Who you gonna call?

Fifth Sunday after Epiphany   Year C   RCL

Isaiah 6:1-8, [9-13]
Psalm 138
1 Corinthians 15:1-11
Luke 5:1-11

All quotations from The Inclusive Bible

The lessons today are about the call from God—receiving the call, accepting the call, and then the implications of living into the call.   We have three different calls to study—Isaiah, Paul, and Simon Peter—and it is quite instructive to find the similarities in their three different stories and then relate them to our own lives.  Because have we not, all of us sitting here, received the call?  Have not all Christians sitting in pews today all over the world received the call?  Else we wouldn’t be sitting here—after all, people who don’t want to go to church, don’t go to church, much less join religious communities.   Still, most of us don’t think that our call from God, even those of us who are professional Religious, is anything like Isaiah’s or Paul’s or Peter’s.

Their calls were really something.  Isaiah’s came in a vision of YHWH on his throne, with the Seraphs (literally burning ones) chanting the Sanctus and the enveloping smoke and all that; Paul likens his call to being snatched from the womb—one minute you are one place and the next minute someplace entirely different; and Peter was witness to a natural miracle, the draught of fishes, at his call.  Our own stories don’t seem to be as dramatic.

I want to suggest, however, that what makes these three stories like each other is the same thing that makes them like our own story; and is the same thing that holds the potential for making us  disciples just like Peter, and apostles just like Paul, even  prophets just like Isaiah. You perhaps anticipate what I will say.  It is the declaration of unworthiness that is the common thread.  Didn’t we all feel that way?

Isaiah says, “Woe is me, I am doomed! I have unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips!”  Paul said, “I am the least of the apostles; in fact, because I persecuted the church of God., I do not even deserve the name.”  And Peter says, “Leave me, Rabbi, for I’m a sinner.”  A variation on the theme of not me, I’m no good, seems to be the standard acceptance speech for the call from God.  It doesn’t sound practiced, say like when I might get the Oscar or something; nobody thanks their mom or their third grade teacher.  No, the immediate response to the call from God is a fearful, bone-chilling feeling of unworthiness.  In the end, however, the fear of not responding to God overcomes the fear of actually hearing from God—and we accept God’s call.

It would be good to say that we accept without further hesitation or reservation, but that is just not the case.  Our brother Peter, God love him, was rebuked by his Lord Jesus so many times, you’d think he would have learned, but no…Isaiah, just moments after declaring, “Here I am, send me!” and then hearing the nature of his task asked just how long he had to keep that up.  Paul, bless him, never actually complains or whines or balks, but does continually give glory to God in Christ Jesus, for all the suffering he undergoes and for all the hard work he does.

More and more these biblical giants sound more and more just like us.  What sets them apart, enshrines their particular stories in Scripture, is their faithfulness, their perseverance to the end—they never quit.  There was no reason, much less excuse, that was sufficient to separate them from the experience of God, of living in the Presence, of accepting the call.  Not jail, danger, torture, illness, injury, loneliness, poverty, persecution, ridicule, fear of any of the foregoing, or even death.

In another Epistle, the letter to the Hebrews, the writer warns us, “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”  That is what we must remember when we think of our own call.  Our God is the living God and our call is for our own time here on our living Earth.  We have professed our lives on behalf of the call, we have discerned as a community the nature of our call at this time and in this place, and now we are at the faithfulness part.  So let us keep the faith dear ones and sing our praises to God, and tend the land, and strengthen the church.   Because who is God going to call, if not us.

Carol Bernice, CHS

Little Melrose Chapel

February 7, 2010

31 May 2009

Pentecost 2009

John 20:19–23
[BCP]

In the evening of that same day, the first day of the week, the doors were locked in the room wherethe disciples were, for fear of the Temple authorities. Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”

All of us are familiar with the Christian seasonal round — the Jesus stories, the Hebrew scriptures, the Church’s liturgical celebrations. I suspect many of us attend the observance of these events from Jesus’ life with the ease and intimacy born of our years in church. The comfort of our oft-repeated tradition anchors our religious life.

But an anchor too firmly grounded can cause trouble; we are in danger of walking into chapel one fine high holy day knowing what we will hear, how we will react. Our minds may linger just as surely on the festive meal we will share afterward as on the gospel of the day.

We already know it all—the death, the resurrection, the ascension, the coming of the Holy Spirit, the preaching, the deaths, the struggles of the early Church … we’ve seen this movie over and over, we recite the words like avid fans watching for the umpteenth time, we laugh and smile and cry at all the right places, and the end is always the same.

We certainly don’t expect the service to rock us to our core.

Had we been among those first-century disciples, though, things would be very much different for us. In less than two months they had watched their leader and friend brutally murdered, and then experienced his presence for weeks afterward in bizarre and unsettling ways. Then, right before their eyes he disappears again. As always, his words to them during this strange time more often than not left them scratching their beards in bewilderment.

Not only were Jesus’ here-one-minute-gone-the-next post death appearances disturbing, the political environment was heating up around them as well, and they were at the center of the conflict. They knew they, too, could wind up like Jesus; even gathering for the Passover meal was dangerous. They could easily imagine a variety of futures for themselves, but most of them were not good.

But no one, not a single one of them, expected what actually happened that night.

Being a companion of Jesus meant living on the edge of insanity, see-sawing between what they had always known and held as their world view, while trying to grasp the entirely different, strange and baffling new “way” of being that Jesus taught.

We have to ask ourselves: where is Jesus speaking to us today? How is he meeting us, right here, right now? What is he asking of us so we can step up to the great plate of Life?

We have all noticed and worried about our dwindling numbers, the effect of the economic crisis on our bank accounts, the imminent loss of oil-based energy and products from our lives, the effect of dramatic climate changes taking place with unanticipated speed. We are aware that everything we’ve come to expect from being trained to and immersed in a consumerist society is undergoing deep scrutiny. Earth is withering. We simply cannot go on as we have in the past. And I truly mean we — this is not about “them”, it is about us.

It is tempting to lock ourselves, figuratively speaking, into our convent, hoping we will be spared what is inevitably before us, believing that If we just stay faithful to what we have always done, God may spare us from having to change. But like the amazing Universe God assembled, Jesus is all about transformation. To hide our heads in the sand is to simply opt out of Life in all its glory and challenge and wonder.

That upper room of so long ago turned out not to be safe after all, in spite of the disciples best efforts to lock themselves in. The truth of Jesus’ teaching will not be stopped by a locked door, nor by a locked mind. Jesus will show up when and where he is not expected; he will hand us peace with one hand and show the wounds of crucifixion with the other, and against all logic these paradoxical realities will fill us with joy.

Jesus had a back-up plan in case he didn’t live long enough to finish his work. Though the Holy Spirit was obviously present and hard at work in the Universe from before time and space flared into being, the fall-back plan was to make that active presence and availability of the Spirit unmistakably obvious to his disciples — to awaken in them a conscious awareness of that wild, fiery, fierce, unpredictable and all-wise member of the Trinity. And when fully awakened, those disciples were indeed set on fire. Nothing could stop their witness to the unitive way forward initiated by Jesus — not even death.

Just like those confused, amazed, worried disciples, we too are being called by God into an entirely different, strange and baffling new “way” of being. We, all of us on this planet, are experiencing a dramatic shift in our planetary reality, and to get from where we are to where we’re going, we have to blaze a completely new path through uncharted terrain. We will soon face global challenges with a cosmic understanding that could never have even been dreamed in the first century.

Our Community is dedicated to the Holy Spirit, and we are compelled to respond and follow her, no matter what scary or wild or strange road she takes us down. The one thing we can count on is that the Holy Spirit does not play it safe.

Given our existence in a Universal transformative moment, we might consider rewriting our founding mission to guide us through the next fifty years: “The Community is organized as a living witness to the office and work of God the Holy Spirit on Earth. Its members must ever strive to be channels through which, as at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit may again cause all communities of life on Earth to thrive in the unity designed into life from its inception.”

Our calling is wider than our tiny community; it is wider than the Church; it is wider than the state of New York, wider than the United States, and wider even than all of humanity. It is broader than theology or biology or any other “-ology” you can name. It is bigger than education or medicine or the military or big business. It is a calling driven by a Universe designed and sustained by Sacred Mystery. It is a calling that flares forth through emergent activity, held to an ever-deepening unitive way by powers that have shaped it for nearly fourteen billion years.

The times, they are a-changin’ and big, terrifying storms are a-comin’. We will have to find our way through a crush of crises ahead. Not everyone — perhaps even most of us — won’t make it. But it is exactly this kind of pressure-cooker crunch that enables the Universe to trigger sweeping and immediate transformation. This is the amazing moment in which we find ourselves.

As sisters and companions of CHS, we don’t have the luxury of playing it safe; we cannot ignore what is before us, nor the gifts we have been given to provide all we will need: wisdom, counsel, godliness, understanding, knowledge, mystical strength and awe.

If we are to move forward into Jesus’ unitive way, we must allow our hearts to change radically — we will learn to understand that loving our “enemies” means not seeing them as enemies at all, but as us; we will accept and protect the rights of every non-human community; we will value diversity, however it comes to us, as necessary and sacred. We will cease to measure our success by profit and goods, valuing instead sustainability and happiness. We will replace competition with cooperation.

Whether we are hung upside down on Patmos or done in by a rogue virus, we will all one day die. What we do between now and then will determine how — and whether — Earth’s future children will live.

I can’t imagine a larger, more worthy calling than that.

12 April 2009

Easter 2009

Mark 16:1-8
[RCL Year B]

THERE YOU WILL SEE HIM

I don’t remember when I first heard this text from Mark; neither do I remember when I first learned there was a second, longer ending; but I do know and remember that whenever I do hear it, or read it, I get a thrill—every time. For years I’ve been wondering about this but only now, this past Holy Week and because I was asked to preach, did I undertake to sit with the text and examine why it is so thrilling to me. And thrill is the right word by the way because the feeling is just like these dictionary definitions given by my good ol’ pal Merriam-Webster: “to cause to experience a sudden sharp feeling of excitement; to cause to have a shivering or tingling sensation; to cause to vibrate or tremble perceptibly; to move or pass so as to cause a sudden wave of emotion”, well, you get the idea. To me this is quite appropriate to Easter morning. So having sat and pondered, meditated and mulled, I narrowed down all the images of the text from Mary Magdelene and the spices to sunrise and the rolled back stone to the young man in white—all fairly provocative themselves—to the thrilling culprit—Galilee. It’s Galilee. I want to go to Galilee and I want to go right now. Galilee looms in my imagination as a kind of cross between Katmandu and the feeling I had being welcomed into St. Hilda’s by Sr. Elise that first day. Adventure, beauty, youth and home all rolled into one. Not to mention Jesus. So hey, where is Galilee, how do I get there from here and why Galilee?

Interesting question, why…why not Jerusalem or Rome or heaven for that matter? The first thing that comes to mind is that it was home to Jesus and his disciples. “I’ll see you back at the ranch, boys.” But that promise to see Him again was to all of us, even us here, now, two thousand years later and how many thousands of miles away from a place on the map called Galilee. That’s not home. Why then does it sound like home? Well, mostly because Jesus is there and if it’s home to Jesus then it’s home to us. Here’s what I mean.

Jesus so often calls himself the Son of Adam. I just read in A Theology of the Built Environment by Tim Gorringe, “according to the second creation story humankind (Adam) is taken from the dust (adamah)—rooted, therefore, in the soil.”(p. 58). It is a different word from that used to indicate a land or territory belonging to a people; no, Adam comes from the word meaning that from which we all come, the literal ground of our being, our human solidarity, Earth, the fertile Earth, our Mother Earth.

Not only are we, and Jesus, rooted in the soil, but we, to quote Tim Gorringe again (p58), who references Genesis 2.7, have a special and absolutely necessary relationship to it: our vocation is defined in terms of tilling and tending it. This bears repeating—our vocation according to the Bible is to till and tend the soil. The ideal, peaceful agrarian society however, is beyond our grasp. Our biblical story tells us we didn’t get past the first generation before everything fell apart and brother slew brother.

To make a long story short it was the Law that was to set us to rights again, but that’s not a sure thing, to wit all those prophets, most notably (for our purposes here today) Jeremiah:

How long will the land mourn,

and the grass of every field wither?

For the wickedness of those who live in it

the animals and birds are swept away…

I have forsaken my house,

I have abandoned my portion,

I have given the beloved of my heart

into the hands of her enemies.

(Jer. 12.4,7)

That almost sounds like God the Father talking about Jesus as if he were Earth herself. Moving on then to Jesus, how does giving the beloved over accomplish what the Law does not—does sacrifice reconnect us with our true vocation? Well, I don’t know but I think so because sacrifice is a critical component of how things work as we heard all last week and in the lessons earlier this morning. What then must we sacrifice to get to Galilee where we will see Jesus? He’s already there and we’re still on the way and I bet it’s something big.

By all accounts (I have not been) Galilee is a region of great fertility and natural richness. There are streams and waterfalls along with vast fields of greenery and colorful wildflowers. Flora and wildlife thrive. There are several high mountains. It is a bird migration corridor. Because of rocky terrain most settlements in Galilee are villages connected by relatively few roads. The climate is mild.

And Jesus is there. The young man in white said, “You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth” he is not here. He didn’t say the Messiah or the Son of God or the King of Kings but just the man, Jesus of Nazareth, the one who was crucified. He has gone on before you to Galilee, not heaven mind you, but a place on Earth. And we’ll see him when we get there. When do we get to that place on Earth where we see Jesus? How do we get there? Well, I must say that I really do and think and believe it is by tilling and tending the soil. It is after all the resurrection of the body we’re celebrating, although celebrate seems too mild a word, and as there’s only One body, we can do nothing but till and tend–this is our glory. To do so consciously with every thought, word and deed–this is our prayer. Amen.

8 Feb 2009

Epiphany V 2009

Isaiah 40:21-31
Psalm 147:1-12, 21c
1 Corinthians 9:16-23
Mark 1:29-39
[RCL Year B]

HAVE YE NOT HEARD …

The best job I ever had was one of the first jobs I ever had. I worked for a little over a year at Fat City Café in Stockton, California as a dishwasher. It was 1971-72 and I was a junior in college. My friend Gayle started up this little place in an older residential neighborhood not far from downtown, not far from the university that we both attended, not far from the little, two-story, white-painted clapboard house we shared with three, sometimes four other students. In those days, Fat City Café was quite the innovation—wood floor, barn-wood siding on the walls, old-fashioned wooden tables and chairs, hanging plants, warm lighting and a home-made, all-natural, locally produced, vegetarian menu. We were tree-hugging, peacenik hippies and proud of it. We worked long hours for low, but steady wages and loved every minute. As chief dish-and-bottle washer I was proudly and happily equipped with a three-compartment sink, a drying rack and plenty of soap, hot water and flour-sacking towels. What made it so great of course was that we had each other and the worthy goal of providing wholesome food for our friends and neighbors. It didn’t last. After only a couple of years, Gayle and the three or four of us original employees all more or less felt compelled to move on to our grown-up lives of graduate school, marriage, and real careers for real money.

Why do I tell you this story? Because it popped into my head on first reading today’s text from Isaiah, “Have you not known? Have you not heard?…” and all the images, connections, and feelings from that time wouldn’t leave me no matter how hard I tried to buckle down to the task of writing a proper sermon. Then I realized that all of us, all of a certain age that is, have a story like this one I’ve shared with you. The story of a time before we were beset by the cares of the world; when being in love or having friends or being in the bosom of family or depending for our very lives on comrades in arms was all and the fellowship surrounding good, hard work so built us up, that privation seemed merely an adventure. “All for one and one for all.” Probably people throughout the ages have experienced something similar but in our particular day and age the cares of the world have increasingly come to mean concerns about money: how are we going to get it, how are we going to keep it, how much is enough, will there ever be enough, when can we stop worrying about it and so on and so on. Somehow and little by little we changed. We changed so much that it now takes the prophets shouting from the ages to alert us to the fact. Hey, hey you, don’t you remember knowing, don’t you remember how everyone knew that what is important is being together, that what counts is doing good for the common good, don’t you remember that it was fun and that life and time were full of laughter and tears, work and rest but not full of stuff, and other stuff and more stuff and over-stuffed schedules, nearly impossible to keep up with. “Have you not known, have you not heard…?”

Yes, I think to myself remembering Fat City Café, we have known, we have heard…that it is YHWH, it is the LORD, it is the one that Jesus called ABBA and about whose business he always was, who rebuilds Jerusalem, that continuing city we had a glimpse of back in the day. It is God who gathers the exiles, who heals and binds and lifts, who makes and provides. Not us, certainly not our stock markets, or engines or wireless technologies. God, it turns out, is not impressed with our money or our stuff. We are beginning to see this. The news is grim. Economies around the world are crashing and violence in all quarters is on the rise. America is not to be spared, indeed is culpable. What to do? Despair? not really an option. What then? Join up, like my old friend Mr. Lange used to say. Join up. Get together and do it for free as our old friend Paul says in today’s epistle. For the sake of the Good News and nothing more let us become friends, lovers, and family to one another—with no other label, no other label, attached. This is how we plug into the eternal creative transforming power of God. Let us abandon the bottom line and the profit margins and leap back into the center of our lives where there is fullness of time to do with God all that makes life worth living. We are going to need each other and it could turn out to be the best time of our lives, don’t you know, haven’t you heard?

1 Feb 2009

Epiphany IV 2009

Deuteronomy 18:15-20
Psalm 111
1 Corinthians 8:1-13
Mark 1:21-28
[RCL Year B]

DISCERNMENT FREE FOR ALL

Just as we have discovered over the course of our life and work on the farm that “we’re all about food”, so too, does food occupy a central position in today’s lections. Verse 5 of the ten-versed Psalm 111 declares, “You give food to those who revere you, keeping your Covenant ever in mind.” At the Epistle, Paul rather gamely introduces his subject, “Now, concerning food sacrificed to idols.” I found it no small comfort that the struggle we face over food choices is not a new one! I found it incredibly provocative however to hear Paul say, “But food cannot bring us closer to God.” Does that statement not strike directly at us? Moreover, how does the lesson from Deuteronomy and the Gospel reading relate? Why does this all hang together? I think it is a matter of discernment. I am reminded of hearing Sr. Jerolynn Mary say when questioned about the work of the community (and I paraphrase) “…well, we spend most of our time discerning the Holy Spirit”.

What it doesn’t seem to be about is knowledge. Knowledge is usually held up as a great good but in today’s lessons it is somewhat disparaged. The knowledge gained by the people at Horeb was that being in the presence of God, face to face, was too intense, beyond our human ability to absorb, understand, process, or what have you. Direct knowledge of God is not for us, it must be mediated, in Moses’ case through the Law and the promise of prophets to keep us in the way. Furthermore, we must listen and obey the prophets and if we do not it is to our own peril. But (and it is a great big but) we must discern between the true and false prophet—a mistake here is fatal. To recap, we die in the Presence of God and we put ourselves in that very presence when we don’t listen to the right prophets and prophets themselves die for presuming the word of God. To die seems to be the overwhelming option. Happily the Psalm suggests a way out of this rather daunting cycle. “Reverence for our God is the beginning of wisdom—and those who have it prove themselves wise.” Discernment as a function of wisdom, and not of knowledge, is what we want in our situation and we can have it for simply revering God. Revere of course is the new fear but either works. Now, I don’t mean for this sermon to be just a matter of semantics and so I believe the lessons are invoking a real difference between knowledge and wisdom. The inference I take is that knowledge is something one possesses and wisdom is a manner of being. Knowledge assumes an answer; wisdom an ability to live within paradox and mystery, not requiring an answer. Knowledge implies an equality with the All-Knowing; wisdom a trust. And this is why I think Paul says that knowledge puffs up and leads to thinking that we know things when really we don’t.

For instance, I certainly think I know some things about food sacrificed to idols. I’m pretty certain that I know in the prevailing national, indeed global economy, that food production and distribution systems have been hijacked by market forces, that is to say by money, that is to say by the idol Mammon. But just to talk about food with words like production, distribution and system when what I really know about food calls to mind words like field and farm, sister and sun, well, I can and do get confused and think maybe I don’t know what I mean. And I realize that angry puffery on the subject does me no good, not to mention those with whom I live and love. This kind of puffing-up knowledge, and even self-knowledge of same, is not sufficient foundation nor motive for me when proclaiming the good news of the living Earth. What I, we, want to share when we say that food is what we’re about is that we get it that food is from God. This is the great fact for us: that everything we need for life has been provided for us upon our arrival here; that we live by grace and that it is impossible to dedicate this gift, this life, this grace, to any lesser being than the Eternal Unfurling One. But should this fact, can this fact, lead us to condemn those who we think do not recognize it? By no means. There are those in my life that I dearly love who eat at McDonald’s regularly, maybe even every day. Do I love them the less? No. Am I not happy to eat there with them just because I love them? Yes. Do I have to give up on our farm because of that? No. I eat with those I love out of love. I pray that I farm and make choices for the farm out of love. This is Paul’s point: that love encompasses inconsistencies and transforms them. But to do or choose for anything less than love leads us back to self, self-knowledge, false prophets, and idols.

So we’re back to discernment—the discernment between love, which points to encompassing transforming relationship, and the kind of knowledge which points to self-prepossessing will to power. The thing is, today’s Gospel shows us that the job of discernment is not all that hard. Because we’re all of us always in it all together—the unclean spirits, Jesus, the rest of us, here together, now and always. Like us, unclean spirits suddenly appear, come and go. Jesus, here always. And it is the ever-present light of Christ that makes our job of discernment a sure thing. In that light it is the unclean spirit in us and among us that recognizes the Holy One of God and shouts out—shouts out, calls attention to itself, just asks for a good casting out. What a great gift to us–we really don’t have to be afraid we won’t be able to discern the path–it is wide open and well lit and we just naturally head for it especially when we’re in the dark. We are called into the Light, we grow into the Light, we eat the Light, we become the Light. Allelujah!

25 Jan 2009

Epiphany III 2009

Jonah 3:1 – 5, 10
I Cor. 7:29 – 31
Mark 1:14 – 20
[RCL Year B]

I seem to be all about “trinity” lately. I’ve always “understood” (and I use the term loosely) the Trinity as the church’s attempt to wrangle into words what community is and can be. An admirable goal. But words will always leave us wanting more, and the challenge of defining the Holy Trinity has taunted and teased theologians for centuries. Mostly, I think, the object of their desire has successfully eluded them.

Basically, we, the average pew-sitters, are left to wrestle with defining Holy Trinity for ourselves; if we care at all, we must jump into that murky pond alone and dive repeatedly in search of the pearl of trinitarian wisdom.

I have my own various revelations, the latest of which is understanding the Holy Trinity as Life, Death and Transformation. God—the essence of Desire, fostering and sustaining all life for all time. Jesus — a wise one, out of his own time, who models for us the real meaning of death. The Holy Spirit—that wild, windy, wonderful sprite devoted to transforming everything into something new.

The story of humans is also the story of stars, and zebras and rocks and clouds and anything else you can name. We not only live in a Eucharistic Universe, but our cosmic home is Trinitarian as well. Communion, differentiation, interiority. Life, death, transformation.

Today is not Trinity Sunday, of course; preachers are foolish enough to tackle this topic when they are required to; one would have to be knitting with one needle to embark on a Trinitarian sermon in the middle of Epiphany, and I’m not daft enough to take it on today whether my needles are paired or not.

So bear with me; my plan is explore what might be revealed if we weave together my trinitarian musings with today’s readings. Specifically I want to look at the following tidbits from Jonah, Paul and Jesus:

• [Jonah] So the people of Nineveh believed God, proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest to the least of them.

• [Paul] “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?”

• [Jesus] “Repent and believe in the good news [gospel]!”

If ever a set of lections speaks directly to our own lives, today’s would be it. All three of them, Jonah, Paul and Jesus, were speaking to any who would listen to them, calling them to wake up, to notice how unconscious and dangerous their thinking and behaviors had become. Now think back to this past Tuesday. President Obama’s inauguration speech said much the same thing: we are in trouble. Our thinking and behavior have taken us far down a terrible, deadly road. To survive, literally, we must change; it is time to transform our lives.

And all of them agree on the solution: repent. Turn around. No more waiting for the government to “do something”, for big business to change, for the medical community to wake up, for the educational system to produce “better people”. WE must turn around

In Jonah’s time folks took repentance very seriously; they didn’t just stop doing whatever bad stuff had gotten them into trouble — they traded their suits and ties, their cocktail dresses and their diamond rings for dirty rags. They went to the fireplace and smeared ashes all over their nicely gelled hair and their expensively made-up faces . It didn’t stop there: they draped duck doo-doo-splattered tarps over the family SUV, they removed FiFi’s ruby-studded collar and rolled her in ashes, too. They pulled the plug on the TV and the computer and the iron and the coffee maker. They fasted. They mourned. They prayed. No one was spared: not for illness or age or important work was exemption granted. From the king to the leper, they repented with their bodies, their minds, their souls.

Over time, that ancient way of walking the repentance walk fell away. By the time Jesus and Paul were born, the dangerous ways had returned, and on a larger scale. “Where is the wise man?” Paul laments. “Where is the philosopher of this age?”

Where, indeed.

Had they not been so self-destructive, the “wisdom” and the “intelligence” of the day would have been laughable to Paul. “Has God not made foolish the wisdom of the world?” he asks. Again, we ask ourselves the same question: where is the wisdom and intelligence in our unsustainable high-consumption life?

Jesus tried again, with a more positive approach: “The time has come,” he declared; “The kindom of God is near.” And then he adds: “Repent and believe the good news!” Isn’t this what we were invited into last Tuesday at noon? To turn around? To trust that goodness is still available, and we only have to look in an entirely different direction than the one we’ve been staring into for years?

President Obama didn’t say this, but we will probably have to locate some sackcloth and ashes before our own repentance is complete. To continue to pretend – for that is what it would be – that we can acquire and waste and consume indefinitely is foolishness. That is the “wisdom” and “intelligence” of this age, and it is quickly revealing a naked emperor. Our culture is in its death throes. We have effectively clothed the Earth in sackcloth and ashes while dressing ourselves in what we believed were our birthright riches. That must change.

It’s all right, though. In a Eucharistic, Trinitarian Universe, everything needed for life to move forward is always available. It is all here: the beauty, the sustenance, the joy, the challenge, the health, the life, the death. Everything that God dreamed into being is waiting for us. We are a species perched on the edge of death, about to take the better part of an entire planet with us. There, sitting right on that knife-edge of total destruction, we have only to turn around — look with new eyes, drop the old ways and open our hearts — to discover that we are swimming in a sea of transformative possibility.

The field of God is near; let us turn our minds and our hearts and our souls around. Then we, too, will know the good news.

28 Dec 2008

Holy Innocents

Jeremiah 31:15-17
Revelation 21:1-7
Matthew 2:13-18
Psalm 124
[RCL Year B]

I like to think that all of us came into this world not as one holy innocent but as many holy innocents in one person — “fractal possibilities,” open-ended blank chances to become more than one just visible branch of the human race, even of one Universe. Every moment we live in this Universe we are faced with infinite opportunities to grow or even die.  Each of these innocent facets of our lives are like flower petals that can be plucked or allowed to become a seed and grow into iterations of possibilities.

Sometimes the growth comes as a result of the way others treat us or as a desire on our own part to improve, to reach out and learn, to risk. Even babies do this; they’re always learning how things work, what their bodies can accomplish. Parents, who allow a child to risk walking instead of just crawling, riding a bike or just walking, jumping rope or just hopping on one foot, etc., are planting seeds of growing possibilities and edges.

Sometimes death comes in the form of not only being forbidden to risk but of being told one can’t do something. The door to new possibilities in one direction is slammed shut.  Any violence we do to another kills some holy innocent part of another’s being, let alone life.  Admittedly our Universe is a violent place, but we are not the Universe, nor are we adjudicators of its laws and dynamics. When someone tells us we can’t draw, or sing, or do something with our dominant (or even non-dominant) hand or understand something new, that innocent is murdered. That doesn’t always mean that there isn’t the possibility of resurrection (but that’s a topic for some other sermon).

Because my parents and teachers fostered a desire to express myself in art, I learned I could draw.  No one knew I had Asperger’s so I wasn’t told this might be impossible for me, since many with Asperger’s have poor small and large motor coordination. I still have difficulty with large motor coordination, and that direction is effectively cut off for me; but I am not afraid to learn things that involve the use of my hands.

Our innocents are our opportunities to try something new without fear of being squashed. How many of us often feel that we can try something new without fearing ridicule, failure, or loss of trust in our ability to rebound from a real or imagined disaster? The windows of opportunity become clogged with the dried paint of inertia and fear.

Too bad most of us can’t be like the redwood tree that sends out reiterations of itself as it grows.

21 Dec 2008

Advent IV 2008

2 Samuel 7:1-11, 16
Canticle 3 or Canticle 15
or Psalm 89:1-4, 19-26
Romans 16: 25-27
Luke 1:26-38
[Year B RCL]

We are in the midst of what we call ‘creativity week’. Having spent a good portion of my creativity time in sitting with today’s lections I have come to realize that not only is this an apt name for our endeavors this week but that the timing, the scheduling of creativity for Advent III and IV is a stoke of inspiration. I have also come to see that creativity is harder on some folks than others, that is to say, namely, me. I confess to being one of those people from whom one often hears, “I just can’t, never have been able to draw, sing, paint, write, sew, etc…”I am craft challenged,” I finally took to saying, getting a laugh at least, as I begged off participating in some communal creativity rite. What is, or was, galling to me about taking this stand was that I always wanted to participate, wanted to be good at something creative—in the end the strategy I landed on to feel better about the disparity between my desire and ability, was to go for perfection at some technically demanding task—I developed technique. This is a pretty good strategy and can last a lifetime I suppose. But here in the Community of the Holy Spirit, creativity is, well, foundational I think we could say, not only in matters of faith and belief, theology and philosophy, but in actual, day to day, practice. Yikes! So I have been more or less forced into being creative and in so doing have had to examine the old resistance, abandon the old strategy and open up to the overshadowing power of the Holy Spirit. Now this week when I pray the Collect for Advent IV, I realize that praying for purification of conscience as a prelude or requisite to creativity, is what I really need and that that is what the Holy One seeks out in us for the work of creation. It is not ability or desire that we lack; it is openness to the Spirit, fertile but virgin soil, as it were, for new life to grow in. Purify is a transitive verb meaning to free from guilt or moral or ceremonial blemish. “Purify our conscience, Almighty God, by your daily visitation…” transform us into co-creators with you by freeing us from the spirit squashing, paralyzing sense of inadequacy that deafens us to the divine vocation of creation.

We hear over and over in the lessons today, however, that receptivity to the creative power of the Holy Spirit must also be accompanied by acknowledgement of where that power resides, from whence it comes, whose it really is. This is a good definition of humility I think—receptivity plus acknowledgement; and humility is that low door (says Mary Margaret Funk, O.S. B.) through which all Christians must pass. The O.T. lesson from 2 Samuel opens with David settled nicely on this throne, at ease in his very own palace built just for him. He has the notion that if he is so agreeably established, it would behoove him to confer upon God a like residence—a tidy bit of false humility. Nathan responds to David’s notion with what amounts to saying, “good idea”. What an harmonious exchange between king and prophet! It is kind of comical really and I think we can all sense what is coming: Nathan gets the word in the night that prophets speaking for themselves can be mistaken and that kings seeking to colonize God are “cruisin’ for a bruisin’” as my father used to say. The echo of Nathan’s words to David however, in the angel Gabriel’s salutation to Mary— the Lord is with you—is provocative. What is the difference between these two favored ones that results in Mary actually becoming the house of God that David so misguidedly wanted to build?

The succinct answer is given by Paul as he closes his letter to the Romans. There is only One who has the power to build, to establish, to strengthen, to make manifest, to reveal, to command, to bring about—only One. And that One will not be contained nor truly honored in a house made of cedar, or stone, even marble, will not be glorified by elaborate construction or precious ornament. No, no, no–the walls come tumbling down whether Jericho or Jerusalem. The One Holy Seamless Unfurling Event that is God is glorified in the commonly-thought common but nevertheless miraculous materiel of flesh and bone. We—God’s handiwork—are the receptacles of God’s glory and the purveyors of God’s desire for creation. We, when we are like pure Mary and not like proud David, are the bearers of a consciousness that embodies and magnifies true power.

In one sense of course, our handiworks do shew forth the divine creativity—whether our dyed and spun wool, or shellacked and painted gourds or crocheted mittens or beads on a string—but in a much larger sense, the opening up to the Holy Spirit, the willingness to come together in devotion, and the impulse to share are the true creative efforts of a lifetime. The handiworks themselves will eventually crumble to dust and even great masterpieces of musical or literary composition are subject to loss. What survives, that is to say what is eternal, is the communion created when conscious contact with the source of life giving power is acknowledged, accepted, nurtured and brought forth.

The spirit of the thing is all in matters of creativity. Works brought forth from a purified conscience in humility, even in the violent passion of awe, are immediate contributions to the goods of the world. The question is can an act of will purify our conscience so as to bring forth such works? Can I decide to be pure? Today’s lessons say yes, but only if such a decision sounds inside something like “Be it unto me according to thy word…”

12 Feb 2006

Epiphany VI 2006

2 Kings 5:1-14
1 Corinthians 9:24-27
Mark 1:40-45

[Excerpts from a sermon preached by Sr. Claire Joy in Cody, Wyoming]

Beginning with the lessons: basically, you could say they are all about health. The first and last deal specifically with illness, (both cases just happen to be leprosy) and their subsequent healings. Then in the middle there’s Paul’s letter to the Corinthians where he essentially says: “Keep in shape! Stay fit so you can run the race, but more especially so you can run it to win.” For Paul, keeping fit in this context is of utmost importance. He’s not concerned about your abs or your muscle tone or that you’ll be more attractive and have more friends. He wants you to win. Paul would be an excellent Olympic coach, except that for him, this is a race of life and death, a race of good over evil. So… what does health remotely have to do with evolution? Not much. So lets dig a little deeper. In 1 Kings we have a story of a quite important man—Naaman, commander of the armies of Aram. He’s successful, yet he’s also been brought low by the disease of leprosy. In his time this disease doomed anyone who contracted it to the life of outcast. (Much as the disease of AIDS has done in our own society.) But his wife’s slave girl knows of a prophet in Samaria, and she claims he can heal Naaman. At this point I’d like to take a different spin on the text and suggest that the story is not so much about healing as it is about misconceptions and preconceived ideas. Case in point: Naaman’s king. He sends a letter of introduction to the King of Israel. “Here’s my very important commander of my army; heal him of his leprosy.” Whoa— that’s not what Naaman’s wife’s slave girl said. She said prophet, not king. But kings have their own ideas of how these things work. They know all about political ramifications and appropriate protocol, and Naaman’s king only talks to other kings. He only has part of the picture and that’s what he acts on. Moving on… the King of Israel gets the letter and he panics. Tears his clothes. Probably convenes his cabinet— and comes up with the second misconception—the conclusion that the King of Aram is trying to pick a fight. Thankfully Scripture makes a long story short. Elisha the Prophet hears about the problem and sends his king the message “Not to worry. Send him to me and we’ll get him healed and the God of Israel will be glorified.” So Naaman arrives at the prophet’s house with his contingency of camels and gold and silver and party outfits, and we’re on the brink of our third misconception. Elisha sends out the hired help. Leaves Naaman essentially parked at the curb while the valet delivers the message “Go dunk yourself seven times in the Jordan.” Naaman is insulted. He has in his mind a very vivid and preconceived idea of how this healing should and therefore will occur. he has no room in his mind for an alternative approach, and as a result he shuts out totally a healing opportunity that’s staring him smack dab square in the front of his face. He won’t see it. It’s not possible. But Naaman is a lucky man. He has servants who appeal to the side of his ego only they would understand…”If the prophet had asked you to do something difficult, you’d have done it. So why not give this a shot? What do you have to lose?” Well, if you’ve read the lesson, you already know the rest of the story. They prevail and Naaman is healed. In spite of himself, he gave in to that last appeal to think outside of the box. Now lets move on to Paul. (Bless his heart.) I think that’s what they say in Texas… about somebody who can be difficult or disagreeable. Well, Paul, bless his heart, has a very good point in this scripture. But he’s also missing a very important piece of the puzzle and mystery of our life together in Christ. And that is the concept that Henri Nouwen calls the power and ministry of the Wounded Healer. Paul makes the assumption that only the fit can win the race for Christ, and in my heart of hearts I know that’s just not true. It’s a preconceived and dated idea that leaves no room for broken people to minister to other broken people. Yet we do it all the time. If I have sinned (and I have) then I have walked in your sinful shoes. And I can compassionately embrace you because in this we are more alike than we are different. Now to the final lesson: in which the leper, who starts out so exquisitely humble in his statement of faith, “If you choose you can heal me”… once healed decides he knows more than the Son of God what to do with this information. Despite Jesus specifically saying “Tell NO one”, he spreads the story all around the countryside. From one end of town to the other… and as a result, Jesus cannot walk the streets openly anymore. So, in conclusion… (to those of you who have waited so patiently for me to get to the evolution vs. creation part, you can stop holding your breath.) Because I’m not going to say much about that. Except this: These three lessons are brimming with examples and metaphors of people and situations where someone had a preconceived idea about what God looks like and how God acts. These ideas were based on their own individual pieces of the puzzle. They were, in truth, partly correct. It was in assuming that they were totally correct that they sinned, and ended up missing out on the mystery and majesty of what was smack dab square in the front of their faces. Genesis gives us one of the most poetic and condensed metaphors for God’s creative process. Evolution, along with the New Story of the Cosmos and our unfolding Universe, gives us a much more drawn out and detailed description of God’s creative process. For me, each is an individual piece of the puzzle. As we study both, let us pray that we do not assume that the box in which we wish to stick our God is where He, or She, or It, or We will stay forever. Amen.