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.

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.

November 24th, 2024: Looking for Hope by Reverend Jeannie Martz

I’d like to begin this morning by talking about miracles.

  A few years ago, a community church that I passed every day on my way to my former parish of Trinity, Orange had a banner-type sign out front that read, “Expect a miracle.”  I always had a positive response to that sign, and I took it as a personal reminder to keep my mind and my eyes open to the reality of God constantly at work in the world – and then I encountered another quote, from where I don’t remember; another quote suggesting that a miracle is God’s work in the world intentionally slowed down so that we humans can see it more easily.  I happily embraced both of these thoughts – until I came upon another quote, this time from my own files of “Good Stuff,” quotes and snippets collected from anywhere and everywhere through the years. 

In this particular snippet, its author said, “People aren’t looking for miracles, they’re looking for hope – and they only get that from people who have struggled, and make the choice to keep going.”  (CtK B 18)

            People aren’t looking for miracles, they’re looking for hope.  Now this is interesting, because based on what I just said, it’s usually miracles that get all the attention; it’s miracles that get the big press.  Understood as special interventions by God into our physical world or into the lives of individuals or peoples through the power of God’s Holy Spirit, I think we certainly pray for miracles; we pray for the power of God to be manifested in a unique and decisive way in a particular life or a particular situation that’s important to us; but then, as I mentally thumbed through the miracles that are recorded in Scripture, from the parting of the Red Sea and the deliverance of the children of Israel to the provision of manna in the wilderness to the miracles of Jesus’ own ministry:  water into wine at Cana, the multiplication of loaves and fishes to feed the 5,000; all of Jesus’ healing miracles, and even the raising of both Jairus’ daughter and Lazarus from the dead – as I thought about all these, I realized that miracles do have their limitations.

            Now, true – miracles change immediate circumstances and can certainly alter the course of an individual life, as every person healed by Jesus and restored to their family and their community would attest; but miracles don’t change either the ultimate reality, or the ultimate bottom line, of human life.  With only one exception, every single person who was the recipient or the beneficiary of miraculous intervention from God in all of Scripture, sooner or later, they all still died – and Lazarus and Jairus’ daughter each had to die twice.

            Miracles may change the conditions of our humanity, but they don’t change the fact of our humanity.

            The only enduring, ongoing miracle in all of Scripture is the miracle of Jesus himself:  his Incarnation by the Holy Spirit, his Passion and death on the Cross, and his Resurrection to new life -- the miracle that defeated all those other deaths once for all.  The miracle of Jesus as Emmanuel, God-with-us, is the concrete and eternal expression of God’s love for us and for all creation; and it’s the miracle of Jesus that is the foundation for, and the basis of, all Christian hope.

            As I’ve said before, and I think from this pulpit as well, Christian hope IS NOT wishful thinking pulled out of our hearts and our minds, as we imagine the future we’d like to have.         Christian hope in the present is the confident expectation of our future relationship with God, because it’s an expectation that is based on, and rooted in, the actual events of our past relationship with God.

            One author writes, “Hope, with strength for the future, consists in returning.  [Hope] is retrospective.  The returning is to the fact and foundation of redemption, the established achievement of Christ’s atonement, the ‘one full perfect and sufficient sacrifice, satisfaction and oblation for the sins of the whole world’ (Cranmer’s phrasing).  Everything else in life that is positive or promised is based on that achievement.”  (LP, Hope, 10)

            This being said, however, confident expectation isn’t always easy for us to maintain.  As I mentioned earlier, people get hope from other people; “people who have struggled, and make the choice to keep going.”

            One of the boldest affirmations of ultimate hope in all of Scripture comes from the voice of someone whose trials, losses, and pain are legendary to this day.  The voice is that of Job, which is surprising, given that when he makes this affirmation, his own situation couldn’t have been worse.

            Through no fault of his own, Job has lost his children, his wealth, his physical health, and his friends; and although he has repeatedly demanded an explanation from God as to the reason for his radical misfortune, he has yet to receive a response.

            Even so, from these depths Job makes a statement that is so powerful, so filled with confident expectation, that it’s included as one of the opening sentences in our Order for Burial in the Book of Common Prayer:  “As for me,” Job says, “I know that my Redeemer lives and that at the last he will stand upon the earth.  After my awaking, he will raise me up; and in my body I shall see God.  I myself shall see, and my eyes behold him who is my friend and not a stranger.”  (BCP p. 491)

            Even in the midst of all his earthly pain, all his earthly struggles, Job has chosen to keep going, and he has chosen to keep going in relationship with God.

            On this Feast of Christ the King, when we celebrate the culmination of the liturgical year and we look ahead to the time when all things in heaven and earth will be restored and brought together in Christ, on this day all of our readings are about hope, and about fulfillment.  All of our readings support the confident expectation that God’s purposes do continue to be worked out through the events of human history, even when these purposes are opposed by the world’s powers, even when justice seems perverted and the faithful are suffering.  The Book of Daniel, from which today’s first reading is taken, is particularly relevant because Daniel was written to people in pain; people whose lives had been turned upside down by conquest and domination – people who, like us, struggled with violence in their midst; people who struggled with housing insecurity, food insecurity, health issues, and fears for the day to day safety of those they loved.

            A little background:  after the death of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., his very sizeable empire was divided between three of his generals.  One of them, Seleucus, and the Seleucid Dynasty he founded, took control of that part of the Middle East that included Judea; and the Book of Daniel was written two hundred years later, in the second century B.C., at a time when the Jews, especially those in Jerusalem, were being actively persecuted by the ruling Greek Seleucids; persecuted for practicing their faith.  

            Daniel was written to give the people hope in God’s deliverance, but because it was too dangerous to write openly about the author’s understanding of God’s plans for the Seleucids, the book’s storyline was placed in Babylon three centuries earlier, during the time that the

Jewish people were in exile there.  It was presented partly as an extended narrative about Daniel, a Jew who remains faithful to God while a member of the court in Babylon, and partly as an account of Daniel’s visions of God’s coming action.  These visions, as we heard today, are described in the symbolic language of apocalyptic, which is a specific literary style that places the immediate situation of the visionary and of the people themselves who are under threat into the greater framework of world history, and of the world’s imminent transformation. 

(Craddock, 478)            

And while apocalyptic writing doesn’t bring any physical or material relief to its recipients, it does something else:  it places the immediate suffering of its recipients into the greater context of God’s Big Picture; and in doing so, the apocalyptic writer gives the people’s suffering a cosmic dimension as well as cosmic meaning; and it graphically demonstrates to the faithful that in the world things are not always as they seem.  (F, R, Th, 328)

As another author says concerning the apocalyptic promises in the Revelation to John, “…with the Lord God, there is always more:  more transformation to come than the earth has yet seen, more power and authority than claimed by earthly rulers, more dignity for God’s people than earthly rulers recognize.”  There is always more.  (F, R, Th, 326)

A Benedictine abbot once wrote, “Our faith is the answer not so much to the question ‘What must I believe?’ but rather [it is the answer to the question] ‘What dare I hope?’”  (LP, Hope, 14)

“What dare I hope?”  “What is my confident expectation?”  This is a question we not only ask ourselves, but also a question we can ask in faith about Jesus’ mindset, as he stands being interrogated by Pilate in John.

  John’s Gospel, of course, is qualitatively different from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke.  The last Biblical Gospel to be written, and dating from around the beginning of the second century A.D., the Gospel of John is a mature theological treatise, an extended reflection on the part of his community on the meaning of Jesus as the Christ.

Throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus is in complete control as the Risen Lord.  All events take place according to whether or not “his hour” has come, and nothing happens, including both his crucifixion and his death, without his complete consent.  Jesus has come from God, and when the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified, he will return to God.

This being said, within the context of John, what does Jesus dare hope? – and again, this isn’t wishful thinking.  Based on his past with the God from whom he has come, what does Jesus confidently expect for the future?

Hold on to that for a moment.

The traditional representation of Christ the King is Jesus on the cross, head up, arms out straight, body erect, vested in a priest’s chasuble and wearing a crown.  

In 1951, the artist Salvadore Dali, in response to what he called a “cosmic dream”, produced a painting that he called “Christ of Saint John of the Cross” because he based its design “on a drawing by the 16th century Spanish friar [and mystic] John of the Cross.”  And I give you one-time sermon permission:  if you have access to your cell phone, go ahead and take it out, keeping it on silent, and go to your browser or search engine.  Type in “Christ of Saint John of the Cross,” because I would love for you to see the actual painting as I continue.

As I hope you can see, the painting dramatically depicts Jesus on the cross as seen from above “in a darkened sky floating over a body of water complete with a boat and fishermen”.  Jesus’ upper body is arched forward in an extreme angle as would be consistent with gravity pulling on a torso held back only by nails, but this same angle allows Jesus to look down upon the fishermen as well as upon the cloud-filled, but not necessarily dark, abyss that lies between the fishermen and the cross.

And although Dali paints Jesus on the cross, he omits the nails, he omits blood, he omits the crown of thorns; and because of the angle of Jesus’ head, he also omits any facial expression for Jesus – again, he says, because he was so directed in his dream.  (Wikipedia). 

The power of this painting is unmistakable, because somehow Dali manages to portray not only the mystery of the cross, both “life-giving” and of the abyss, but also the mystery of Christ enthroned upon this cross; the mystery of the crucified Christ as “the one in whom all things [in heaven and in earth] hold together”.  (Christian Century, 10/24/18, Brad Roth, 23)

And this glorified but radically different Christ the King, this Christ without nails, is held on the throne of the cross only by his own love, his own obedience to God, his own will.  The painting’s message and its effect are regal, compassionate, and profound.

To go back to my question about the hope of Jesus, about what Jesus confidently expects for his future, one scholar has said that “The hope of Jesus was based on his

understanding of the character of God.”  (LP, Hope, Robin Scroggs, 13)

As the one who had come from God and was returning to God, Jesus knew God, knew the character of God, intimately.  He knew that he had come from Love and Compassion, that he was returning to Love and Compassion, and that in the Love and Compassion of God as revealed in and through him, all things – us, our lives, our world, all the little pictures that make up the Big Picture – all things will be held together.

People aren’t looking for miracles, they’re looking for hope – and our hope, our Christian hope, is based on our understanding of God as God was, and is, and ever shall be revealed in Jesus Christ, the king voluntarily enthroned upon the cross of love, for us. We don’t need to expect the miracle.  We already have the miracle.     Amen.   

November 17th, 2024: Doing the Footwork Together by Reverend Judith ('Jude') Lyons

A lot has happened in the month since I was last here.  

So much so, that I have felt drained,

 And I have sometimes felt inadequate to the task of preaching the Good News of the Gospel, to point us toward the New Church New Year that begins in 2 weeks’ time, with the lighting of the first Advent candle, the candle that celebrates Hope.

It’s not that I am without Hope – not at all – but a heaviness pervades

And my muscles ache as they work to climb up To where the light is each day.

Perhaps you feel something similar –  not because of who you did or didn’t vote for— But because of the fear, aggressive language  and either/or attitudes that surround us. We are a Both/And people  living in an either/or world.

But, in the midst of it all, as is always the case— Life goes on with the joys and challenges  of our everyday lives: Friends, family, game night, phone calls, (or text messages), hurt feelings, food, laughter, pets, and love.

And also in the mix are larger events that matter. This month contains many celebrations of Indigenous peoples 

There are preparations for Thanksgiving, baptisms, weddings, concerts, and on and on in the vitality of our lives.

A week ago, was the annual Diocesan Convention in Riverside, Where clergy and lay delegates met to do the business of the church AND to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the ordination of women in the Episcopal Church!!!

It was a beacon of light and Hope so needed by us all.

On Friday night we watched the documentary about The Philadelphia 11, the first women who were officially ordained as Priests And the brave Bishops who ordained them.

I was 27 then, living in Philadelphia, where I watched it unfold on TV as my 18-month old babies played on the floor.

Watching the film, I had forgotten the dark, angry, hate-filled abuse they endured 

As these seminary-trained deaconesses pursued Their God-centered call to the priesthood.

You can only imagine what they were called  publicly and privately – That they were of Satan, 

They were destroying the nearly 2000 years  of the church,

Jesus was male and only men could be priests 

Women weren’t suited;  didn’t have the right equipment,

Any sacrament these women try to do post-ordination Will be invalid – baptisms, weddings,  And most of all – The Eucharist.

They are an abomination.

All this and much worse – out of the mouths of church people. 

 I had also forgotten that the 3 Bishops required to ordain them Had each sacrificed their careers and their reputations to do so And yet they continued to speak out, actively working for years

For the eventual passing vote in the House of Bishops

For the Ordination of women on July 29, 1974.

As we watched the film, the clothes and hair were very 1970’s

But the anger and division were very familiar.

At Convention, all the women clergy – priests and deacons – wore red— Representing the Holy Spirit.

Clergy shirts and collars, red jacket or sweater, and red stoles.

We all processed in together during the opening hymn of the Eucharist.

It was thrilling, ear to ear smiles as we sang – A moment of joy— but also of great humility 

In the deep awareness of those who had come before,

Of the struggles and sacrifices they endured to clear the way for the rest of us.

Heading the procession, presiding at the Eucharist, and giving the keynote address was Dr. Rev. Carter Hayward, one of the 11, now in her 80’s.

So, here for us was exactly the jolt of Hope we all needed.

Hope drove our flood of feelings for what is good and right and of God---no matter the struggle.

I pray you too have had moments of Hope this week,

The flood of feelings of love, goodness, rightness

In your days and weeks, in your lives

That remind you that there is more – That God’s love is more  than what appears on our news feeds.

The Gospel for today resonates  in some unexpected ways with where we find ourselves in this time and place.

Jesus who cuts through the surface  to re-orient the disciples

To the stark realties in which they live.

Having left the Temple court  where Jesus had been teaching amid tense and dangerous confrontations, Jesus and his disciples walk outside,  along the Temple walls, where an unnamed disciple exclaims –  as a tourist might –

“Teacher, what large stones and what large buildings.”

In other circumstances, 

we might accuse Jesus of being a buzz kill,

But here Jesus deliberately reigns in any happy distractions about the size of the Temple.

He needs the disciples to stay in the truth, in reality of the precariousness of the world.  He will need them to be fueled by Hope In the middle of devastation, not outside of it, Or in some manufactured positivity. The real Hope is in God –only and always in God— most especially at the hardest, toughest times. “Teacher, what large stone and what large buildings.”  And Jesus says: 

 “not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down.”

We know this to be true

Nothing is Permanent

Not the Temple

Or the Twin towers

Or bombed out villages

Or flood ravished towns.      Only God.

The disciples grow silent, somber, as they ask Jesus what lies ahead.   There is a collective Gloom.

But it is not gloom for Jesus – it is reality which must be faced, where Truth must shine, where courage must reign.

In 12-step programs there is this phrase:

Do the footwork and stay out of the results.

That is what Jesus is saying.

Do the footwork, that is where Hope resides and grows.

In answering the disciples, Jesus says: 

“Do not be led astray” 

There will be many people, places and things to distract you, And those trying to persuade or fool you.

Keep it simple:

Hold what you know to be true in your heart, mind and actions.

Then Jesus says, “Do not be alarmed” 

– which is different from do not be afraid –

Do not be alarmed by the dangers and destruction you see around you – 

War, violence, fire, flood, famine, hatred writ large – That is part of reality, part of the reality in this world. Stay in it.  Stay true.

We are so inundated with images  of suffering and discord

That it is hard to stay in it, hard to stay true.

And I confess to needing news breaks;

I switch to watching “The Great British Baking Show”  on Netflix instead.

And that’s good self-care, and a fun thing to do.

But I mustn’t see the world on one channel only.

Hope is doing the footwork together, holding each other up

Finding courage in doing what is good and right – with and for others.

I realized as I walked in that procession with my red stole How much I missed the courage and joy 

That a regular community of believers gave me.

You have that here.  Treasure it.

I leave you today with these words inspired by Jesus:

Do not be led astray

Do not be alarmed

Do the footwork together Find the Hope and Love  in as many moments as you can And you will light the way.

AMEN.

November 3rd, 2024: Reflections on All Saints' and All Souls' Day by Reverend ('Mo') Lyn Crow

True confession.

I spent a lot of years as a lay person in the pews – (late vocation).

One thing I was always a bit confused about was the difference between All Saints Day, which we are celebrating today, and All Souls Day.

I finally found a way to remember the difference

All Saints Day – traditionally remembered on November 1st is the celebration of all recognized Saints – the ones the church recognizes as especially holy people.  So think of this day as the day we remember Capital “S” Saints.

All Souls Day – traditionally remembered on November 2nd is the celebration of all the faithful departed, all of those we remember and love who have died but are not necessarily formally recognized by the church.  Think of this as the day we remember small “s” saints.

By the way – you may be wondering why we are celebrating All Saints – traditionally celebrated on November 1st, today, on November 3rd.

All Saints is what we call one of the “moveable” feasts of the church.  We can move it to the closest Sunday, so that more people will get to take part in the celebration.

Because let’s face it – how many people do you think would have showed up on Friday, November 1st at 10am?  Now you understand why we are celebrating on November 3rd!

I want to tell you a sweet story about saints that illustrates what big “S” Saints and little “s” saints have in common.

A Sunday School class took kids into church and showed them the stained-glass windows.  “Those are pictures of the saints.  They are very holy people.”

Later, at the end of the lesson in their classroom, the teacher asked, “Who can tell me what a saint is?”

Danny raised his hand and said, “I know!”  The teacher asked Danny to share with us.  And he replied, “Saints are the people the light shines through.”

You see, all saints, whether they are capital “S” Saints or small “s” saints are people the light shines through.

We know them because we can see the light of Christ in and through them.

And the more we look for that light in people – the more we see it.

So, I’m going to tell you a few brief stories about some saints – some capital “S” Saints and some small “s” saints.

After my ordination I applied for and received approval for a sabbatical in Europe, studying the Saints where they lived:  “Doorways to the Divine – Holy People and Holy Places”

St. Therese of Lisieux

Known as the Little Flower, she is a Capital “S” Saint.  She lived in Northern France from 1873-1897.  Though she died at the age of 25 – she was canonized and made a Saint by the church.

Urged by her Mother Superior, she wrote a book called, The Story of a Soul – an autobiography.

Her spirituality is known as “The Little Way.”

She says that all the small seemingly insignificant actions of love of which we are capable, take on great value because of the motive behind them which is the ceaseless flow of love between us and God.

If we only fear God, she says, we think God needs to be placated by our deeds, which then becomes our motive.

But God is not to be feared, says Therese.  God is merciful love and confidence in that love, means even when we sin, provided we stumble to our feet again and continue our advance toward God, we will be forgiven and God will instantly welcome us home.

St. Ignatius of Loyola

Another capital “S” Saint known as a Man of the Heart.  He lived from 1491-1556 in Bonn Loyola, Spain.

As a young man, he wanted a career as a courtier in the King’s court and as a soldier.

He gambled, he brawled, he fought duels, and he was a womanizer – which is why he fought many duels.

He joined the war between Loyola and Pamplona.  His leg was shattered by a cannonball.

He spent months and months recovering at home and bored to tears, looked for books in the family library on chivalry.  There were only two. 

But there were lots on the lives of the Saints and there was a copy of The Imitation of Christ, a spiritual classic by Thomas à Kempis.

Out of boredom he began to read them and was converted.  He decided he wanted to be a Knight for God.

He travelled to Montserrat outside of Barcelona to give his life to God.

Then he went to a cave retreating to be with God.

He heard God say to him, “Don’t withdraw from the world, take my love out into the world.”

There in Manresa, he wrote Spiritual Exercises, a book of instructions for living a spiritual life.  Even today you can take a 3, 4, 8, or even a 30-day Ignatian retreat based on the book.

Or you can do as I did and buy the book and do the retreat one day at a time at home.

You may remember from last week one practice taken from the Spiritual Exercises: when I mentioned during the gospel that Ignatius encourages us to enter into a gospel story by becoming one of the characters.

To sum up Ignatius’ teaching, it would be: Heart Open to God Heart Open to Others.

Now on to some small “s” saints.

Chris Hooley showed his 11-year-old daughter Kaylee a touching video on YouTube called “Making the Homeless Smile.”  Their motto is: It’s the little things we do that make a big difference in the world.

His daughter was mesmerized by it.  By the way, I highly recommend watching it, it’s wonderful.

With his daughter’s urging, dad and daughter worked together to create a nonprofit charitable organization.  They host street events where they hand out food, water, clothing, and toiletries to the homeless in Phoenix and then they post videos on them on YouTube.

Jackie Waters and her sister Tracy are small “s” saints.  Tracy lived a 21-year battle with a rare form of brain cancer.  But Tracy was an amazing young woman.  She adopted a Superhero presence during her battle which kept her spirits high and showed others how powerful positive thinking can be.

After Tracy died, Jackie, inspired by her sister’s strength, jumped full force into creating “Help Your Hero,” a website that helps children dealing with difficult medical diagnoses to find their inner Superhero and connects parents with important resources to help them as a family.

So let’s be saints that the light shines through, each in our own way.  And let’s take that light out in the world for everyone to see.

And here’s a song to inspire us.  I’m sure a lot of you grew up with this as I did.  It’s #293 in the Hymnal or you can use the handouts I brought.

October 27th, 2024: Reflections on Pentecost 23: Mark 10:46-52, by Reverend ('Mo') Lyn Crow

I believe in miracles.  There is no doubt in my mind that Jesus restored the physical sight of blind Bartimeus in today’s gospel.

Miracles are part of the reason people knew that Jesus was the Messiah.

In Ignatian spirituality we are invited to put ourselves into a gospel story to become one of the characters.

That might be a bit of a challenge for many of us, if we try to become Bartimeus.  It might be hard for us to imagine what being blind would be like.

But there may be a way to connect with Bartimeus.  There may be something in this gospel for those of us who are not physically blind.

We may not be physically blind, but all of us have some spiritual blindness.

And all of us have a choice whether to remain by the roadside crippled by that blindness or whether to cry out to God that we want to see more clearly.

What I’ve learned is that this life journey we are on is way more interesting if we ask to see!

Another thing I’ve learned is that sometimes when God helps us to see something we couldn’t see before, the healing is gradual, sort of like peeling layers of an onion.

Sometimes God takes us back to the same issue over and over again, peeling the onion a layer at a time.

And each time God has us revisit an issue in our lives, we go deeper and deeper into that issue and begin to see more and more clearly.

So if we want to understand where God is trying to heal our spiritual blindness, we need to look for the same issue coming up repeatedly in our lives.

God reveals what God wants to heal.

Look for the same old thing coming up again and again.  Don’t resist it.

Here’s an example from my own life.  Coincidentally it has to do with beggars.

I had a rather jaded view of beggars.  My thought was “Don’t give them money, they might buy drugs or alcohol with it.”  So I didn’t help beggars.

The first layer of the onion began to be peeled off when God began to soften my heart.  Maybe it wasn’t up to me to judge.  Had I checked in with God to see if I was supposed to help this person?

Maybe my job was just to love, not judge and seek God’s guidance.  So occasionally, when I began to get what I call holy nudges from God, I would give beggars a bit of my change.

The second layer was peeled away when children became a part of the picture.

One day a woman came up to me outside TJ Maxx.  She was almost in tears.  She needed school clothes for her kids.  Nudged again, I gave her folding money.

Several weeks after, in the parking lot at Trader Joe’s, a man, his wife and two kids were begging, really begging for help.  Following God’s nudge, I gave them money.

The third layer of the onion came off one day when I was seated in a booth next to the window eating a meal at a local Italian restaurant.

I became aware of a homeless man standing outside the window staring at my meal.  I instantly knew he was hungry.

I grabbed a $20 bill and ran outside to give it to him.

Afterwards I got in my car and the thought came to me “You didn’t even ask his name.”

Next time I will, I vowed – the third layer.

Some days later while packing for a week long trip, I looked at all my clothes.  And I thought of all the people around us who shop at Goodwill and can’t afford TJ Maxx.  I vowed to think of their needs before I bought anything else.

And I spent another week of my vacation hauling bags and bags of stuff I wasn’t using to the Goodwill so that someone else could have the joy of owning it.

Layer #4

And then one Sunday after a group of us had gathered at Pollo Loco for lunch, I bumped into a lady in the parking lot, empty coffee cup extended begging for money.

Again, getting a holy nudge, I asked her her name and if she was hungry.  “C’mon let’s get you something to eat,” I said.  I invited her to choose her meal and a beverage, and I paid.  I gave her the buzzer that would let her know her meal was ready, gave her a hug and left.

After I was in the car and down the street the thought came to me “Why didn’t you stay and keep her company while she ate?”

Layer #5

And then God took me to the core of it all.

All of a sudden “I saw.”  I saw what God was leading me to see, what all the layers were about.

And here is what I “saw.”  The more you befriend the person on the roadside, the beggar, the more you will learn to befriend the unlovely parts of yourself.

The more you stop resisting the lives of the beggars in your world, the more you will come to peace with the parts of you that live on the roadside begging.

Ah!  Now I saw what all these encounters with the homeless were about.

I saw the issue with a spiritual depth I hadn’t seen before.

I thought it was about helping the poor and the marginalized.

I thought it was about giving them dignity by knowing their name.

I thought it was about giving the gift of a meal and my company.

I thought it was all about being willing to be a companion to the poor.

And it was all those things!  But it was also about more.

It was about acknowledging the unlovely parts of us.

About not only being aware of that part of ourselves, but extending care to ourselves.

By knowing ourselves (our name) by knowing everything about ourselves.

It’s about spending time with the unlovely parts of ourselves, making friends with that part.

It’s about being able to say, “Yes, this shadow is a part of me.”

I am both shadow and light – accepting rather than resisting that.

The Good News is that by befriending, eating with, giving honor to all of who we are, that part of us will be gradually healed by God.

Just the way Jesus healed the blind beggar.

And so the gospel invites us to take the part of the beggar:

·        To long for something more

·        To beg Jesus to see more

That’s how the onion gets peeled.

And the gospel also invites us to take the part of Jesus:

·        To accept the beggar in ourselves and in the world

·        To never resist the beggar

·        To get to know the beggar

And then we, like the blind beggar, will be healed.

October 20th, 2024: Reflections on Pentecost 22: Privilege and Leadership, Mark 10:35-45; Isaiah 53; Psalm 91, by Reverend Jude Lyons

Disneyland opened when I was 8.  I was in the third grade, and because the public elementary school was on half days due to, I think, some sort of significant repair or emergency something, my brother and I were enrolled at St. Paul the Apostle Catholic School. And, although it was an adjustment, the best thing was that there were Catholic holidays where all the Catholics went to mass and the very few of us who were non-Catholic didn’t!!  And so, I remember, December 8th. It was the Feast of Mary and the Immaculate Conception.  My classmates all went to mass; my mother, brother, sister and I went to Disneyland. We entered another world. It wasn’t crowded. It was pristine; it was calm; it was beautiful; it was magical; it felt, well, holy.  It was a land of awe and wonder and breath and smiles, and it felt as if time itself had slowed for us all to savor each moment. It seemed to me like a special pass from God.   

Near the end of that year, the Catholic enrollment for St. Paul’s had picked up, and so the non-Catholics….the protestants… were not renewed, which was okay.  I went back to the public school for 4th grade.  What do I remember?  That day at Disneyland. 

Much has changed, at Disneyland, and everywhere else, especially where crowds are a way of life ---- waiting in endless lines, finding a place to park, getting to the discount first, and figuring out how to navigate through too many, too much, too often.  Uncertainty lurks in those crowds – will they run out, will I have to pay extra.  Will the doors close, will I waste the whole day, will my children have a melt down before we get there, will I be at the wrong window, will someone cut in front of me or push me or take the last seat or block the aisle with their suitcase.  And, so it goes.  These are the annoyances of our world, the irritants that actually shape our lives.; And yet we know these are first world problems, not survival problems, not the pushing and shoving that comes when food or water arrives in Gaza, of families fighting to get on the bus or boat away from a war zone.   

We all understand the basic human instinct for survival, for food, shelter, and the protection of our children.   We see the images of desperate people trying to make it through one more day, anyway they can. 

But somehow, in our culture, we have co-opted that basic instinct for survival by cultivating it and using it to appease our inconveniences, our annoyances, to navigate and maneuver through the masses, to find for ourselves, and pay for, the fast pass, the special door, the privileged card, the favored list, the gold card, the sticker for the designated parking lot, the ease and comfort of unique, of special, of privilege. Peddling privilege is a huge money-maker, and most of us fall for it in one way or another.

I have just returned from an 8 day trip to New England, and believe me, if I had been able to utilize special lines for security, or a fast pass for the car (which took hours), or bigger seats, better access to the bathroom, I would have done it in a heartbeat, and I looked longingly at those who sped ahead----so I understand why we enter in to the game of how to get ahead, to leap frog the system, to make better arrangements for ourselves!!   

What I think Jesus is getting at in today’s Gospel is not a critique of the desire to secure a place or the desire to get ourselves to the head of the line.  It is not the desire or even the asking that is misplaced.

It is facing what creeps into our hearts that matters. It is the entitlement, the pride, the self -satisfaction with one’s own efforts – in short, it is the lack of awareness of privilege we have managed to obtain, and the lack of gratitude for the ease it brings. 

It is not a condemnation of privilege; it is a condemnation of our insensitivity, our lack of gratitude for what we have and how we, unlike many others, are able to function in the world. Our culture and our human nature rewards us for manipulating the system, in part by making us feel clever, smart, even responsible as we participate in our advantages.  

In this world, there will always be advantages.

As Christians, It is a matter of attitude and perspective and generosity of heart. 

How different would it be if we gave thanks to God every single time we recognize our privilege, even in the smallest ways,  and prayed for those without, for thhose still standing in line.   

We miss the many, many ways we are blessed and we misunderstand the larger purpose. 

And so I feel for James and John, the sons of Zebedee, called the Sons of Thunder.  Their instinct to secure a place for themselves is not very far removed from what we might do too.  But their attitude and their timing stinks – Jesus has for the third time, just told them,

He “will be delivered to the chief priests and the scribes.  They will condemn him to death, and will deliver him to the Gentiles.  They will mock him, spit on him, scourge him, and kill him.  On the third day he will rise again.” (Mark 10:33-34).      Well, That’s vivid!! 

 Without any response to that, the Zebedee boys begin their plan to get special seats. Much the way a child says, ‘Promise me you won’t be mad at me’, before they tell what happened, James and John say, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”  Clearly, they have been planning this. They have taken Jesus aside. 

Jesus might have said, “Did you hear what I just said?  About what is going to happen?

But he doesn’t. He meets them where they are and asks, “What is it you want me to do for you?” 

It is telling that this sequence in Mark, from chapter 8 through chapter 10, is where Jesus tells his disciples  -- 3 times – what awaits him in Jerusalem,  and the sequence begins and ends with Jesus healing a blind man. Next week you will meet Barnabas.  Jesus asks him the same question he asks James and John: What do you want me to do for you?  Barnabas answers immediately; he desperately wants to see, to understand, to follow.   

 If only the disciples wanted to see, as both blind men do, to see and understand more deeply – but they don’t, and --- as a group, they have devolved into a competitive quarrel over privilege -----and their tempers flare.  

Jesus stops everything and calls his team together and says, ok, circle up.   

He sits them down and says, again, what he has said so often.  The recognized as leaders of this world, privileged and powerful, often wield their power cruelly and lord it over their subjects.  You will not.   “Whoever wants to become great among you, shall be your servant.  Whoever wants to become first among you must be slave of all.”

 Servant leadership is the model of leadership Jesus teaches again and again.  

At our baptism, we were all called to be priests, to serve the needs of the world.  The root of the word ‘priest’ is “bridge”. ;  As priests we are to serve as a bridge between this world and the next, as a light to shine the way into a holy land –maybe something like that first Disneyland was to me --  that operates differently from this one, where one leads with humility and a heart of gratitude, where leadership itself is the privilege, a privilege to put on an apron and get to work. 

There are no shortcuts in our path to follow Jesus.  Jesus knows the road is rocky and hard, and he is clear about that.  There are no special privileges offered – no A tickets, no sure way.  No earned degrees or symbolic vestments, like these, get rewarded with better seats.   

The challenge for us is not to drop out of the TSA Precheck line or stop seeking some comfort or a memorable experience.   The challenge for us is to recognize and give thanks for the gift of that shorter line, that better treatment, to never take for granted even the smallest blessings in our lives and most importantly to pass those blessings on.  James and John took for granted their relationship with Jesus as a ticket to a secure and privileged position.  They didn’t understand that in the Kingdom of God there is no advantage to being in the front row. 

Thank you, Jesus, for your word today to help us understand that true leadership is true service, and that honest awareness of our own privilege can awaken in our hearts an even greater desire to serve God’s people. 

AMEN

October 13th, 2024: Reflections on Pentecost 21: Mark 10:17-31, by Reverend Jeannie Martz

As we just heard, in today’s Gospel reading Mark tells us that Jesus is setting out on a journey, a journey that we know will ultimately lead to Jerusalem and to the cross.  Suddenly, a man runs up to Jesus and literally stops him in his tracks by flinging himself to his knees in the dust in front of Jesus, begging for an answer that he himself doesn’t have.

            “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?  I can’t figure it out.”  Obey the commandments, Jesus says; you know them as well as I do.  I have, the man says; I’ve done it all, all my life…but it’s not enough; and so Jesus elaborates, calling the man to discipleship in the process.

            The particular language that Mark uses tells us that this question, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” is important to the man.  Mark says that Jesus looks at the man and loves him.  Jesus knows that his question is sincere and that the man really, really wants Jesus to give him the answer.

            Instead, Jesus gives him an answer, “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor; then come, follow me”, but this answer “shocks” the man; and the word Mark uses here is the Greek equivalent of the word we would use to describe the shock of a sudden death.  The man is speechless because as it turns out, he has many possessions and he’s completely overwhelmed.  He goes away grieving and numb, unable to do as Jesus has directed.

            Now, usually when we look at this passage we talk about the potentially destructive power that our material wealth, our possessions, and the prestige we get from them, can have, especially if we hoard them or misuse them.  We talk about the dangers of seeing ourselves and others – that is, the danger of valuing ourselves, and others – only in terms of what we or they have.  This is the usual avenue of approach here…but it’s not the only one.

            There’s another way to look at this reading, another perspective we can take.  With this reading as the background, we can take a look at what it means to live life out of a question, versus what it means to live out of an answer.

            With all of his possessions, the man who approaches Jesus lives out of a question.  Both the word “question” and the word “quest” have as their root a Latin word that means “search”.  The rich man’s whole life has been a search, a search for meaning; a search for that knowledge, that experience, that possession, that accomplishment that will make him feel complete; but Mark lets us know that his search has been doomed from the start because it’s been strictly an earthly search.

            “Good teacher,” the man says to Jesus; “didaskale agathe”; and maybe he means to show respect, to honor Jesus as a righteous man; but agathe, “good”, this is a word that is generally used only to describe God and God’s inherent goodness; and it’s this use – or misuse – of agathe that Jesus hears, and this is why he corrects the man.  “Why do you call me good?” he asks.  “No one is agathe but God alone,” and it’s worth noting that even though this is supposedly a conversation about eternal life, this is the only overt reference to God that either of them makes.

            Continuing in this same earthly vein, as Jesus goes on to list the commandments, he only mentions the ones that regulate human relationships.  There are four others he doesn’t mention, and these are the ones that concern our relationship with God.  “Teacher,” the man responds, and he avoids the modifier this time – he’s not about to make the same mistake twice – “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.”  I’ve followed these commandments all my life, but it’s not enough and I don’t know why….

            Now, it’s important for us to realize that in the eyes of first century Judean society, this man really is a “good” man.  He obeys the Law, and he’s wealthy; and since the very beginning Jews, as well as other ancient peoples -- not to mention today’s Christian adherents of what’s still called the “Prosperity Gospel” -- all of these folks had regarded, and do regard, material wealth as being a visible, tangible sign of God’s favor and blessing.  This is why the disciples are so surprised, and so dismayed, when Jesus says that the wealthy are going to have a tough time getting into the kingdom.  Rich people are already God’s favorites – so if they can’t get in, what hope is there for the rest of us? 

As long-standing as this belief in prosperity is, however, as others have said before, “The Bible is more complicated than that.”

            “I’ve followed all these since my youth…”.  Like Peggy Lee, who I realize some of you have never heard of before, but like Peggy Lee singing “Is that all there is [to the circus, to love, to life]?” the rich man is still hungry, still hollow, still living with a nagging emptiness that both Augustine of Hippo and Blaise Pascal, among others, will wrestle with in later years and later centuries.  To God, the 4th century AD Augustine said, “Thou has created us for thyself, and our hearts are rest-less till we rest in Thee.”

            1300 years later, the French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and theologian Pascal would write, “What else does this craving, and this helplessness proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace?  This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself.”  (Pensees, VII, 425)

            Having no overt engagement with the God-oriented commandments, not really understanding what he’s looking for, the rich man is rest-less.  Jesus is aware of his unrest and his helplessness and tells him that he “lacks one thing.”  Just as another time he tells Martha of Bethany that “only one thing is needed” and her sister Mary has chosen that “one thing” in sitting and listening to him teach; just as then, Jesus tells this man now what the “one thing” is that he is lacking:  “Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”

            What you lack, he says to the man, what you’re missing is God; and not just God, but a relationship with God; and not just a relationship, but a particular type of relationship:  a relationship of dependence and discipleship, like Mary of Bethany; a relationship of love and of trust, of fulfillment and completion, like Augustine of Hippo and Blaise Pascal.

            Another twist of language here, and a legal one at that, is that the man asks Jesus how he can inherit eternal life.  This is phrased oddly, because according to the Law, the Torah, which the man obviously knows, one’s only heirs are one’s offspring.  Only children can inherit…and what did Jesus say to the disciples in last week’s reading, only two verses before the rich man showed up today?  He said, “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”  Anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like God’s child, as God’s child, will never inherit it.

            You lack one thing, Jesus says to the man:  you must allow yourself to become God’s child, to become God’s heir, trusting in God and depending on God alone.

            Sell all you have; let go of your material security; let go of all those things that you thought would bring you fulfillment, and follow me – because in following me, you follow the One who sent me.  This is the answer to the question you have asked.

            When the man heard Jesus’ words, he was shocked with the shock of a sudden death, the death of who he thought he was; and he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

            This man had based his whole life on the question and on the quest, on the doing and on the having; and he very much wanted Jesus to give him a different answer.  If we also live out of a question, whether it’s the rich man’s question or Peggy Lee’s question or a different question altogether; if we also base our lives on a question, we’ll end up as restless and as unfulfilled as the man in today’s Gospel was…so what if we change our perspective, and we live out of an answer instead?

            What if we base our lives, and the choices and the decisions we make, on the knowledge and on the assurance that as followers of Jesus striving to be faithful, we already have inherited eternal life?

            We haven’t inherited it because we’ve earned it, we haven’t inherited it because our faith or our striving are perfect, we haven’t inherited it because of anything we’re doing.  We have inherited eternal life simply because of grace; simply because God, in God’s mercy and of God’s own choosing, has already given each of us eternal life through our baptism – baptism being the sacrament of our adoption as God’s child, and therefore also our adoption as God’s heir. 

And why does Paul in his writings emphasize so strongly our adoptive relationship with God?   Because according to Roman law, natural born children could be disinherited at the will and the whim of their father.  ADOPTED CHILDREN, HOWEVER, BY LAW COULD NEVER BE DISINHERITED.

            We are in a covenantal, familial, adoptive relationship with God.  We are God’s adopted heirs, and because of that, we are marked as Christ’s own forever.  We are quite literally signed, sealed, and delivered – by God, for God, and to God.  By God’s own choice, we are bound to God in baptism and God is bound to us – and so, with this salvation as our formative reality, we don’t need to worry about not inheriting it; we don’t need to chase it or clutch at it – and we don’t need to try to keep someone else from having it too.  This gift is already ours, and nothing can change this…except our own refusal to acknowledge it and to embrace it.

            An Episcopal priest named Heidi Haverkamp writes, “A few years ago, in crisis, I went to a local Christian spiritual center and was assigned a spiritual director who was an elderly Catholic sister.  She listened to my story, and she told me two simple things.  First, that God is love.  Second, pointing her finger at me with firmness and affection, she said:  ‘Remember, you are poor.’  She explained:  you do not have the resources to save yourself, fix your problems, or change the world – only God does.  Perhaps she saw my temptation to believe in my own ability and responsibility for my life, in no small part because of my many possessions:  great education, successful work life, health insurance, retirement savings, and a house full of stuff.  I am tempted to believe that, based on my own efforts and knowledge, I can achieve – am supposed to achieve – a spiritual life, a godly life, eternal life.”

            Haverkamp goes on, “The rich today include many more of us than in Jesus’ time, used to trusting in our own wits, work, and will to get things done and bend our world to our control.  It is hard for us to find the kingdom of heaven, to enter into it… – as hard as for a camel to go through the eye of a needle….We cannot save ourselves, but God can.  As Jesus makes clear to the young man looking for his extra credit assignment, the way to eternal life is not achievement but want and surrender.  It is to claim the words I am poor.”  (Christian Century, 9/26/18, p. 20)

            If those many, many months of pandemic powerlessness back in 2020 or the more recent devastating hurricanes Helene and Milton in the Southeast, where I used to live and where I still have relatives and friends, have taught us anything, they taught us that WE ARE POOR; that in spite of our material resources or accomplishments in the eyes of the world, none of us has the ability to fix our problems or change the world on our own.  Only God can do this; but God does invite us to share in this work.

            As John writes in his Gospel, “From his fullness,” from the fullness of God in Christ, “have we already received, grace upon grace.”  We are all poor; and because we are poor, we have already received the grace and the promise of the kingdom – and so, as we’ve taught our own children to do, we say “thank you” to the One who has saved us, and we recognize that a life based on the answer is a life that flows out of gratitude, and joy, and love; a life based on the answer is a life that embraces and celebrates the awareness of, and the acceptance of, our own spiritual poverty – which is to say, our complete dependence on God and on God’s grace; our dependence on the God for whom all things are possible.

            Reflecting on Jesus’ final words to the rich man, “Then come, follow me”, Haverkamp writes, “What gets in the way of my following Christ?  This is the rigor I was longing for – not a spiritual drill sergeant, but a person able to see me and tell me the truth:  that whatever possessions I grip most tightly are the junk that is most in my way.  That I am poor; that my only wealth and security is Christ.  That Jesus, in whom all things are possible, is always saying, ‘Now, come, follow me.’”  (Ibid.)

            The rich man and Peggy Lee asked the question, “Are these things I’m clinging to all there is?”  Along with Augustine and Blaise Pascal and Heidi Haverkamp and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we can stand firm in the answer and say with confidence, “No, they’re not all there is.”  The question is not all there is. 

            Our relationship with God is the answer.  Our relationship with each other is the answer.  Faithful and strong, completely dependent upon God, we are poor – but in our dependence lies our wealth and our strength, and with them and with God, our ability to make the difference in the world that we can’t make on our own. 

This dependence and this faith, our reliance on our relationship with God, this is the answer in which lies eternal life.  Amen.

October 6th, 2024: Reflections on Pentecost 20: Mark 10:2-9, by Reverend ('Mo') Lyn Crow

Difficult being called to preach on this gospel.

It was a temptation to skip over the first part of the gospel and preach about children.

Oh, I could preach a wonderful sermon about children!

But I won’t.

We don’t grow spiritually by avoiding the difficult things in life.

So we’re going to meet this gospel head on – we’re going to delve right into it.

And we’re going to do it with honesty and integrity.

Set the scene:

a.   Jesus has set his face towards Jerusalem and his death

b.   He already has enemies

c.   The Pharisees in particular

d.   They are constantly trying to test him – to catch him in a mistake

e.   This time they come to Jesus asking him to settle a disagreement they are having

·        Pharisees from the school of rabbi Hillel, a Jewish lawyer who founded a rabbinical school in Babylon; his school was liberal, humane, and tolerant

Vs

·        Pharisees from the school of rabbi Shammai, an aristocrat, quite elitist and very nationalistic;  his school was conservative and strict

f.     These two schools had an ongoing disagreement about divorce

g.   Not about whether divorce was allowable, because it was

h.   But on what grounds is it allowable

i.     Deuteronomy 24 said that a man could divorce his wife on the grounds of indecency (note that a woman could not divorce her husband)

j.     But how do we interpret indecency?

·        Shammai said that it meant in the case of adultery

·        Hillel said if a wife displeased her husband, spoke ill of his family, didn’t respect his authority, burnt his toast – he could divorce her

k.   So they challenge Jesus to settle it between them;  the danger was – if he agrees with one side, everyone from the other school would be angry with him

Jesus answers the way a rabbi often answered a question which was posed to him, he answered a question with a question:  What did Moses command you?  And so quoting Moses as their authority, they recite back what scripture says about the law for divorce.

But then Jesus shifts the focus of the conversation.  He makes it primarily about marriage and not divorce.  He shifts the conversation from splitting hairs about loopholes for divorce to God’s dream for humankind.

First, he acknowledges that yes, it is lawful to divorce, but that is only because humans are suffering from hardness of heart.  In Greek, the words mean:  a heart dried up or a parched heart.  According to Jesus, it is because we have parched hearts that there is a need for divorce laws.

Then he moves on to God’s ideal for us – God’s dream for humankind

a.   He begins to quote from Genesis

b.   How God made man and woman as complimentary beings

c.   And that they became one, both physically and spiritually

d.   In essence, together, they become a new being

e.   And nothing can separate them from each other

f.     That is the nature of their oneness

Jesus speaks an absolute truth in this gospel.

a.   When God created man and woman, he intended for them to have a union that was permanent

b.   And though it doesn’t say so in this gospel, we have come to understand that the intention of God is the same for same sex unions

c.   Marriage is meant to last forever

d.   All divorce is a failure to fulfill God’s dream for us

e.   In divorce, we fail one another and we fail God

But the purpose of this gospel is not to arouse guilt.  And it is not to propose a hopelessly high standard, but to give us a vision for what God’s dream of marriage is.

We might say – but I do feel guilty.  I’ve let God down.  I’ve let the community of faith down. I’ve let my partner down because of my divorce.

I wasn’t able to be what I hoped I could be.

I wasn’t able to be what God dreamed for me.

I wasn’t able to create what I promised I would create.

Here is the truth:

a.   All divorce is tragic

b.   But sometimes staying married is more tragic than divorce

c.   Some marriages should end

d.   Sometimes divorce is the lesser of two evils

e.   Is an intact and hopelessly broken marriage any less sinful than a divorce?

f.     There are times when we must acknowledge that we have made a major mistake in the journey of life

g.   We need to face it, own it, admit to our parched hearts, confess it, ask for forgiveness, and move on

h.   That is living in truth

That doesn’t mean we don’t take marriage vows seriously

a.   No, we hold fast to God’s dream for us

b.   And we are even more determined to fulfill that dream

c.   We refuse to buy into the idea of disposable relationships that are so popular in today’s culture

d.   But we also refuse to be legalistic about marriage

e.   God’s dream for us is far more than a rule about never ever getting a divorce

f.     God’s dream for us is unity and oneness and mutuality

g.   And God’s dream above all is about grace

·        A grace that will not turn away from us even if we fail

·        A grace that welcomes us with open arms as though we are powerless children, at times unable to help ourselves

·        A grace that says “Let the little children with broken and dried up hearts come to me.”  Don’t stop them – they need me and I want to bless them

·        The kingdom of heaven belongs to people like these

I have experienced this grace

a.   Marriage falling apart

b.   Tell Bishop

c.   Tell priest who was my boss

d.   You must tell the vestry

e.   Would they ask me to leave?  Decide they couldn’t have a divorced priest?

f.     Broke down

g.   Chair in middle – laid hands

h.   Washed in grace

In that moment I truly understood grace – not at the intellectual level, but at the heart level.

And I knew then that nothing could ever separate me from God’s love.

May we continue on our journeys confident in God’s love, confident in God’s forgiveness, confident in God’s amazing grace.

September 29th, 2024: Embrace the Divine Spirit within You: Reflections on Pentecost 19: Numbers 11:4-6,10-16,24-29; Psalms 19:7-14; James 5:13-20; Mark 9: 38-50, by J.D. Neal

For about 5 years, I worked as a high school teacher in a great books style, classical education program. This sounds a little hoity-toity, but primarily it means that instead of focusing the classroom around lectures and textbooks, we focused our classes around great books and discussions. Instead of reading textbooks about American History, they would read Frederick Douglass & Abraham Lincoln; instead of reading a textbook or anthology with snippets of English Literature, they would read G.K. Chesterton & T.S. Eliot — straight to the source. Likewise, instead of coming to class to hear me lecture about one of these topics, I would give them an opening question on the book they were supposed to have read that week, and we would spend the whole class discussing the text at hand. My job was to facilitate, to act as a guide and to help the students plumb the depths of whatever book we were discussing — to help them discover that they were able to understand and grapple with the powerful, often di      cult ideas and questions o ered in these books. And the wonderful thing is that they were able; I consistently had better discussions about philosophy and theology with my 14 year old students than with my fellow seminary students in PhD seminars.

The trickiest bit about my job was to help the students themselves discover that they really were able to understand and grapple with this stu        if they did the work, trusted one another, and didn’t give up. And this makes sense, right? I’m sure you can tell that many of the books we would read together are the kind of thing that most of us write o as being out of reach or irrelevant for the average person — stu for ‘those smart people.’ Most of my students didn’t think of themselves as being capable of understanding this stu   when they started our classes. We would get into our rst discussions and they would freeze up after I asked a question, not because they couldn’t do it, but because they had been trained to believe that the teacher was ‘the smart one’ who had all the answers, that their job was just to follow along and receive the special knowledge that I possessed. Especially with rst year students, it would take almost the whole year for the group to really break out of this; as the tutor, I would have to try all sorts of strategies to try to get them to realize that they were capable of doing this work together. One of my favorite strategies was to just go silent and dramatically turn my chair around and put myself in the corner for part of a discussion. The goal here is simple: if the students are unhelpfully relying upon you, looking to the teacher to answer the question instead of using the text, their own minds, and one another, then you remove yourself. You refuse to cooperate, and you stay out until they eventually give up waiting for you to answer the question for them and start to answer it themselves (because it’s either that or they sit in awkward silence for an hour and half) — and (if it works) something magical happens.

They try it. They start to say ‘yes’ to my invitation and begin to do the work together. They vulnerably throw out an idea, they try to puzzle through a confusing passage together, they stumble upon a key idea and start to make sense of it, and they realize that they can do this work, that their minds are made of the same stu   as mine, and that they are just as capable and worthy as I am to discover the goodness, truth, and beauty hidden in those weird old books we would read together.

Now, why did I spend so long talking about this? I’m tempted to just go sit in the corner and make you guys preach the rest of the sermon for me, but that’s not why I bring it up. In the Old Testament reading, we nd Moses feeling overwhelmed and angry, feeling as though God has saddled him alone with the impossible responsibility of taking care of the whole people of Israel. He complains to God about this, and God says, ‘Sure, no problem’ — and ordains 70 ‘elders’ to help Moses lead the people. Two of those ‘elders’ don’t come to the meeting when they are supposed to, and so the spirit of God comes upon wherever they happen to be. Suddenly they are overcome and God’s spirit begins to speak through them out in the middle of the Israelite camp. When Moses’s right-hand man, Joshua, hears about this, he is ‘jealous’ for Moses, he wants to protect Moses’s reputation as ‘The One’ who holds God’s authority, and tells Moses to shut them up. But Moses doesn’t want to, because he is overcome with relief and gratitude because he has remembered that God is the one who leads and provides for his people, and God has given him a whole lot of help when he nally asked for it. Joshua misses the point — Moses doesn’t care about protecting his status and authority, he cares about the presence and power of God being present among his people, and he even looks forward to a day when God would ‘put his spirit on all of God’s people.’

Similarly, when we get to the Gospel, we see the disciples up in arms about the fact that some rogue exorcist is out doing miracles in the name of Jesus, when this person doesn’t follow them. The disciples, like Joshua, are missing the point: they are more concerned with controlling who counts as a ‘legitimate’ disciple of Jesus, with protecting their status and worthiness, than with the fact that the healing work of God is being carried out through this stranger. Remember how Jesus caught them ghting over which one of them was ‘the greatest’ in last week’s gospel? So Jesus reminds them of what he said in last week’s gospel, that the way they are treating this stranger or that little child is the way that they are treating Jesus.

There is a ip side to our Gospel reading this morning. Jesus rebukes the disciples harshly, telling them that it would be better to be drowned or to cut o a limb than to let their pride and desire for status and ‘greatness’ cause them to mistreat or ‘become a stumbling block’ to another person in whom Christ is present, because to do so is to reject Christ himself — because in some mysterious way, Christ is present in each of them.

In other words, the hope of Moses has come true in Christ. God has put his Spirit upon all of his people. And so when we get to our reading from the epistle of James, we are given a picture of a spirit- lled community. A place where all members participate in the life of Christ. Notice that there is no Moses- gure, no special teacher or priest in James’s passage. James assumes that the Spirit lives in every member of the Church community, so he exhorts all of them to praise and pray with one another, to confess to each other, to receive healing through one another’s prayers. He believes that any one of the people he writes to could pray with as much power as Elijah, whose prayers stopped the rains in Israel for 3.5 years! He believes this, because he knows that God has placed his Spirit within each of us and so the whole life of Christ himself is on o er to us — if we can receive it.

The gospel this morning is not just a word to the disciples, it is a word to the ‘little ones’ — to all of us. It reminds us that the life of faith, prayerful connection with God, and the joy and fullness of Christ’s own life are not just for the special, ‘holy people’ over there — for the Moses, the ‘disciples,’ the priests up at the altar, the special saints who are ‘quali ed’ to experience God. We each have di erent gifts and di erent roles to play, sure, but we all are one of those little ones whom Christ stands with. We are all capable of extending Christ’s love and power and healing to each other — just like in the reading from James. And this is good news, especially for St. Matthias, because we don’t have a Moses right now, we don’t have a priest. All we have is one another and the Spirit of God here with us — and that is a gift, because it gives us an opportunity to discover that this is enough. St. Matthias can’t wait around for Church to happen until we nd a priest. We don’t know how long this search process will take, and we don’t need to wait. God has placed his Spirit within you. You are invited to step further into the life and love of Christ here and now, and invited into sharing that life with one another — whether or not there is a priest up there to help you do it. This is what we mean by the ‘priesthood of all believers.’

Each day, Christ holds out his hand to each and every one of us in ways great and small and invites us deeper into his abundant life. But each day, there are things that stand between us and accepting that invitation. Our fears, our shame and feelings of unworthiness, complacency and comfort, the wealth of distractions we are ooded with, even just the layout of our liturgy can mislead us into thinking that the real ‘Christian stu ’ happens up there, with the special ‘holy people’ in special robes rather than down here in each of us. In the somewhat grisly language of today’s gospel, there are parts of our story or our life that might need to be ‘cut o ’ or ‘plucked out’ to allow us to see and grasp the love of God. Just like my old students, we sometimes have a hard time believing that God wants to bring us into the story, that we are capable or worthy of being an instrument of God’s love or a bearer of his peace — and just like my old students, I believe that we have been made capable and worthy and there is much to discover together if we show up and trust. I believe that if we trust James and Jesus today, if we trust that Christ has put his Spirit in us and we do the faithful work of asking for God’s help and listening for his answers, of learning from one another and the Scriptures, of loving those around us and trying to say yes to all the little invitations God sends our way — if we say ‘yes’ then we will discover that we are capable of receiving joy and life that we could not have imagined.

May St. Matthias become a place where we begin to discover this together. Amen.

September 22nd, 2024: Servant Leadership and Working Lovingly Together to Solve the World's Puzzles: Reflections on Pentecost 18: Mark 9: 30-37, by The Reverend Valerie Hart

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in thy sight oh God our strength and our redeemer.

Jesus and his disciples had just gotten back to their home base in Capernaum. While they were walking, Jesus had been teaching them. He was trying to get them to understand that he was going be betrayed and die. And then after dying he would rise again, but the disciples were pretty of dense and didn't seem to quite get what was going on. Maybe they just weren't listening because they didn't want to hear.

When they got to the house where they were going to, Jesus looked at them and asked, "What were you arguing about?" They didn't like that Jesus had noticed and brought that up because they had been arguing about which one of them was the greatest. It seems a bit like the patriarch of a family bringing together everyone for Thanksgiving. All his sons and  daughters to come together. Then the father says "I have you here today because I met with my doctor last week and I'm going to be going on hospice care tomorrow." Then  the kids start arguing about  which one is the best. Which one does the father like the most. They were worried  about which one did the father think was the best even when the father was dying. Even though the father loved them all, more than they could possibly imagine

Jesus is frustrated by their lack of understanding and that they are still worried about who is the greatest, so he says to them, "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant to all." The ones to want to be on top are going to need to be ready to be on the bottom.

Then Jesus looks around sees a child and brings this random little child into the center of the disciples. And he says, "See this child, whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me."

This insignificant child, we don't even know its name, we don't know whether they are male or female, but if you are kind to this child you are being kind to Jesus - and to the father in heaven. That means that within this child, this insignificant child, Jesus is present. How can you wonder about who is the greatest.

This gospel reading has gotten me thinking about why are we so concerned with being the best, with being the greatest, with winning? There is something in our culture that is obsessed with who is the best, who is the greatest. Think of the popular shows on TV like America's Got Talent, The Voice, or Dancing with the stars where people compete to learn who is the "Best." We like to watch those to try and figure out who will win. And we imagine ourselves there  - being chosen as the best. We just had the Emmy awards that tell us who are the 'best' actors and actresses. And of course we spent a lot of time this summer, at least I did, watching the Olympics. Caring about who was found to  be the best at some sport I did not even know existed before I turned on the TV. People spend their whole lives preparing for this moment to prove that they are the best in the world.

Why do we always have to feel like we need to be winning? Why do we want to be the best?

This summer I was with my grandchildren who range in age  from nine to eleven. I was supposed to entertain them while their parents were busy, and their mother suggested we play board games. The had all the usual games that I had when I was a kid. Candyland, Monopoly, Uno, you know. the basic games. As we started to play I noticed that when one of my grandchildren was winning he started feeling overly  good about himself, saying he knew this game and he had it. Then his luck changed on him and suddenly he was losing. And he didn't like it. He didn't like losing. He wanted to change it . He wanted to cheat. You could see him slowly getting more and more upset until he finally had a meltdown because he was not the best.

The next day when I went to spend some time with them, I did not want to go through that meltdown again. We started to play another game, but he soon started to get upset so I said, "I don't want to do this. Let's do that wonderful 500-piece puzzle you got for your birthday." We found the puzzle and spread out the pieces. We all sat around the table, each trying to fit the pieces together. When someone on one side would say 'look, I got these two together'  everyone would cheer. And then someone else would "say I've got this edge here. Does anyone have red edge piece that might fit." And the others would look to see if they might have that piece. Together, bit by bit, over a couple of days because it was 500 pieces, by bringing the pieces together that chaos began to turn into a beautiful picture. When each one shared their unique pieces, their perspective, and their sense of how to solve the puzzle we where we able to complete it. We worked together to solve the problem. It was fun. And nobody was the greatest, and nobody had a meltdown.

Our society is so focused on up and down, better and less, who's the brightest, who is the fastest, that we are constantly in conflict. We are not able to just enjoy being together. We have a political system now that is all about winning and losing and not about putting the pieces together, bringing all the different perspectives together to find healthy solutions.

Jesus says that the greatest must be the least and be the servants of all.

As long as we are trying to be the best there is a lack of real satisfaction. You may become the best in your class, but then you want to be best in your school. Or you've made it to the top of your group a work, and you got a raise, but you still want to move up. We're always evaluating ourselves, judging ourselves. Are we good enough? Am I the best?

Why do we do that? I'm not sure but I think it has to do with trying to prove that we are worthy. Trying to prove to ourselves, to our parents, to our friends, to our coworkers that we are worthy, that we are of value, by being the best. Or we're afraid. Afraid that if we are not the best, we won't have anything. That there is a pecking order, and we have to be on the top of it or we lose. But Jesus teaches another way. He teaches a way of love. He teaches us that we already are more than enough.

We already are loved. Like that child in the center of the room, we are valued by God. We are so close to God and God's love for us that what someone does for us they do for Christ. That we are that worthy and that much one with Christ that it doesn't matter if we are only a little child. It doesn't matter if we are at the bottom of the pecking order. It doesn't matter if we are rich or we are poor. God loves us. Christ loves of more than we can imagine. We have nothing to prove. Nothing to be afraid of.

Christ says that if you want to be the best, be servant of all. That's what really feels good and gives true satisfaction. This afternoon I'll be going over to my home church, St. Paul's in Tustin. We have something called Sunday Supper where anyone who wants to can come and be given supper. They sit down, we take the food to them, we get drinks for them, we clean up after them. We treat them with love and respect.

There is nothing that is more satisfying than to feed someone who is hungry, to care for someone who is sick, to help someone in need. To welcome the stranger.

And I imagine that's how the people at St Mattias feel when they are doing the Loving Thing. When they are giving food to the hungry. When they are welcoming them and caring for them and smiling at them.

Jesus tells us to stop arguing. Stop competing with each other. Stop trying to be the best, and instead be the least and love and serve. For that is where we will find peace and joy and we will know Christ's presence as we serve him.

September 15th, 2024: Who is He? Reflections on Pentecost 17: Mark 8: 27-38, by The Reverend Valerie Hart

Let the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight oh Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen

The questions that Jesus asks in this Gospel reading are the most important questions any person wrestles with. The first question is, “Who do people say that I am?”

Any thoughts? Who do people say that Jesus is?

“The savior.” “The son of God.”

“A really good man.” “Our Lord.” “A perfect example.” “The good shepherd.” “The messiah.” “A healer.” “A great teacher.” “Son of man.”

We’ve got lots of words for him. Later in the service we will be saying the Nicene Creed which is the ancient statement of faith that says such things about Jesus as “God from God.” "Light from Light"

Some of those words we’re pretty familiar with. You can probably tell me what a teacher is, because we know teachers. Or a good man, we know about good men.

But what about Messiah? Now that’s the “correct” answer that Peter gave. But the Messiah? What does the word messiah mean? The word we translate as Messiah in Greek is Christos, the anointed one. For the Jewish people of Jesus’ time the Christos, the Messiah was going to be a warrior king like David. He was going to come and lead the Jewish people to once again have control of their land. That would fight Rome so that they would be a free and  great nation. That’s not what Jesus turned out to be. He was a very different kind of messiah. A different kind of savior.

When we listen to all the ways Jesus has been described, we find that most of the time it is kind of complex. It is not easy language. During our lives we’ve heard a lot about who Jesus is. If you went to Sunday School as a child, you heard one thing. In the secular world you might hear something else. Here in church we hear other things. So we have lots and lots of answers to, “Who do people say that I am?”

All of those comments, all the theology, all the books written about who Jesus is, all the creeds can be helpful, but it is the second question that really matters. That’s when Jesus looks at his disciples and says, “Who do you say that I am?”

How do you know who Jesus is? What do you say? Not quoting someone else, not based on what someone else says that Jesus is, but who is Jesus to you? Right now, today, this morning.

I find that when we are on a spiritual journey our understanding of who Jesus is changes over time. Sometimes from day to day. It changes as we study scripture. It changes as we are in discussions with others. It changes as we read meaningful books. But most of all it changes as we have life experiences. As we go through difficult times. As we wrestle with the meaning of life. When we deeply love or deeply hurt. As we discover that through it all, Jesus is somehow there, walking with us.

The most important question of your life is “Who do you say that Jesus is?” Your answer makes all the difference in the world. And only you can answer that question. Some might start with the answer that to you Jesus is a great teacher. That is accepted pretty much around the world. There is almost no one who doesn’t say that he had some wonderful teachings and that he showed a great deal of wisdom. That is one way to approach Jesus, but is not quite consistent with what he said. C. S. Lewis wrote that if you say that Jesus was just a great teacher then you have to assume that he was either a liar or insane because he said that he was much more than that. It is hard to take the wisdom and teachings that we find in the Gospels and separate it from what he said about himself. But often the first way we get to know Jesus is as a great teacher. And that is important.

What about when we say that Jesus is my savior. What does savior mean? How has he saved you? Think about your own personal life. What have you been saved from? What have you been saved for?

How have you experienced, personally experienced Christ's presence in your life?

I've often wrestled with how to describe my relationship with Jesus, and this is what I've come up with. It is personal; it is where I am today. Where I am this morning. It may change, but it is what’s true for me right now.

I would say that who Jesus is to me is that he is my friend. He is my friend who loves me no matter what. He is my friend who values me and holds me precious because he helped to create me. I am of incredible worth to this friend; and he accepts me for who I am. Loves me for who I am. And loves me enough to not let me stay who I am, but encourages me to become more than I think I can be. He is my friend who is always there, whenever I need him. He always cares.

And he is my friend that gave his life for me. And no love is as great as offering your life for another. We don’t have a lot of experiences of what it means for someone to give their life for us. People who have been soldiers, police and the firefighters, like the brave men and women who today are fighting the fires around us, know what it is like to have companions that go into dangerous and difficult situations together. And they know that these companions will offer their lives to protect each other. It is said that when soldiers go into battle once the battle gets intense, they are not concerned with their country, they are not concerned with any grand statements of principle, they fight because of their comrades, the ones they are fighting with. And they want to protect them, and they will risk their lives in order to protect their friends, and they would be willing to die for one another.

Christ died for us. He is my friend that was willing to die for me, and in this passage, he asks for me to be willing to do the same. To pick up my cross and follow him. To be his friend the way he is a friend to me. That might mean giving my life, although being in the United States it is unlikely. But it does mean transforming my life. It challenges me to give up my self-centeredness. It asks me to let go of my sense of ego control. It means changing my priorities, and it affects every decision that I make every day of my life.

And so I'll ask you again,

Who do you say that Jesus is?

September 1st, 2024: Reflections on Pentecost 15: Mark 7: 1-8, 14-15, 21-23, by The Reverend (‘Mo’) Lyn Crow

Always helpful to look at the big picture when we are reading a gospel story and ask ourselves – what is this really about?

So what is today’s gospel really about?  It’s about legalism VS grace.

Trying to earn God’s approval by performing the requirements of laws VS approval or kindness given to us by God whether or not we deserve it.

So let me ask you this:  Which do you prefer?

-      A neighbor with good habits or a good heart?

-      A friend with good habits or a good heart?

-      A spouse with good habits or a good heart? - A child with good habits or a good heart?

It’s wonderful to have a neighbor who cares for his property, keeps the noise down, brings his trash cans in.

It’s wonderful to have a friend who is considerate, keeps appointments, always sends birthday cards on time.

It’s wonderful to have a spouse who is courteous, gives gracious comments, gets chores done, puts the toilet seat down.

It’s wonderful to have a child who uses good manners, does her homework, keeps his room tidy.

But nothing compares to a neighbor, a friend, a spouse, or a child, with a good heart.

When we are looking only for a person with good behavior, we are really looking at a person’s self-control;  a serial killer can in some settings have amazing self-control.

When we are looking for a person with a good heart – now we are looking at the true quality of a person.

Jesus was always looking beyond a person’s habits to see what was in the heart of a person.  The Pharisees, on the other hand, were concerned with legalism, what was on the outside, what looked proper.  At one point Jesus called them whitewashed tombs.

And here they were attacking the disciples because they weren’t following the correct rituals

-      And by the way this handwashing thing wasn’t about germs

-      The germ theory hadn’t even been thought of

Here’s what it was about:  Exodus 30 and 40.  There you find a law that priests must do a ritual cleansing of their hands before they came to the altar.  Gradually, the Pharisees expanded what the scripture said.  Now everyone was to ritually wash their hands before eating as a way of showing devotion to God.  And it also became a way of distinguishing a devout Jew from his pagan neighbors.  Soon it had very little to do with devotion to God and a whole lot to do with who is in and who is out, who is one of us, and who isn’t.

Humans have a tendency to do that and people in some churches are still doing it:  Baptism in some places isn’t so much about commitment and love of God as it is about who is saved and who isn’t, who is in and who is out.

We in the church have a tendency to be blind to the fact that we often focus on good behavior and all the while exclude, humiliate, and harm others.

Albert Schweitzer said this:

“For centuries Christianity treasured the great commandment of love and mercy as traditional truth without recognizing it as a reason for opposing slavery, witch burning, torture, and all other ancient and medieval forms of inhumanity.”

Even when slavery was finally ended, the church made it very clear who was in and who was out:        

-      All Saints Pasadena

-      St. Barnabas Pasadena for their black servants

Jesus quoted Isaiah and said “This people honors me with their lips but their hearts are far from me.”

As God’s people we need to be alert – and to catch ourselves when we begin to fall into legalism and use our faith to judge who is in and who is out.

Otherwise, as Frederick Beuchner said:

“We become like a child learning to play the piano.  She holds her hands just as she has been told and memorized the piece perfectly.  She hits all the proper notes, but her heart is not in it, just her fingers are.”

The church and its members need to constantly be asking, “Are our hearts in it?”

-      We need to keep from being whitewashed tombs – beautiful on the outside, dead on the inside.

-      To learn that compassion is far more important than getting things right.

I want to tell you a story about a church that I know and love and how they chose compassion and grace over legalism and doing things right.

Tina’s Story

-      When they arrived, she was lying on the patio in front of the church door – dirty, confused, homeless

-      Didn’t try to get her to leave.  Didn’t call police.

-      Greeted her – invited her in

-      She crawled into the sanctuary and laid on the floor

-      No one tried to get her to move

-      Everyone who walked by her greeted her

-      At the peace – people bent down to greet her

-      They discovered her name – for weeks afterward it was almost the same scenario

-      I don’t know how many weeks before she walked in and sat in a pew

-      With the help of some parishioners, she got mental health care, medical care, and an apartment of her own

-      By the end of the year, she was shopping for clothes at Good Will. 

She chose professional looking suits and spike heels.

-      She was definitely one of the best dressed women in the sanctuary

-      And she had become a beloved member of the community

Why do we carve out this time every week to be here?

-      To learn that compassion is far more important than getting things right

-      To learn that being close to the heart of God is infinitely more important than any tradition we may want to cling to

-      To learn to show the world that being a Christian isn’t about getting it right

It’s about the heart – loving our God with all our heart, mind, and soul, and loving our neighbor – yes, every neighbor – as ourselves.

If we do that, then the church can revolutionize the world!  Because that is what the world is dying to know.  There are far too many Christians out there convincing the world that it’s all about getting it right.

We need to get out there and tell the world something radical – it’s about love, that God is not a tyrant but a lover.

So when we leave here today, let’s live like Augustine of Hippo recommended – “Love God and do what you please!”

Because if we love God, truly are nuts about God, what we choose to do will please God.