woman, and he asked her what God had said about the fruit of the trees in the Garden.  The woman said that according to God, everything was OK to eat except for the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  God had told the man that if they ate of the fruit of that tree, they would die.

            “You’re not going to die,” said the serpent, quietly baiting his hook.  “It’s just the opposite.  One bite of that fruit and your eyes will be opened.  One bite of that fruit, and YOU WILL BE LIKE GOD.”

            Well, how cool is that?  Bait just doesn’t get any better!  There might be lots of reasons we’d love to be like God, but the most compelling reason of all is that God is all-powerful – and the siren call of power is just as seductive today as it ever was.

            So the woman believed the serpent, took the bait, took the fruit, and she and the man were hooked – hooked by pride and disobedience; and as they ate, they experienced the first irony of the human condition.  In their attempt to be like God, the man and the woman actually went so far wide of the mark that they ended up about as unlike God as they could possibly be.  Their pride and their disobedience introduced SEPARATION into their, and our, relationship with God; separation, and self-centeredness; and so, doing what we will has become a lot more appealing to us than doing what God wills.

            That’s Original Sin, and my guess is that the overall dynamic sounds pretty familiar to us…but we do still have a problem with that “passed on from generation to generation” part.  When we look at babies, for example, we don’t want to see them as anything but the gifts from God that they are, and so we reject any suggestion that they also participate in Original Sin; and even St. Augustine of Hippo, who did a lot of the definitive work in this area for the western Church, even St. Augustine insisted that each soul is newly made by God…but Original Sin doesn’t contradict that; the theology of Original Sin doesn’t say that babies are evil or bad or not newly made by God.

            What it does say is that simply by being human, simply by being born into this world, babies are separated from God – just like their parents.  It says that babies are self-centered (which they are; that’s how we know what they need), and that babies are concerned with the fulfillment of their own desires – just like their parents.

            The Bible tells us that we were created good and that we ourselves compromised this goodness by deciding that we were the ultimate good.  From this decision, this choice, have come selfishness, hatred, arrogance, infidelity, abuse, and all the other negative behaviors, on the corporate and national levels as well as the personal, all of the behaviors that continue to exalt the one at the expense, or to the detriment, of the other; or of the many; all of the behaviors that we continue to model for those babies who come after us so that they can pass them on to their children too.

            All that is Original Sin, capital O, capital S.  We don’t have a choice about whether or not we inherit Original Sin any more that we have a choice as to who our parents are…but we do have a choice as to how we respond to Original Sin; and in choosing our own response, it helps to see how God responded to it.  Because of Original Sin, we had to say goodbye to Eden.  In spite of Original Sin, God never said goodbye to us.

            It’s easy to track God’s response to our disobedience because God’s response is the whole story of salvation that we find throughout the Bible.  This is a love story, the story of God continually calling us back to God in spite of what we’ve done, in spite of Original Sin.  It’s the story of a righteous God working to guide our behavior so that we too can be righteous; the story of God weeping over us, getting tough with us, but always standing by us with chesed, standing by us with steadfast love.  Ultimately, this is the story of God coming to be with us in the muck and the mire; of God being the one who goes first because we can’t; of God being the one who blazes the trail home to show us the way.  God’s response to our sin is the story of God continuing to invite us into relationship – again, and again, and again.  As St. Augustine has said, “Without God, we cannot.  Without us, God will not.”

            How we respond to the spiritual reality of Original Sin is up to us; and we here as Anglican Christians, as Episcopalians, have chosen to respond positively to God’s love, to God’s invitation into relationship, by receiving baptism for ourselves and for our children, believing God’s promise that in baptism we are united with Jesus in his death and resurrection, and that in fact we are marked as Christ’s own forever.  We believe that through the power of the Holy Spirit, baptism heals our separation from God and from each other; that our relationship with all of creation is restored and made new…and so we here choose restoration and new life; but let’s not forget my traffic ticket and my conviction of my own innocence.

            Even baptized, we have freedom of choice every day of our lives, including the freedom to say that we have no sin, the freedom to backslide into arrogance and self-deceit, to backslide into all the “compromises of daily life.”  One author talks about John the Baptizer’s call to repentance today as a call for “a moment of truth, a call to abandon all [the] devices [we use] to maintain [the] illusion of [our] innocence” so that we can “come clean” and “come empty” to receive the gift of God in Christ.

            Abandon all the devices we use to maintain the illusion of our innocence; abandon them so that we can come clean, and come empty to the manger of God’s love; this is the call of Stirrup Sunday.

            “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us; and because we are sorely hindered by our sins, let your bountiful grace and mercy speedily help and deliver us….”  Amen.

December 8th, 2024: The Second Sunday of Advent by Reverend Rob Bethancourt

Baruch 5:1-9, Canticle 16, Philippians 1:3-11, Luke 3:1-6

I.    Intro - Two clergy with sign "Turn back before it's too late. The end is near." Guy in redsportscar "Mind your own business, you religious nuts!" Loud splash. Maybe the sign should say "Bridge out"

II.   Body

A.  Background

1.   A lot of ridicule around the theme of repentance

2.   Rightly so. Often presented as: Feel bad about all bad things you've done or you'llgo to hell.

3.   Let's take another look

B.  Gospel - Luke 3:1-6

1.   First, an introduction of John the baptist preaching on repentance

2.   Then Isaiah: this is the voice of one saying "Prepare the way of the Lord"

3.   So evidently preparing the way of the Lord is first and foremost through our ownrepentance

4.   Important to know what repentance is

C.  Repentance

1.   Hebrew: Shuv - turn/choose a new direction (not: Feel bad about yourself)

2.   Greek: Metanoiete - change your mind

3.   New insight this week: Change your focus (unites both Hebrew and Greekunderstanding)

D.  Application

1.   In areas that bring suffering to ourselves, others, and our world, we need tochange our focus

2.   Story of how they train race car drivers to focus on the track ... not the wall

3.   Alignment with God is alignment with love, joy, and peace.

III.  Conclusion

A good question to ask this third week in Advent is:

Where is my current focus hurting my relationship with God?

What is one simple shift in focus that might help this week?

Maybe I am focused on "Ain't it awful." Perhaps a shift could be "What am I genuinely grateful for?"

Maybe I am focused on all the bad things happening in our world. Perhaps a shift could be

"What is one simple act of kindness I could do for another this week?"

December 1st, 2024: The First Sunday of Advent by J.D. Neal

Jeremiah 33:14-16 / Ps. 25:1-10 / 1 Thess. 3:9-13 / Luke 21:25-36

Well friends, today is the first Sunday of Advent, and I’m very sad to not be there in person with all of you to see the church colors change and to light that first Advent candle. As most of you know by now, God always seems to have a dry sense of humor about which gospel passages I get assigned to preach, and today is a double whammy: (1.) today’s gospel is a rough one, and (2.) I’m too sick to actually be there to preach about it! Please say a big thank you to whoever was kind enough to stand up this morning and read this meditation on my behalf.

Starting today, we enter into the season of Advent. The word ‘advent’ means ‘coming’, and it refers to the incarnation — the coming of Christ into the world as a little baby in a manger in 1st Century Palestine. Advent is a season of preparation, where we try to enter into those long, dark centuries before the birth of Jesus when the people of God lived in exile and then under foreign occupation. In these years the people of God were alienated from their home, their temple, and so many of the things that connected them to God and one another; these were years of uncertainty and pain, when it must have seemed that all was lost and when prophecies of restoration and hope must have felt like dimly burning candles in a dark, cold night.

And so it’s no wonder that when Jesus comes onto the scene, he is born into an Israel where the people are desperate for a Savior — where the long years of suffering have taken their toll and the people of God are hoping for a Messiah to come along not just to set things to rights, but to violently overthrow the Roman oppressors and finally make the other nations suffer just like Israel has been suffering. They are hoping for a day when Israel will be lifted up above all the other nations, and when they all will bow down and come to the Temple in Jerusalem as subjects to pay tribute to Israel and Israel's God, as some of the prophets write about.

But this is not the way that Jesus comes into the world to restore it. In fact, our gospel today is the last section of a longer passage where Jesus is predicting that the Temple in Jerusalem will be destroyed and where he tells them what things will be like in the years leading up to that destruction. Of course, Jesus is right, and the temple is actually destroyed about 40 years later in 70AD, but for the disciples and other Jews who hear this, this is impossible news. The temple is the main way that Jews at the time interacted with God; it is where they believed they drew near to God, where God met them. It was THE sign and proof of God’s presence with them. The Messiah was supposed to come into the world to liberate the temple and lift it up to glory, not prophesy about its destruction.

Yet somehow, Jesus says, this time of destruction will be a time when ‘the Son of Man’ is revealed, when God’s glory is made known, and when the disciples are going to “stand up and raise [their] heads, because [their] redemption is drawing near.”

Now, this is a tough passage, and I’m not going to pretend that I fully understand exactly what Jesus is saying here. What I do understand is that when Jesus was born, God’s people were so fixated on their particular understanding of God’s promises, so fixated on the temple and their particular rituals and all of the different things that they looked to for security and strength that when God showed up in the person of Jesus, they misunderstood him entirely. When he threatened the security and stability that they held dear, they entreated the Romans to put him to death.

What I do understand is that sometimes when we are wounded and afraid, we put our trust and security in all sorts of things that we believe will save and protect us — let’s call these things ‘temples’ — and we do all sorts of terrible things to one another instead of facing our fears and handing them over to God. But here’s the thing: God is the only one in whom we can truly rest, in whom there is true healing and security and peace. And sometimes the only way we can be set free and finally give ourselves over to God is when those ‘temples’ that we cling to are taken away and come crashing down around us — when we are forced to see that they were never able to save or protect us all along.

This first Sunday of Advent is traditionally meant to focus on ‘Hope’, so based on everything I’ve written so far, this gospel passage might seem like a bad fit. It’s certainly not warm and fuzzy, and it’s not obviously comforting and hopeful at first glance. But here’s the thing — I think that it says something about what true hope looks like.

As many of you know, my Mom had a heart attack last weekend, she’s in the hospital right now recovering from open heart surgery. My wife, Rachel, has a severe chronic illness, my Dad has cancer, and to top it all off, I have a nasty cold. I’m not having a good week over here. And, often, when someone is going through times like this, it’s tempting to tell them not to worry because ‘everything is going to be alright’ and ‘God’s going to take care of it’ and ‘God has a plan,’ and just to ‘have faith’ — because we don’t like to see people suffering. And in some sense, all of those statements are true, but as I’m sure you know, words like that are cold comfort to someone who is really in darkness, because the truth is that God doesn’t promise that we won’t suffer, that we won’t hurt and grieve and lose many of the things and people that we love.

The ‘hope’ that Christ offers, and that our Gospel this morning offers, is that somehow, even when everything we hold dear seems to be crashing down around us and all things seem dark — somehow, Christ will come. It may be in the kindness of a friend or stranger, in a sudden word from God in prayer or in something we read, or it may be something else entirely, but somehow, even in the depths of our pain, Christ will reveal himself to us and we will discover that all is not lost. The hope of today’s gospel and the hope of Advent is that somehow, someday, despite everything we might lose, darkness and death will not get the last word — all things will, at last, be made well.

This is what we try to remember in this Advent season: that God has come among us — that Christ has been, is now, and will be always with us — and that he often comes to us unexpectedly, when all things seem dark.

This Advent, may we learn to wait in hope for Christ’s coming, and may the Holy Spirit make us the hands and feet of Jesus to those who feel trapped in the dark.

Amen.