May 19, 2013, The Day of Pentecost

May 19, 2013, The Day of Pentecost, Year C

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

          Welcome to Whitsuntide!  Welcome to Pentecost!  Pentecost means “the 50^th Day.”  We inherited it from our Jewish ancestors, it was a festival held 50 days after the second day of Passover.  It is now celebrated as the harvest festival shavout, or Weeks.  That is what Luke is talking about in our passage from Acts.  In the Anglican communion, it is traditionally called Whitsunday, from old English meaning “White Sunday,” probably referring to the white robes traditionally worn by the catecumate at baptism. Traditionally Whitsuntide, the Vigil of Pentecost in particular, was a time for Baptisms, much like the Easter Vigil, principal feasts of our Lord.  

          Let’s step back a minute and see where we are in the world seasonally speaking.  We are at Pentecost right now.  But our church calendar starts back in December with____?  Advent.  Advent is a pensive season marked by the Marian blue (purple or violet is also allowed).  We are doing what?  Waiting.  Preparing.  And for what?  ___ For the incarnation of our Lord and Savior which comes precisely on the 25^th of December each year with its snow white vestments.  It is a fixed holiday, a solar holiday linked to a specific day followed by the brief season of Christmas.  We then move into the Epiphany, the time between the end of the 12 days of Christmas and the beginning of Lent.  Epiphany is a time of noticing, of the realization of the presence of God and the consequences of God’s definitive intersection with this world in the form of a person in 1^st century Palestine.  

As Epiphany concludes with the cupboard clearing feast of Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras to our more adventurous Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, we break out the royal purple, adorn ourselves with ashes, and commence with the deepest fasting season we have in our calendar, the Season of Lent.  In Lent we reflect on Jesus Christ, on the love he shows for humanity and how humanity repays that love.  And always, we are repenting, fasting, preparing for the death of Jesus Christ at our own human hands which we relive poignantly in the red and black of Holy week.  

But the blood and death of the passion are of course pushed aside, the old leaven of malice and hatred are replaced with the new unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. On the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox, a lunar holiday, we celebrate the glorious and moveable Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord: Easter.  Decked in white we bask in the glory of God in Christ’s new presence with us in the wake of the resurrection.  Forty days after Easter we remember Christ’s Ascension into heaven where He sits at the right hand of the Father, and ten days later, the fiftieth day, we are right here, right now, Whitsunday, the remembrance of the particular entrance of the Holy Spirit in to the world, its alighting on the hearts, minds and bodies of Jesus Christ’s followers in a new way.  The Feast of Pentecost celebrates the consecration, the founding, the birthday if you will of the church.  And after the red of this day, we slip into the cool green of what season?  Ordinary time.  Ordinary time takes up half of the church calendar, from Pentecost all the way through to Christ the King Sunday, the end of the church year, gateway to yet another Advent when the glorious cycle starts all over again.

From purple to white to purple to white, a day of Red, then into the long green season.  From preparing and waiting to basking in a new incarnation of God, we then begin the long descent towards death, then reveling in the resurrection, we send Jesus off and straight away welcome the coming of the Holy Spirit into our midst, consecrating the Church.  And then, we enter ordinary time.  

The trajectory of the church year makes immanent sense.  The drama of God’s participation, intersection, interaction, presence… whatever words work for you, we learn, understand, take on, participate in, become the story, inhabit the story through the very arc of the drama of the story itself.  Here Robert Heinlein’s word grok is useful.  To grok is “to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes part of the observed.” The narrative, if we allow it, if we grok it, envelopes us, and we become it, or it becomes part and parcel of us and we of it.  It is marvelous, and we mark the movement of the seasons with colors, seasonal candles, prayers and music.  The liturgy can shift dramatically, like not saying confession in the Eastertide, or having different words welcome us to Mass, or banning the word Halleluiah in Lent.  But all of the drama, the story of our faith, the story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, all we have done for the past six months, all of it, it culminates in today, and then flows across the weeks and months of Ordinary Time until we start the cycle again. Because today, Whitsunday, and the Ordinary Time that follows, that is were we are formed as the Church.  

Now by church, I mean church with the big “c”.  One holy catholic and apostolic church, of which we are but a tiny mote in a vast sea of Christian practice, life and service.  That is what today is about, Whitsunday, standing here on the precipice of Ordinary Time, the life and work of the church, the daily practice, life and service of 2 billion people gathered in faith.  From here, imprinted with story of Jesus Christ, groking it even, we move on to our great work.

What is it, the work we have been given to do as a church?  Why are we here?  What and how should we be working on as the body of Christ?  Knowing all we know, groking the life of Jesus Christ as the movement of our calendar has again dramatically taught us, how then shall we be church together?  This is a serious question.  We put a lot of time and effort into making this happen.  I’m expensive.  This building is expensive.  We all spend collectively hundreds of perishable hours each week on keeping this embassy of the Kingdom of God open.  So what are we, this tiny mote in the 2 billion strong sea of Christianity, what are we supposed to do in Ordinary Time, in real life? What is the purpose of the Church?_____

I am going to depart from our regular course here and put the manuscript aside.  What are we doing here, being church?  What does the idea of “The Body of Christ” mean?  Why are we in this together, in church, together?  because that is the key word in all of this, together.  And this is a word of particular importance as we discern together if I am to stay on as your rector.  Why are we all in church together?

Gracious Father, we pray for thy holy Catholic Church.  Fill it with all truth, in all truth with all peace.  Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in any thing it is amiss, reform it.  Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Savior.  AMEN

May 12, 2013, 7th Sunday of Easter

7th Sunday of Easter, Year C

May 12, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me.”

          Do you all remember Robert Fulghum?  He is the author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.  He’s a Northwesterner.  I think he used to live in Portland, he is in Seattle now.  In a book he published back in 1995, he shared a prayer that he found, literally found: it has a rather ignoble genesis, it was taped inside the stall of a men’s room at a seminary in Berkeley.   We are told to pray ceaselessly...  It is a beautiful prayer that goes like this:

      God, I have a problem.

      I'm just a man and I'm feeling so alone.

      God, I know you have no name, but I need to call you something.

      God, I know you are not a man like me, but I need to think of you that way.

      God, I know you are everywhere, but I need to talk to you somewhere.

      God, I know you are eternal, but I need you now.

      God, forgive my limitations, and help me. Amen.

                                                (From Beginning to End, 1995)

          How do we meet God in Acts?  What an odd story.  A slave girl pimped out as a fortune teller by her owners annoys Paul with her insistence, “These men are slaves to the Most High God…”  to which Paul responds to with an exorcism.   Then beaten and thrown in prison at the behest of the wealthy owners who were now out a fortune teller, God knocks the prison down with an earthquake and so stills the hearts of Paul and Silas that they remain that the jailer might be saved in body and spirit.  

          The god we learn of in the Acts of the Apostles, particularly in this scene, is a very active god.  Visible and active.  Heaven and Earth move when this god wills it.  Hearts are changed, radically, in the hands of this god.  Stripped, “severely” beaten, thrown in stocks and chains in the inner most cell and what do they do?  Pray and sing hymns to God.  Then God frees their bonds in the miracle of an earthquake and Paul and Silas do not run off, but offer counsel and the sacraments to their tormenter right then, in real time.  It is a fantastic story.  Our God is a visible God.

          How do we meet God in Revelation?  Well, how do we meet the Alpha and the Omega?  How do we embrace the bright morning star that is Jesus Christ?  How do we meet this god?  With our arms wide and our hearts bared.  “Come,” says the Spirit and the bride.  “Let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’  And let everyone who is thirsty come.  Let anyone who wishes to take the water of life as a gift…” come.  The god revealed in St. John the Divine blows it all open, the first and the last, the beginning and the end, God is beyond comprehension yet is well within the experience of anyone with the eyes to see and the ears to hear.  Like the vastness of space, I can’t comprehend an infinite universe, but lying in a field in Jasper looking up into the stars these crystal clear nights recently, layer upon layer upon layer, depth into depth into depth…  we can’t comprehend the infinite but we can participate in it fully.  Our God is a mysterious God.

          How do we meet God in the Gospels?  Well in today’s selection from St. John’s Gospel, at least, we meet God the Son praying on our behalf to God the Father.  That is dynamic.  One face of God addressing another face of God for us.  The glory of God shared from Father to Son to the faithful and the faithful yet to come.  A god of knowing and being known, a loving god who calls us to love god and each other.  “I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”  Our God is an intimate, tender God, a loving God.

          Three little passages in the Bible.  At least three very different ideas about the nature of God, at least three very different ideas about how we can or will meet God, about how we can or should approach God.  And we hear these passages in a very particular way, we hear them, first off, read aloud.  We are hearing them together, as part of the common Anglican form of Christian sacramental worship.  And that is just our experience of God in Church.

          How do you experience God in relation to the tragedy in Savar, Bangladesh?  Do you feel the horror of it?  The raw display of greed and self interest that led to the death of over 1000 of the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people, that what, we might buy cheap clothes at Walmart or the Gap?  Where is God in this scene?  Or maybe the question is is God in that scene at all, or maybe God is actually brutally and fully present maybe most particularly in a time of great horror, terrible suffering?

          How do you experience God in relation to the death of a loved one?  Are you angry that they have been taken?  Are you at a loss for the hole left in your life?  Are you blessedly assured that she is in the arms of a loving God, that he is getting his justice now, finally?  All of these at once?

          Where is God in the wild scene at Occupy Medical on Sunday afternoons, or at the Dining Room on any given weeknight or at the Sunday Breakfast?  In the faces of the poor?  In the hands of the helpers?  Where is God in the world that such need is present, that such suffering could be to begin with?  How do we make sense of it all?

      God, I have a problem.

      I'm just a man and I'm feeling so alone.

      God, I know you have no name, but I need to call you something.

      God, I know you are not a man like me, but I need to think of you that way.

      God, I know you are everywhere, but I need to talk to you somewhere.

      God, I know you are eternal, but I need you now.

      God, forgive my limitations, and help me. Amen.

          As someone who lives rather deeply into my head, like a goodly number of us here, as someone who makes decisions based on whether something makes sense or not, whether there is some interior logic to a system, Christianity can be rather confounding.  Like so many of us getting so much from the profound teaching of the Dalai Lama, but we forget that he is the patriarch of a radically patriarchal feudal theocracy, the Lamas ruled Tibet with an iron fist before the Chinese threw them out.  Similarly, sometimes Christianity doesn’t make any sense.  The violence of the Psalter.  The scandalous lives of Abraham, Issac and Jacob.  The Divine and Royal Lordship of the Crucified God.  Simply the notion of God the Father, God as He can be confounding, alienating, oppressive or simply off putting to so many, it doesn’t make any sense God with a gender… but sometimes, sometimes we just feel so alone.  Sometimes we need to put a name to the nameless, we need to imagine a beam of light from the heavenly lighthouse.  Sometimes we need a friend, a divine friend, a friend in Jesus even if we don’t have any idea what that means or how to do it.  Sometimes we need to corral the infinite that we might find at least the hem of a robe to touch.  Always and everywhere means that, truly, right?  It includes right here and right now, right?

          My point, if there is a point to a sermon, that can get pretty dangerous, my point is that we need to forgive ourselves our humanness, our limitations, our prejudices. We need to forgive our need for order and sensibility.  We need to recognize our scar tissue, see where we have been damaged, broken, hurt, we need to acknowledge our blind spots, account for the gaps in our systems of understanding.  We need to recognize that very little about God makes sense.  What we must do is everything in our power to meet God and each other where we can and not just in the ways that make sense, in the times that are approved, with vocabulary that we have had handed down to us.  We should not walk away from traditions just out of hand, that is not the Anglican, the catholic (with a small “c”) way, but where the tried and true way fails us, where sense fails us, all we can do is ask God to forgive our limitations and help us.  And hope upon hope God will.  AMEN.

May 5, 2013, 6th Sunday of Easter

May 5, 2013, Year C, Easter 6

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          On this Rogation Sunday, I want to start with a poem of unlikely origin for this context, Mass.  It is Charles Bukowski’s a song with no end.  It goes:

when Whitman wrote, "I sing the body electric"

I know what he


meant

I know what he


wanted:

to be completely alive every moment


in spite of the inevitable.

we can't cheat death but we can make it


work so hard


that when it does take


us

it will have known a victory just as

perfect as

ours.

          I learned this poem on Friday morning from someone I met on Friday morning, someone who is very much thinking on issues of life and death as he struggles with a very aggressive form of cancer.  One of the deepest privileges of priesthood, and without a doubt the most humbling, is being invited into people’s lives in the thin spots, the shallow patches in the river of life: birth, marriage, divorce, pain and suffering, loss and grief, and of course sickness unto death.  Gladness, sorrow, and above all change, constant change.  And the realness of it all, joyful and otherwise, is sometimes overwhelming.  What overwhelms me is exactly what Charles Bukowski is talking about, our ability, our need, our God given responsibility to be completely alive in every moment in spite, in spite of the inevitable. 

          “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb…”  Sing it, sing it loud, St. John the Divine.  “On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit each month; the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”   O, God “the earth has brought forth her increase;” may you give us your blessing.  May we sing our bodies electric in spite of the inevitable.  May we sing the body of Mother Earth electric, may we sing the body of our Lord Jesus Christ electric in spite of the inevitable.  What we need to do is sing these things electric as if it is the song itself that is inevitable.

Rogation is an agrarian observance, handed down to us from our ancient ancestors in pagan Rome.  Being agrarian, being  agricultural means having to do with the very real systems of life and death that make human civilization possible.  Could there be a more strident call, a more definitive call to engage the inevitable?  Rogation is an occasion to sing our collective earth-bound bodies electric not just in spite of the inevitable, but because of it, for it, in celebration of it.  For as inevitable as death seems and of course is, life is just as inevitable, is just as pressing, just as looming, just as essential as death could ever hope to be.  Just look at the blackberries.  Life, the overwhelming aliveness of the world, is there a greater testament to God Almighty?  Do we need anything else to be convinced of the grandeur of the Divine?  The creation itself is at least a fifth gospel of our Lord. 

Right there in Revelation:  the river of the water of life, crystal clear, watering the trees of life, twelve kinds of fruit each month!  I’ve seen apple trees grafted to grow three or four varieties, and maybe a pear, but twelve, and twelve each month?  What an image of divine abundance.  And the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations of the world?  An old friend of mine, a farmer, he always preached his produce as medicine, the best medicine money could buy: honest, pure, well loved food, a gift from God for the people of God, no doubt about it.  The inevitability of life is revealed in the processes of life itself.

My work, before I came to Resurrection, was agricultural.  I farmed and cared for the grounds of an Anglican monastery North of Boston.  I also thought and wrote about agriculture, about a holy agriculture and a theology to help ground the systems of life in a vocabulary of faith, in an understanding of the world that transcended understanding hay fields, the rows of potatoes and the secret life of turkeys and opened up, hopefully, an apprehension of the Great Economy.  Wendell Berry calls it that, the Great Economy.   It is the all encompassing economy, God’s economy where everything is accounted for, where nothing is ignored or externalized.  Because farming really is that, it is really about managing, massaging, manipulating, and at its best, cooperating with the infinitely complex systems and complexes of complex systems that enable life to happen.  People talk of God as love: sure, and I sometimes broaden it out a bit and try to understand God as relationship itself, as the ability to relate, as the substrate within which relationship occurs, the intersubjective space.  Witnessing, beginning to understand, participating in the ultra-complex relationships that are part and parcel of farming are a unique window to begin to understand God in God’s self. Hence, a project was born, “Helping the Land Help People Know God.” 

We started a small farm at the monastery, feeding 15 local families, the brothers, their retreat guests, and some food went out into the food security system.  We had mostly vegetables, but also grew grains, berries, eggs, turkeys and pigs.  And we had a nice sugar bush that produced 10 gallons of maple syrup each winter.  We used the chickens to weed the rows, grew grain to feed the chickens, spoiled food to feed the pigs and all of it fed the compost pile which came back to feed the soil and the green grass grew all around all around and the green grass grew all around.  Complex relationships. 

And all sorts of people crossed paths in those rows of tomatoes; toddlers and monks, grouchy old church ladies and bright-eyed young interns, bishops and crusty Yankees who had been farming the same land since 1600 something, and all somewhat choreographed by myself with all of my peculiarities.  In five years, I think the best day we had at the farm was when 100 kids from inner city Boston came out as part of a summer enrichment program run by the Diocese.  They picked raspberries, dug potatoes, petted the pig and all, and we culminated in a dramatic reading of Eric Carle’s Pancakes, Pancakes.  The kids threshed the wheat, milled the flower, made raspberry-maple compote, and flipped pancakes on a giant outdoor griddle as the story progressed: then we ate.  It was a good day.

And what did we all learn?  That raspberries are best when they are eaten warm right off the bramble on a hot July day.  That potatoes are absolute magic: dig your hands in the soil and a life giving apple of the earth emerges.  That it takes a lot of work to make flour, a lot, and that whatever you put into it all, into the system, is what you get back.  Garbage in, garbage out.  Poison in, unwholesome food out.  Love, attention, a dash of caring and ample heart water in, and the very essence of life will be returned to you encased in the three mil thick skin of a Pruden’s Purple tomato. We learned that God is great, and depending on where you encounter God, can be delicious. Most of all, we learned that the dynamic power of life, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, that the majesty of God is revealed most convincingly in the indomitable, the inevitable pulse of life.  The pulse in your wrist, the pulse of sap up into the maple canopy, the pulse of that turkey whose life is be taken that others may live, other bodies being nourished by its body, the pulse of rain seeping into the ground, the pulse of the cucumbers growing up the trellis, the sunflowers bending to seek the sun, corn reaching into the sky.  The inevitability of being alive.  This is the lesson we need to remember, this is the essence of the gospel: life is a precious gift; be grateful and do what increases life.

Our victory comes in living the lives we have been given to live, and living them fully, electrically, even.  We do that by discerning the will of God and following it; discerning our own special place and purpose in life, and following that.  Our victory, our inevitable victory in the face of our equally inevitable death is living and loving, feasting and fasting, seeking, always seeking the spread of life and the life giving.  Eat real food.  Make good friends and beautiful things.  Laugh from the belly and cry from the gut.  Love recklessly, forgive with abandon, try to leave the world a better place than it was before you came here and go gentle into the good night.  Now that is the perfect victory of complete aliveness if there ever was one.  AMEN

Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C

April 28, 2013, 5th Sunday of Easter, Year C

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

          “See, the home of God is among mortals.”

          I can be accused of a lot of things: being overly optimistic about the state of the world, the human condition and our temporal future is something I am not guilty of.  I am completely optimistic, I am filled with deep and abiding faith that eschatologically, in the most fundamental way, it is going to be OK, that what will be will be and we have nothing to fear, or at least nothing to worry about… I take Jesus Christ’s words of assurance to heart, but between here and there… it often looks bleak to me and like it is our fault.

          I am not exactly sure why I focus on the darker nature of our beings.  Growing up, my family always loved a good tragedy story.  It was not simple schadenfreude, but sort of like Woody Allen’s hypochondria, always, always talking about our aches and pains and ailments, about who messed up and how, and how terrible x, y, and z was, is or will be. I grew up terrified of being a Pollyanna, glossing over the discomfort, blowing sunshine before the darkness has been accounted for.  I took on the ethic of the popular media, bad news is hard news; good news is fluff.  Or at least, we can’t be praising ourselves for the good with so much horror afoot.

          And there is horror afoot, goodness gracious, but what I forget sometimes, too often, is that that is only part of the story. Grace and love are also afoot, and in legions. Maybe it is just the weather.  Maybe it is just that it is spring and life is reemerging.  The volume of life happening drowns out even the events of last week.  We’ve been camping out the past few nights, and on Thursday we heard a cow calving out in the distance.  Calves are just bouncing all over the ranch where we live.  And Violet, Hazelnut, Daisy and Clover, the kids born to our two does these past three weeks…  We were all there for two of the births.  Miraculous.  And now we have baby goats gamboling about.  Lilacs are in bloom, the Azaleas are at their height, the rhododendrons are about go.  The hay is up, the Pink Moon has just passed and May Day, with ancient roots and modern strains of the joy of human labor bred into it is upon us.  Life, taken at this level, is good.  Very good.  

          Within the human economy, I have to admit, things aren’t all bad, either.  At a lecture recently, I was introduced to the feminist economist Hazel Henderson.  There is a lot to her work, but in a week where the calculation of GDP will change, one of her economic principles stands out:  the love economy.  Imagine the economy as a cake, a layer cake.  The icing on the top is profit.  The next layer, is where all economic transactions in the private sector: for profit and not-for-profit, anywhere money or goods change hands and is accounted for.  The next layer is for all transactions in the public sector, governments in all their glory.  There is a small layer of the “underground” economy, places where money changes hands but is unaccounted for. Those categories are the things we generally accept as our economy; that is what counts, right?  And what counts?  Quid pro quo transactions only.  But the next two layers down, the biggest layers, the foundation of the whole cake, those aren’t accounted for at all.  First is the love economy, then at the base, Mother Nature.  Mother Nature, the natural economy is the rain that waters a crop reducing the need for irrigation.  The natural economy is the latent fertility of soil, the presence of oil or coal or old growth forest (non-renewables).  It is the sun that makes photosynthesis happen.  It is the wind that pollinates the corn and the wheat.  It is the basis of our lives and we don’t account for that.  (Nor do we account for where all of the wastes go, the greenhouse gasses and such, externalized costs, but that is for a more dire kind of sermon).  And the love economy?  Raising children.  (Not daycare, that is in the top layers, raising them yourselves).  Cooking.  Cleaning, doing laundry, mowing lawns, volunteering at church or the relief nursery, being kind to someone…  none of this is considered productive or even valuable by the powers that be, but it is valuable. Pearls of great price.  The greatest, actually.  We have and we will go a lot further on the love and natural economies; these are God’s economies.  No matter how perverse and unjust the recognized economies become, we can always do without them, it is the love, the natural economies that deserve and have our true loyalty. That is good news.

          It is all about how we look at things.  Eric and Fay are friends of ours, and they, along with Alex and a few others, are responsible for the Conestoga huts that we have here, and Alex is really behind the bungalow.  Actually affordable housing.  New forms of community in a time of transition.  I admire them so much.  They look out to the world, see catastrophe looming, or happening, collapsing ecosystems, human and otherwise… but rather than throw up their arms, retreat to the woods or rebel, these good people have thought about what is needed, what transitions we need in the patterns of our lives, and they started working on it.  Community Supported Shelters.  They started working on designs, on infrastructure, on production processes, all on faith. And what happened, the recession.  Collapse of the housing markets.  Occupy.  Opportunity Village, the encampment we are working on down on Garfield and 1^st.  And they were there, ready, waiting for the rest of us to realize the need they have found a solution for.  That is some eschatological hope happening in real time, and now 11 or 12 people across the city live in these structures, built, bought and sited in faith and with kindness.  40 more will move into their structures this summer at the village.  That is a new heaven and a new earth.

          And then I see this place; the little slice of the ecclesia, the beloved community here at Resurrection.  So much happens here, like the layercake economy.  There are the measurables: money raised, bills paid, (and opened and accounted for and mailed and the rest of it), building cared for, songs sung, policies created and enacted, social services rendered, Mass celebrated.  All the visibles are done here, and well and the vast majority of it done by members of the church for members of the church and beyond.  Awesome.  For as flaky a manager as I can be this is a pretty tight ship and it is you all.  Your love for this place, each other, taking the Word of God earnestly… it all comes together here, and beautifully.

          And there is plenty more to do.  We have some things brewing with children and youth formation and the nursery that is going to take this whole community to do.  People have been stepping up, and more will be asked.  Same goes for the Saturday High Mass.  Also, we are identifying some areas of the church that need maintenance, and pressingly as well as continuing work on an addition to the building and the attendant capital campaign happening next year, maybe.  Our finances are in very good shape, but we are in need of a treasurer to help our treasury team keep it that way.  Nick and I have been asking around and would love for someone to step up.  We’ve done a lot together in this time of transition, and there is a lot more to do, too.

          And that doesn’t account for the invisible blessings of the beloved community.  The holding each other in thought and prayer when all is not hunky-dory.  We don’t even need a note or a phone call (though that helps), just knowing that we have a place here, a place in the hearts and minds of others that we may have nothing on the surface in common with other than finding ourselves worshipping God together, serving the world together.  The invisible blessings of radical hospitality, welcoming new people into this fold, making room for elders and infants, rich and poor, agreeable and disagreeable folks.  The easy and the difficult.  That is what this, what church, what the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is about.

          We do need to resist evil. Unto death even, even death on a cross, but that is not the whole story.  More than resisting evil we have goodness to live into.  “…God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”  Jesus Christ reveals that God is for all of us: that is more of the story.  Laudate Dominum.  That is the name of psalm 148.  “Praise the Lord.” That’s more of the story.  “See, the home of God is among mortals.  He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes.”  That is more of the story, too.  “I have given you a new commandment, that you love one another.”  That kind of rounds it out, doesn’t it?  There is more Good News than bad, more goodness than evil.  More reasons to smile than to cry, and our place here in the church of Jesus Christ is to give voice to the range of it.  Laudate Dominum.  Sing praise and Bless the Lord.  Hallelujah!  AMEN.

April 21, 2013, Fourth Sunday of Easter

Year C, Easter 4

April 21, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          Let’s all turn to page 476 of your BCP.  We’ll read the 23^rd Psalm, the one on the bottom of the page.  “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.”

          It has been quite a week in Boston, my home town.  The five deaths and 180ish wounded and who knows how many traumatized.  Terrible. I’ve been more shaken up by all of it that I would have expected. It is close to home. We lived in Cambridge for years and Windy worked in Watertown for a year and a half. The ten year old niece of Windy’s best friend was at there on Bolyston Street, and another close family friend was on the bleachers right there at the finish line.  They are OK in body, at least.  Time will tell for the rest of them.     

  

          There is a violent attack at a great athletic event, then more or less martial law was declared in Boston, one of the great “free” cities of the world, the cradle of the rebellion celebrated on Patriots Day.  It was shut down by paramilitary police forces.  The People’s Republic of Cambridge and the surrounding towns out to the tony suburb of Newton, shut down.  What is the world coming too?

          And the explosion of an anhydrous ammonia plant in Texas?  Anhydrous ammonia is horrible stuff. Much of the erosion of the topsoil across the mid-west of this country is due to too much anhydrous ammonia.  It is the ubiquitous fertilizer in industrial agriculture and it kills soil.  It kills every living thing it touches until it mellows out and then grows corn and soy beans quite nicely, for a while at least.  And producing it is dangerous, too, particularly in a state with such lax industrial safety regulation as Texas.  Sixty, eighty dead?

          And then the Senate disgraced itself, again, in failing to do anything about gun control.  How can that be?  In the face of Newtown and over 90% of people polled in a few national polls agree that some increased regulation is needed, and nothing happens.  88 people per day die as a result of gun violence.  We get a background check to open a bank account, we need ID to get a job, to drive, but not to buy a gun?  What is our world coming to?

          It is moments like this, convergences of bad news, of what some take to be further signs of the end times nearing, of incidents, patterns, trends that fill me with righteous rage, it is moments just like this that I am most grateful for my faith, that I am most grateful for the Gospel, that I am most grateful for the Living God, for Jesus Christ residing in my heart.  I am grateful because once again I am remembering that Jesus Christ saves, because I, like so many, can be filled with rage, and rage, righteous or not, does not save. That is a gentle lesson that the horror of this week is teaching me.

          Those young men from Cambridge, 26 and 19, nothing will convince me that they were, are bad or evil, they are probably not even pathological.  Misguided to epic proportions; very possible.  Heart-breakingly near-sighted or naïve or selfish; probably.  Contorted and distorted by a consuming hatred; that is nearly certain.  What anyone in the military, law enforcement, medicine, social work, teaching, ministry, anyone who comes in contact with suffering, which is all of us, we all know first hand that perfectly good people, perfectly fine, loving, upstanding people do horrible, stupid, misguided things.  That is just obvious.  A whole generation of Germans coming of age in the late 30s and early 40s were not evil.  That is too convenient.  Nice boys were at Mei Lia, and good kids drove the tanks into Tiananmen and worked at Abu Ghraib and continue to work at Guantanamo and in Barshar al-Assad’s army and in the IDF and in the al-Aqsa Brigades and at Monsanto and Smith & Wesson.  Good people do these things, but good people blinded by hatred in some form.

          The making of anhydrous ammonia is a hateful undertaking.  Its use empties the soil of anything that is not directly useful to industrialized human beings, and then only for the short term.  Anhydrous ammonia is incredibly dangerous when it comes in contact with moisture.  It heats uncontrollably when water is introduced to it, like if it gets in your eyes or on skin, or when injected into soil, which inherently has moisture in it.  To inject a poison such as this into our soil birthright… the only explanation I can come up with that isn’t totally unforgiving is that this is a hateful level of ignorance.

          And guns in our politics?  I can’t even begin to wrap my head around that one in any way that makes sense besides greed.  Our “leaders” are so greedy for their station in life, they so want to maintain their own power that they disregard the will of most Americans and defy any measure of common sense in order to be acceptable to a tiny special interest, primarily the manufacturers and dealers of weapons, of firearms.  Putting our own needs above the needs of others, above the common good, above what is right, those are the loci of greed, and greed is nothing but disregard of the other in favor of the self, and that is hateful by any definition.

          As I wrote these words I kept flipping back to the news in Watertown and looking at photos of West, Texas and reading the names of the Senators that failed us, and my temperature rose.  I was angry.  The news casters gloating over the dead older brother and the wounded younger one and all the waving flags; the utter absence of questions about industrial agriculture and its dangerous sides; the smugness of NRA agents and proxies, urrgh.  Because obviously I know better than those people, those vengeful, mindless, greedy people.  (I added a few choice adjectives in the privacy of my own home).  If they just listened to me, or to people who think and act like me, probably look kind of like me, if it went the way I wanted it to go it would all be better; how could it not be…

          And then, I remember the words of the 23^rd psalm.  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me.”  And what does that look like? What does God’s presence in the shadow of death look like?  A table prepared for you.  Your head anointed with oil, an ancient sign of welcome and hospitality.  The abundance of a cup running over, now there is a vision of security.  Sure, there is a rod and a staff, but for the shepard the rod and staff are tools, not primarily weapons, certainly not offensive weapons.  God being with us, the psalmist assures us, is goodness and mercy following us all the days of our lives.  When everything thing is as it should be, we are dwelling in the house of the Lord for ever.  It is pretty simple in the end.

          And then I think of the words of Cardinal Sean O’Malley, Archbishop of Boston (not someone I often quote).  At the prayer vigil on Wednesday, he spoke on the Sermon on the Mount, saying, “The Sermon on the Mount, in many ways, is the Constitution of the people called to live a new life. Jesus gives us a new way to deal with offenses, by reconciliation. Jesus gives us a new way to deal with violence, by nonviolence. He gives us a new way to deal with money, by sharing and providing for those in need. Jesus gives us a new way to deal with leadership, by drawing upon the gift of every person, each one a child of God.”

          Our world is complicated, and I fear getting more so.  More complicated and less stable, more precarious and less sure.  But Jesus Christ remains.  And so long as our faith remains, Jesus Christ will remain, remain as a reminder that love is the strongest medicine available, and always will be.  Jesus Christ will remain as a sign that generosity is a reasonable, a holy expectation of ourselves and others.  Jesus Christ will remain as a fact that the old leaven of malice and evil are no match for the new powers of sincerity and truth.  Jesus Christ alive in our hearts and minds and bodies will not lead us to victory, but to humility, not to domination, but to cooperation, not to invincibility, but to resilience.  In times like these, Jesus Christ leads us to be angry and gentle, assured and humble, resolute and flexible.  In the days and weeks and years to come, may we always remember this and all will be well, all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.  AMEN.

         

April 14, 2013, 3rd Sunday of Easter, Year C

Year C, Easter 3

April 14, 21013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

            The road to Damascus.  It is one of those arch-typical stories of Christian faith, a core model of how God can reach out and grab us from the midst of our small, muddled, inward facing lives, even our grandly sinful, oppressive lives like Saul’s.  It is a story of how God can just grab us and show us beyond the shadow of a doubt that and how we have been called to serve God and neighbor. It is a definitive story.  It is a definitive story of conversion.

            That is a sticky word, conversion.  It conjures in my mind missionary armies forcing the Baptism of conquered nations at the edge of a sword.  Of Jews tortured into apostasy by the Inquisitions.  I think of Barbara Kingsolver’s beautiful book The Poisonwood Bible about missionaries in the then Belgian Congo.  Horrid chapters, volumes even in our religious history, history that must be remembered.  But that is only part of the story of conversions.

            Saul, not Paul, Saul’s conversion is that other side of the story.  Here is this man, a fervent, violent Pharisee bent on cleansing his beloved community of a heterodox element, the followers of “the Way.”  (The term Christian does not come up for two more chapters in Acts).  But there he is, traveling to Damascus to suppress, to haul in chains back to Jerusalem, these religious dissenters.  He was ultra focused on one thing, one pretty bad thing, and bang… something happened. And through this, hearing the voice of Jesus Christ, of God, his being struck blind, his being reached out to by the very people he was sent to persecute, Saul became Paul, his sight was restored and he began to testify, “He is the Son of God.”  Saul was converted and Paul came to be.

            This story is a model, if not the model of how God can grab us and show us that there are another ways.  Other ways to live, better ways to treat those we share the gift of life with, better ways to be in relationship with God and neighbor and everything, better ways to love.  It is an iconic story displaying the power of a loving God to convert an evil doer into a founder of the Church. As Flannery O’Connor once said, “I reckon the Lord knew that the only way to make a Christian out of that one was to knock him off his horse.” And yes, people have a lot of issues with Paul, he was a product of his age, but by any standard he was a remarkable individual, one of the greatest organizers who has ever lived, and a leader whose vision still matters.  Paul, St. Paul is the product par excellence of conversion.

            But it is complicated, this model of conversion.  It is so dramatic, such a spectacle.  And if there is one thing I learned in my formation it is to not expect spectacle.  That said, many of you have heard a bit about my own epiphany, my own conversion experience in the midst of a bicycle journey in Europe.  One Easter morning it became terribly clear that I was being called into ministry.  It was not a spectacle, but it was dramatic, as is generally my nature. But that moment, that epiphanal moment in that little English church when things became more clear, it was just that: a moment, a moment of conversion.  The movement of conversion, the larger, more important process was affected over the next five years, and certainly it continues today.

For a variety of reasons, primarily an overly liberal religious formation as a youth and some terrible encounters with Christian fundamentalists in the Marine Corps, Christianity did not seem particularly open to me as a place to realize my revealed vocation to ministry.  However, I knew Unitarians, and that became a direct and welcoming path of least resistance for which I am deeply grateful.  And it was from there, from the posture of being a Unitarian divinity school student that my conversion began in earnest.  

I could tell you a long story of how each semester, how each encounter with systematic theology, how each word, words like sin, salvation, resurrection went from being opaque, suspicious or even offensive to “oh, that’s what that means?  OK, I get it.” I could tell you how it took years of nimble vocabulary gymnastics, substituting words I could grok for words I could not or would not use, and I still do that sometimes.  Parts of the Creed confuse me.  That’s OK.  Large chunks of the Bible put me off.  That’s OK, too.  It is supposed to put us off as it is supposed to challenge us, comfort us, confuse us and save us: scripture is all of that and more.  I could share all the details of how I did it, my intellectual process, but that is not important.  What is important is that enough of the pieces did fall in place, much like a game of Tetris, all interlocking, filling in gaps, completing the picture, where a discernible religious landscape emerged that I could lean into, rest into, seek refuge within and find strength to carry a new found faith into the world.  That it happened is important, but that it keeps happening, that I am continuously converted into a follower, a better follower of Jesus Christ, that is much more important.  Every Mass, every Morning Prayer, every time is sit down to pray the prayer list on the back of the announcements, or write a sermon, or take a confession, every time I lean into God in prayer there is an opportunity for conversion.  That is the conversion that I am talking about.  Not a spectacle.  Not a grand epiphany, but the day in, day out revelation of the life of God.  It is like Jack Kornfield’s great book, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.  

Now how does that happen?  How are we converted?  How do we go from being knocked off our horse, blinded by the light of God to living our life in a different way? Or from a confusing morning in southern England to a vocation? How do we go from being back in church for the first time in years, and for reasons you might not understand or appreciate, how do we go from that to being the person of faith that you will become? How do you begin paying attention to what you hear here, or what you sense coming from God in a new, deeper, more fundamental way; or how do you go from living your life how you have always lived it to realizing that there are different ways of living, ways more in line with what you know to be true, what you have faith that is true?  The root question in each of these cases is this:  how do you affect your own conversion into the person of God that you truly are?  Or as Thomas Merton puts it, “But Oh! How far have I to go to find You in Whom I have already arrived!”  Well, here’s a hint… you are doing it in this very moment.

As a pretty rapidly disgruntled Unitarian, getting my mind full of all sorts of academic/theological understandings of Christianity, my true conversion did not happen in the lecture hall or the library (as Hogwarty as Harvard’s libraries can be).  It happened here.  Right here, at this table, in the eternal and actual presence of God.  Every Friday morning from that first semester on, I gathered with other students, staff and faculty around an altar presided over by an Anglican priest and we prayed our way through the sacrament of Eucharist week after week, month after month.  It was very simple, a half hour Mass each Friday morning.  To my mind, it was the best thing going at that school.  And after three and a half years of it I realized that I was not supposed to be a Unitarian pastor.  I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to be exactly, but I was certain that I was Christian.

It did not happen on a certain day.  I don’t remember a shining moment, but weekly devotion around a table steeped in thousands of years of tradition, with words a thousand years older than the church, with others seeking, seeking, leaning into God in hopes of understanding how and why we are to live and love…  that is the conversion that we offer here in this place.  It is a conversion with a proximity fuse.  If you come close, if you open yourself to it, you don’t even have to say yes, you just have to stop saying no, if you just simply show up…  something is going to happen.  We don’t promise the road to Damascus, I don’t promise a spectacle, but joining us here, no matter where you are on your journey into God in Christ, it is going to be good.  AMEN.