December 20, 2009
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Fourth Sunday in Advent, Year B
Micah 5:2-5a, Canticle 15, Hebrews 10:5-10, Luke 1:39-55
God is a marginal character.
God likes to operate on the margins, on the edges.
God operates on the margins because it is where we are able to be most aware of God’s presence. As conscious beings we are mostly caught up in the center of our world or the world created by human beings.
The margins are places of change, of transition, of transformation. Prayer is a marginal place; we pray far less of the time than we work or sleep or eat or play. Worship is a marginal place. We worship far less than we work or sleep or eat or play. Dawn, dusk, oceans, mountains, rivers, islands, and deserts are all marginal places deeply associated with union and encounter with the divine. Transitions such as birth, and death are marginal moments. Margins are places of openness and connection. Margins are places where human power, pride and delusions of self-sufficiency are exposed as the folly and hubris they are. Margins are places where redemption happens, deeper awareness begins, and the kingdom of God can begin to be born into the world.
Social margins, I would suggest, follow the same pattern. It is those on the fringes-- the poor, the outcast, those without social power due to gender or race or other quantifiers—that so often have the most illumination to bring to social ills and injustice, to the dangers of human power. Those without worldly power are uniquely able to be divine catalysts. Being in positions of worldly power or ones benefiting from it make it hard to stand back and work to challenge and change it. Yet many do for they have grasped this essential tenet of the Good News. This is the one of the deep and difficult revelations of the Gospel; it is one of the deep and difficult understandings of orthodox Christianity as revealed in the story of God in Jesus: letting go of power, living a life of love on the margins, trusting that on the edges is where God is going to begin again and again the coming of the kingdom of heaven.
Where does this idea come from? The cross most certainly and the life of Jesus most definitely. But the idea is understood from the very start of the story of Jesus. The stories of the births of Jesus and John came later in the life of the early Church, yet the idea of margins and power revealed in the resurrection was woven into these genesis tales. Unless we grasp this from the very start, Christian faith as lived easily becomes another version of worldly power being divinely sanctioned. It easily becomes a civic religion rather than a holy one.
Enter Elizabeth and Mary. I must confess that these stories make my woman’s heart joyful. Sorry, gents, but your off-stage in this one! For nearly the entire first chapter of Luke the main characters are women. In fact, for most of the chapter they are the main actors, the main speakers. Zechariah is struck dumb by God’s angel for not believing that Elizabeth will conceive. God dramatically silences the social voice of power—that of the male—in pretty stunning fashion. Zechariah comes out of the temple not sharing his vision, but unable to speak. We must look elsewhere for where God is going to tell us what the divine plan is. In time Elizabeth indeed becomes pregnant with a child that will be a prophet for the people.
Then the action moves to Mary. The angel tells her she will conceive a child by the power of God before her marriage and that he is to be a savior. In this incredible place on the edge of human experience she says yes to God’s outrageous plan. Unlike Zechariah, Joseph’s opinion is not even sought. The whole story of God’s plan for salvation in Jesus happens in the margins, starting at his very conception.
Women are the ones, in Luke, who are entrusted through their very femaleness to nurture and bear God and the witness to God into the world. Women too are images of the divine and seen by God as part of the divine drama in primary, not subservient, ways. God is being a radical again! Women were property strictly speaking in those days. Women had virtually no independent power or control of person. They were not public figures. They lived in the margins of a world defined by men. Elizabeth, as the wife of a temple priest, was less marginalized than others, but she was still defined as Zechariah’s wife. Mary was even more the edge: a woman, marrying a craftsman, poorer, and not connected to an institution of social power through her husband-to-be or family. Yet, God says, here is where I am working. Here is where my plan, my salvation begins and lives. In the margins, in these faithful women who can perceive me because they are not living at the center of worldly power. It is not a man in this story that can birth the savior into the world. It is a woman. Pay attention!, God is saying. Do not dismiss the creative, life-giving, God-revealing strength of women and who they are! Revisit the definitions and roles. Not just of women, but of everyone!
These two women are not just faithful, trusting and courageous women who believe and accept God’s audacious plan for them, standing tall among people’s stares and questions and derision. They are filled with the Holy Spirit. They are chosen to have intimate union with God, something primarily heard of in Scripture as happening to men. Mary is overcome with the Holy Spirit. Elizabeth as we hear today is filled with it as is her unborn child.
They are also prophets. Elizabeth understands that her child’s leap isn’t simply a baby’s normal movement or a response to her happy greeting to see her cousin Mary. She interprets its meaning and understands that Mary carries the Messiah. This is what prophets do. She is also a priest for she blesses three times: “Of all women you are the most blessed, and blessed is the fruit of your womb…Yes, blessed is she who believed that the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled.”
Mary, too, is a prophet. She sets out immediately after her encounter with the angel and goes as fast as she can to see Elizabeth. Prophets act with urgency, without delay. Her reply to Elizabeth is a prophetic poem about the way God works, has worked, and will work in the world.
The Magnificat, as it is called, is a glorious summation of salvation history. It speaks that God’s power is not the world’s idea of power. Princes and presidents are brought low and the masses, the humble of the world have a place given to them. The hungry are fed; the proud are unmasked. Mercy is given. All are invited into a new heaven and a new earth and if the invitation is missed you will find your hands holding dust. It is utterly and completely about life here and now in this world. It is about the nature of our communities. This is not only about personal, private piety. This about the dangerous work of building new structures in our lives.
And even more striking is Mary’s bold assertion that this work has already begun. For indeed it has in God’s partnership with her to bear the Christ child. Notice that the verb tenses are not future. It is not God will show strength, or the hungry will be filled. It is already begun. God has done these things and continues to do these things. Which throws us once again back on to the margins. Women are the principal prophets of this new revelation, not men, though their sons, with the participation of women and men, will bring it to pass. God chose a poor unmarried girl not the wife of the local Jerusalem nobility. Herod’s wife, powerful, a princess, was not selected to bear John or Jesus. Mary and Elizabeth have been filled with good things—the Holy Spirit, the children they will bear, the power to bless and to understand God’s activity. All on the margins, all on the fringes. This is where it begins and from where it grows.
For us, we are invited to remember the marginal nature of our confession of Jesus as the Messiah—it’s not a confession of power and way of life as the world generally understands it. We are reminded that we are to live in faith on the edges of the new creation and the margins of this one. We are invited to pay careful attention to the voices and the peoples on the margins of our societies for we are told today quite clearly God is acting here. If we are on the margins we are told that our lives and experiences are places of prophetic action, that we have important, God-filled things to share with the world. The voices of those on the margins matter profoundly to God and are to be heard. We are invited to pay attention to the margins of our own lives for it is there we will certainly encounter God’s activity. The margins are the places where hope and expectation begin to be transformed into something real, perhaps small, perhaps fragile, perhaps the tiniest of movements, but this is how God works.
Can we this Advent say yes again to be a marginal people, who believe the outrageous way God works, who chose to sing Mary’s song, and who accept once again a God that comes to us in the most vulnerable, powerless and beautiful of ways? Will something in us leap when the announcement of the birth happens? Will we believe that in this child and this child’s life lie all the hope that God’s promises will be fulfilled?
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
December 13, 2009, Third Sunday in Advent
December 13, 2009
The Rev. Natasha Garrison Brubaker
Zephaniah 3:14-20, Canticle 9, Philippians 4:4-7, Luke 3:7-18
Third Sunday of Advent, Year B
One of the strongest temptations for those of us who have identified ourselves as Christians for a while or come from a culture or family that considers itself Christian is to believe that we have it mostly together. The temptation is to hear a hard and provocative voice like John’s and think deep down, he’s talking to somebody else. We would already be one of his disciples, not part of that crowd that seems to be gathering around him now that he is becoming popular, that seems to be jumping on the bandwagon of what was at first dismissed. It’s almost as if John had become trendy!
To be honest, John intimidates me. I’m not sure how I would have reacted to him. I know that the Johnes I meet in my life today unnerve me and my first reaction is often to defend myself. I can slip into that false sense of security or self-righteousness that says, but I’m a Christian, I’m a decent person, or as we hear in the story, I’m a child of Abraham. John is hard; he is asking a lot. He is asking us to do soul-searching about what we really are living for. It can feel very negative, this passage. But I think actually it is quite hope-filled. And here is why: I think it and the passage from Zephaniah are about homecoming and coming home.
The word repent comes from a root that means turn around, come back to where you are supposed to be and to whom you are meant to be. It means to tell us that we’ve gotten off track somehow. We’ve gone off on our own way, often dragging our God-talk with us, and have gotten in a mess. The Bible, as it usually is, is speaking in both communal and personal terms. What we do as persons shapes our society and the society we have shapes the persons that are raised within it.
John points out the communal by responding to three groups of people who are power-brokers within the society: the crowd that tends to follow what is the norm of the powers that be, tax collectors and soldiers. Without digressing into a detailed discussion, suffice it to say that these last two in particular were in positions to abuse their power and they did. This is what John is countering. It’s not hard to find contemporary corollaries: the abuse of markets and financial power by firms on Wall Street, banks and others in pursuit of that highly-valued dream of wealth; paramilitaries or occupying soldiers who intimidate populations and who all too often kill or abuse the innocent. John points out the collective problem that needs to be turned away from, but he really gets to the heart of the matter by saying that it is the work of each person. Without our individual change of heart, society will not be able to take another course. It is always about both our selves and our participation in the larger community. And this change of heart is about coming home to God.
Coming home to God is the hope. It is where we can come with all our mistakes and scars and selfishness and hurts and say here it is God; I know it isn’t pretty, but you love me anyway and can use me for your will and to be a bearer of good fruit, your fruit, in this world. God promises in Zephaniah that he will bring us home, that he will gather us together. We will be restored to wholeness. But we must turn towards it or we will continue to miss it. How we respond, for instance, at Copenhagen or not is a very vivid example among many of this call to turn…and our ability to miss it. The turning makes possible the fruit; it isn’t having so many bushels of apples to give to God or so many flats of blueberries that gives us the seal of repentance. Repentance, which is the turning and that coming home to God, happens when we open ourselves to God and the fruits are the next manifestation. It’s not about earning, it’s about turning and trusting the fruits will be there in our hearts and lives. Often that’s the hardest part—trusting, trusting that if we turn or do the hard inner work we will indeed come home to God, to a place of wholeness.
When I was in Seattle I found myself in a dead-end job at a non-profit. I was frustrated because I wanted and could do more, but also was scared to leave since the job had benefits and I’d only been there for about a year. I didn’t want another employer to think I was flaky. Out of the blue I got a call from a company I had come into contact with before in a previous position. While working at a fishing company I had worked with them to arrange bunkering of our vessels while out at sea with fuel. They had an opening, remembered me and my Russian language skills, and offered me a job. At first it seemed like a godsend. The pay was much better and the work was much more challenging. The downside was it was more of a sales position, which didn’t thrill me. But I talked myself into it for ego reasons, for the lure of more financial security (including the most pious rationale of saving money for seminary!), for experience that would make me more marketable, etc.
I started work, and it just felt wrong. I found myself for all the “right” reasons working in a situation that was drawing me away from myself and from what I hoped for the world. I knew how fishing was done in the Russian Far East. I knew that quotas were being ignored, that overfishing was happening at an alarming rate, that the desire for as much profit as possible by large companies, the habit we have of expecting things such as cod to be available all the time and for an affordable price, and desperation for income by fisherman on the edge were all contributing to it. I saw a future that would mean no fish within a few years and all the despair that would come along, but a system that couldn’t adjust. I saw co-workers who were so lured by the idea of bonuses that they never saw their families. All that mattered was the money. I literally started to feel like I was losing my mind. It got so bad that I couldn’t even speak Russian, a language I was quite proficient in at the time. I was getting lost. No one would question my decision to stay for it was a good job, with very good people, at heart providing a necessary service, but something was just off kilter. I realized that I could not stay there and stay sane, stay true to who I was and the hope I had for a world where we could fish and at the same time sustain the seas for the future.
Terrified, I left the job with $3,000 to my name and no employment lined up. Yet as scary as that new situation was, it was different. I had come home to myself. I had listened and trusted that God was inviting me to something else that I wouldn’t find there. I had to make the turn not knowing the future, but believing that it would bring light to my soul and drive out that darkness that was crowding in. John came to me as a voice of breaking apart in the night. John came as nightmares. It was like being in the firestorm though whether of the Holy Spirit or burning chaff I couldn't tell. And John finally came as the courage through the encouragement of a friend to say I will not stay and it will be okay.
This is one story in my life of repenting and being brought home. It deepened my trust in God and in Jesus. It confirmed some of the core ideas of Christianity for me and how I believe we are to live with each other, even if at times following that is costly or out of step with the rhythm of the world around us. I touched again that light of Christ within that could give me a deep peace and sense of God’s presence even in the midst of all the struggle and anxiety. I came home to God that was residing within me, inviting me to a new place of peace and hope and possibility to bear fruits of compassion and justice and service.
For us, the ultimate gathering is being gathered into the Body of Christ. We await his coming again into the world so that we can renew our experience of that coming home, of us coming home to God and God coming home to us. This two-step dance is the pulse of the universe and of the divine. It is there, beckoning us, if we stop and turn and say yes. It is the dance of a lifetime. We always have further to dance, more steps to learn, more joy and light to discover. We are promised that our trust is exactly what opens the door for God to come in. We are asked to trust so that we can be prepared for God to come home and find a welcome, a ripe field full of wheat ready to be shared.
We don’t have to have it all figured out, (who among us does?), or be perfect. We come and turn where we are so that we can begin to go towards where we want to be: ever more true imitators of Jesus in this world as a community, this part of the Church universal, and as persons. God will come; God is coming. Jesus is waiting once again to break into the world with the Good News of the Gospel. It is a never-ending story of hope and love and turning, and we are wanted for this dance. The light that enlightens all people is coming into the world; that is the promise of Advent, the turn God in Jesus is making towards us.
In this season of preparation and turning I think of a priest I knew in New York City. Every Sunday before celebrating communion he would pray that when we received Christ that day he would find our hearts to be a dwelling place prepared for him. I can think of no better prayer and no better hope for us this Advent season. Amen.
The Rev. Natasha Garrison Brubaker
Zephaniah 3:14-20, Canticle 9, Philippians 4:4-7, Luke 3:7-18
Third Sunday of Advent, Year B
One of the strongest temptations for those of us who have identified ourselves as Christians for a while or come from a culture or family that considers itself Christian is to believe that we have it mostly together. The temptation is to hear a hard and provocative voice like John’s and think deep down, he’s talking to somebody else. We would already be one of his disciples, not part of that crowd that seems to be gathering around him now that he is becoming popular, that seems to be jumping on the bandwagon of what was at first dismissed. It’s almost as if John had become trendy!
To be honest, John intimidates me. I’m not sure how I would have reacted to him. I know that the Johnes I meet in my life today unnerve me and my first reaction is often to defend myself. I can slip into that false sense of security or self-righteousness that says, but I’m a Christian, I’m a decent person, or as we hear in the story, I’m a child of Abraham. John is hard; he is asking a lot. He is asking us to do soul-searching about what we really are living for. It can feel very negative, this passage. But I think actually it is quite hope-filled. And here is why: I think it and the passage from Zephaniah are about homecoming and coming home.
The word repent comes from a root that means turn around, come back to where you are supposed to be and to whom you are meant to be. It means to tell us that we’ve gotten off track somehow. We’ve gone off on our own way, often dragging our God-talk with us, and have gotten in a mess. The Bible, as it usually is, is speaking in both communal and personal terms. What we do as persons shapes our society and the society we have shapes the persons that are raised within it.
John points out the communal by responding to three groups of people who are power-brokers within the society: the crowd that tends to follow what is the norm of the powers that be, tax collectors and soldiers. Without digressing into a detailed discussion, suffice it to say that these last two in particular were in positions to abuse their power and they did. This is what John is countering. It’s not hard to find contemporary corollaries: the abuse of markets and financial power by firms on Wall Street, banks and others in pursuit of that highly-valued dream of wealth; paramilitaries or occupying soldiers who intimidate populations and who all too often kill or abuse the innocent. John points out the collective problem that needs to be turned away from, but he really gets to the heart of the matter by saying that it is the work of each person. Without our individual change of heart, society will not be able to take another course. It is always about both our selves and our participation in the larger community. And this change of heart is about coming home to God.
Coming home to God is the hope. It is where we can come with all our mistakes and scars and selfishness and hurts and say here it is God; I know it isn’t pretty, but you love me anyway and can use me for your will and to be a bearer of good fruit, your fruit, in this world. God promises in Zephaniah that he will bring us home, that he will gather us together. We will be restored to wholeness. But we must turn towards it or we will continue to miss it. How we respond, for instance, at Copenhagen or not is a very vivid example among many of this call to turn…and our ability to miss it. The turning makes possible the fruit; it isn’t having so many bushels of apples to give to God or so many flats of blueberries that gives us the seal of repentance. Repentance, which is the turning and that coming home to God, happens when we open ourselves to God and the fruits are the next manifestation. It’s not about earning, it’s about turning and trusting the fruits will be there in our hearts and lives. Often that’s the hardest part—trusting, trusting that if we turn or do the hard inner work we will indeed come home to God, to a place of wholeness.
When I was in Seattle I found myself in a dead-end job at a non-profit. I was frustrated because I wanted and could do more, but also was scared to leave since the job had benefits and I’d only been there for about a year. I didn’t want another employer to think I was flaky. Out of the blue I got a call from a company I had come into contact with before in a previous position. While working at a fishing company I had worked with them to arrange bunkering of our vessels while out at sea with fuel. They had an opening, remembered me and my Russian language skills, and offered me a job. At first it seemed like a godsend. The pay was much better and the work was much more challenging. The downside was it was more of a sales position, which didn’t thrill me. But I talked myself into it for ego reasons, for the lure of more financial security (including the most pious rationale of saving money for seminary!), for experience that would make me more marketable, etc.
I started work, and it just felt wrong. I found myself for all the “right” reasons working in a situation that was drawing me away from myself and from what I hoped for the world. I knew how fishing was done in the Russian Far East. I knew that quotas were being ignored, that overfishing was happening at an alarming rate, that the desire for as much profit as possible by large companies, the habit we have of expecting things such as cod to be available all the time and for an affordable price, and desperation for income by fisherman on the edge were all contributing to it. I saw a future that would mean no fish within a few years and all the despair that would come along, but a system that couldn’t adjust. I saw co-workers who were so lured by the idea of bonuses that they never saw their families. All that mattered was the money. I literally started to feel like I was losing my mind. It got so bad that I couldn’t even speak Russian, a language I was quite proficient in at the time. I was getting lost. No one would question my decision to stay for it was a good job, with very good people, at heart providing a necessary service, but something was just off kilter. I realized that I could not stay there and stay sane, stay true to who I was and the hope I had for a world where we could fish and at the same time sustain the seas for the future.
Terrified, I left the job with $3,000 to my name and no employment lined up. Yet as scary as that new situation was, it was different. I had come home to myself. I had listened and trusted that God was inviting me to something else that I wouldn’t find there. I had to make the turn not knowing the future, but believing that it would bring light to my soul and drive out that darkness that was crowding in. John came to me as a voice of breaking apart in the night. John came as nightmares. It was like being in the firestorm though whether of the Holy Spirit or burning chaff I couldn't tell. And John finally came as the courage through the encouragement of a friend to say I will not stay and it will be okay.
This is one story in my life of repenting and being brought home. It deepened my trust in God and in Jesus. It confirmed some of the core ideas of Christianity for me and how I believe we are to live with each other, even if at times following that is costly or out of step with the rhythm of the world around us. I touched again that light of Christ within that could give me a deep peace and sense of God’s presence even in the midst of all the struggle and anxiety. I came home to God that was residing within me, inviting me to a new place of peace and hope and possibility to bear fruits of compassion and justice and service.
For us, the ultimate gathering is being gathered into the Body of Christ. We await his coming again into the world so that we can renew our experience of that coming home, of us coming home to God and God coming home to us. This two-step dance is the pulse of the universe and of the divine. It is there, beckoning us, if we stop and turn and say yes. It is the dance of a lifetime. We always have further to dance, more steps to learn, more joy and light to discover. We are promised that our trust is exactly what opens the door for God to come in. We are asked to trust so that we can be prepared for God to come home and find a welcome, a ripe field full of wheat ready to be shared.
We don’t have to have it all figured out, (who among us does?), or be perfect. We come and turn where we are so that we can begin to go towards where we want to be: ever more true imitators of Jesus in this world as a community, this part of the Church universal, and as persons. God will come; God is coming. Jesus is waiting once again to break into the world with the Good News of the Gospel. It is a never-ending story of hope and love and turning, and we are wanted for this dance. The light that enlightens all people is coming into the world; that is the promise of Advent, the turn God in Jesus is making towards us.
In this season of preparation and turning I think of a priest I knew in New York City. Every Sunday before celebrating communion he would pray that when we received Christ that day he would find our hearts to be a dwelling place prepared for him. I can think of no better prayer and no better hope for us this Advent season. Amen.
Monday, November 30, 2009
November 29, 2009, 1st Sunday in Advent
November 29, 2009
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Jeremiah 33:14-16, Ps. 25:1-9, 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, Luke 21:25-36
Advent 1, Year C
Blessed Advent, everyone. Today we enter into this time of waiting, of expectation, and of patience. We live in an impatient world; we live in a world that is always hurrying up the process and rushing ahead to the next thing. Life is a linear reality that has a relentless forward-driving energy. Even at Christmas time. Only 14 shopping days left! You need this to make that goal you set or to make your kids happy! Get to the next holiday party; who knows who you might meet! Even the traditions we have of making certain foods or making decorations fall victim to it. But the coming of God, the awakening of our souls to the deep truth of the unifying mystery of the divine, doesn’t follow this pattern. God isn’t worried about beating the buzzer or final sales or getting to the top of the list. Paradoxically, the coming of God is meant to give us freedom from this ceaseless striving and also give us the very best gift there is: the living God, the living Christ, alive in our hearts.
It’s not obvious though how we arrive at this exhortation to patience from today’s readings. The portion we read of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians is a lovely reminder of our need for each other in this Christian walk and our need for God to increase love and strength in our hearts. We never cease to need God working in us not matter how long we’ve been at this Christian thing. Where Advent fits in is not so clear.
The Gospel is even harder to make sense of. It is speaking of the coming crucifixion of Jesus, which happens at the end of the story. It’s a provocative reading. I always imagine that all Jesus is talking about does indeed take place in his death and resurrection. That idea, probably heretical to many, gives a whole new shape to what we mean about the second coming. Is it not the second coming of the Risen Lord on Easter? An intriguing thought, but one that doesn’t get us much closer to the question why now? Why do we hear this to begin Advent? A clue is in the line to be alert. For while this text is speaking towards a particular event it is also speaking in the sense of the continual coming of the Risen One that shakes things up and turns things on their heads. God's promise can and will be fulfilled in times that look so unlike what we imagine God's reign or action to be.
When things are getting turned upside down and things are changing or maybe even falling apart, patience is hard to come by. It is even harder to stand up and raise our heads. We want to hide, to look away. We are often frightened and afraid in the middle of such uncertainty and often turmoil. We are tempted with resignation to a dismal reality or to simply give up. It’s so hard and it’s taking so long. Yet we are to be aware enough that we can see Jesus when he is coming into the world or into even something so small as an individual heart. We are to be patient that he will come when the time is ripe. The question for us is will we be ready for it, aware of it, or not?
Which brings us to the reading from Jeremiah. We hear words of great comfort. The promises will be fulfilled. After exile and occupation, Israel will be its own people in its own land with its own ruler—a branch from the house of David. After hundreds of years the people are to hold up their heads and see their redemption coming to them. They are to be led by someone who will bring righteousness and justice to the land and to the people. Note well it is not military power or wealth or expansion, but living rightly with each other and with God. This is truly what keeps us safe with God and aware, sensitized to, the ongoing work of God with us and for us and within us. After years of waiting, after a patient, and at times very impatient, trust in God, the people will know salvation.
Branches grow slowly into trees. God does not show up on demand or on our haughty command. Even that handful of people, Mary and Joseph and a few foreign wise men, who understood that with Jesus’ birth something new was breaking forth into the world, had to wait 30 years for God’s purpose to be revealed. Patience and trust and a willingness to wait with and for God. Even more so, to wait with and for God and continue to live into the way God calls us to be even when it seems to have no immediate effect or when doubt, darkness and pain loom large. It may not be efficient. At times we may feel absolutely alone in our faith in this even as we affirm that God is with us. It will invite us to live in what some would see as irrational time and in cyclical rhythm, but such too are the motions of God. God will come in the unexpected at yet also at the time we need. This is the deep promise of the coming Christ.
We cannot be alert to or aware of the birthing of Christ in our hearts if we are impatient, always focused on what comes next, on result and getting the next thing done. We cannot be alert if our worries and fears overwhelm us. We must be ripe in our hearts. We must have enough space, enough calm, enough quiet within to be able to feel the faintest of movements of God. We must be able to wait for the next movement that will come in its own time. We must cultivate a soil of soul that can let God grow within. We must be attentive to the weeds that need to be plucked or the fertilizer we need to add (perhaps prayer or worship or stopping and doing nothing from time to time) so that the Word Incarnate has fertile ground to grow from. We must hold fast to a trust in a God that will come for us through thick and through thin. We must be willing to come back to the same place time and again and find it familiar yet also new. We must be able to live in the holy pause, in holy expectancy, in holy patience.
Thomas Merton in his book “Zen and the Birds of Appetite” writes this: “Many of the Zen stories which are almost always incomprehensible in rational terms are simply the ringing of an alarm clock, and the reaction of the sleeper. Usually, the misguided sleeper makes a response which in effect turns off the alarm so that he can go back to sleep. Sometimes he jumps out of bed with a shout of astonishment that it is so late. Sometimes he just sleeps and does not hear the alarm at all…
“But we in the West, living in a tradition of stubborn ego-centered practicality and geared entirely for the use and manipulation of everything, always pass from one thing to another, from cause to effect, from the first to the next and to the last and then back to the first. Everything always point to something else, and hence we never stop anywhere because we cannot: as soon as we pause, the escalator reaches the end of the ride and we have to get off and find another.”
Advent allows us to learn how to come back to the Center, to the unmoveable reality of God, to the presence of God coming alive within us. Rather than going anywhere we come back to what has always been waiting. We discover patience and expectation again both as a personal virtue and a way of living a life of sustained witness to Christ in the world. Christ is coming into the world. God's promise will come to pass. We can’t rush it, control it or make it work for our ends. We can patiently prepare for it and be able to receive it when it comes whether it looks like what we expect or not. Advent is that gift of time to learn to be awake, to learn how to listen for the alarm clocks.
Perhaps the holy task before each of us this week is to discover what it is that muffles the alarm clocks. Perhaps the holy task is to find our impatience and ask that it be turned into patience. Perhaps our task is to trust in the emptiness or darkness that a holy light will shine within in time. Perhaps the holy task is to learn the discipline of holy pause so that Christ has the place and the space to be born yet again within our hearts. Amen.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Jeremiah 33:14-16, Ps. 25:1-9, 1 Thessalonians 3:9-13, Luke 21:25-36
Advent 1, Year C
Blessed Advent, everyone. Today we enter into this time of waiting, of expectation, and of patience. We live in an impatient world; we live in a world that is always hurrying up the process and rushing ahead to the next thing. Life is a linear reality that has a relentless forward-driving energy. Even at Christmas time. Only 14 shopping days left! You need this to make that goal you set or to make your kids happy! Get to the next holiday party; who knows who you might meet! Even the traditions we have of making certain foods or making decorations fall victim to it. But the coming of God, the awakening of our souls to the deep truth of the unifying mystery of the divine, doesn’t follow this pattern. God isn’t worried about beating the buzzer or final sales or getting to the top of the list. Paradoxically, the coming of God is meant to give us freedom from this ceaseless striving and also give us the very best gift there is: the living God, the living Christ, alive in our hearts.
It’s not obvious though how we arrive at this exhortation to patience from today’s readings. The portion we read of Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians is a lovely reminder of our need for each other in this Christian walk and our need for God to increase love and strength in our hearts. We never cease to need God working in us not matter how long we’ve been at this Christian thing. Where Advent fits in is not so clear.
The Gospel is even harder to make sense of. It is speaking of the coming crucifixion of Jesus, which happens at the end of the story. It’s a provocative reading. I always imagine that all Jesus is talking about does indeed take place in his death and resurrection. That idea, probably heretical to many, gives a whole new shape to what we mean about the second coming. Is it not the second coming of the Risen Lord on Easter? An intriguing thought, but one that doesn’t get us much closer to the question why now? Why do we hear this to begin Advent? A clue is in the line to be alert. For while this text is speaking towards a particular event it is also speaking in the sense of the continual coming of the Risen One that shakes things up and turns things on their heads. God's promise can and will be fulfilled in times that look so unlike what we imagine God's reign or action to be.
When things are getting turned upside down and things are changing or maybe even falling apart, patience is hard to come by. It is even harder to stand up and raise our heads. We want to hide, to look away. We are often frightened and afraid in the middle of such uncertainty and often turmoil. We are tempted with resignation to a dismal reality or to simply give up. It’s so hard and it’s taking so long. Yet we are to be aware enough that we can see Jesus when he is coming into the world or into even something so small as an individual heart. We are to be patient that he will come when the time is ripe. The question for us is will we be ready for it, aware of it, or not?
Which brings us to the reading from Jeremiah. We hear words of great comfort. The promises will be fulfilled. After exile and occupation, Israel will be its own people in its own land with its own ruler—a branch from the house of David. After hundreds of years the people are to hold up their heads and see their redemption coming to them. They are to be led by someone who will bring righteousness and justice to the land and to the people. Note well it is not military power or wealth or expansion, but living rightly with each other and with God. This is truly what keeps us safe with God and aware, sensitized to, the ongoing work of God with us and for us and within us. After years of waiting, after a patient, and at times very impatient, trust in God, the people will know salvation.
Branches grow slowly into trees. God does not show up on demand or on our haughty command. Even that handful of people, Mary and Joseph and a few foreign wise men, who understood that with Jesus’ birth something new was breaking forth into the world, had to wait 30 years for God’s purpose to be revealed. Patience and trust and a willingness to wait with and for God. Even more so, to wait with and for God and continue to live into the way God calls us to be even when it seems to have no immediate effect or when doubt, darkness and pain loom large. It may not be efficient. At times we may feel absolutely alone in our faith in this even as we affirm that God is with us. It will invite us to live in what some would see as irrational time and in cyclical rhythm, but such too are the motions of God. God will come in the unexpected at yet also at the time we need. This is the deep promise of the coming Christ.
We cannot be alert to or aware of the birthing of Christ in our hearts if we are impatient, always focused on what comes next, on result and getting the next thing done. We cannot be alert if our worries and fears overwhelm us. We must be ripe in our hearts. We must have enough space, enough calm, enough quiet within to be able to feel the faintest of movements of God. We must be able to wait for the next movement that will come in its own time. We must cultivate a soil of soul that can let God grow within. We must be attentive to the weeds that need to be plucked or the fertilizer we need to add (perhaps prayer or worship or stopping and doing nothing from time to time) so that the Word Incarnate has fertile ground to grow from. We must hold fast to a trust in a God that will come for us through thick and through thin. We must be willing to come back to the same place time and again and find it familiar yet also new. We must be able to live in the holy pause, in holy expectancy, in holy patience.
Thomas Merton in his book “Zen and the Birds of Appetite” writes this: “Many of the Zen stories which are almost always incomprehensible in rational terms are simply the ringing of an alarm clock, and the reaction of the sleeper. Usually, the misguided sleeper makes a response which in effect turns off the alarm so that he can go back to sleep. Sometimes he jumps out of bed with a shout of astonishment that it is so late. Sometimes he just sleeps and does not hear the alarm at all…
“But we in the West, living in a tradition of stubborn ego-centered practicality and geared entirely for the use and manipulation of everything, always pass from one thing to another, from cause to effect, from the first to the next and to the last and then back to the first. Everything always point to something else, and hence we never stop anywhere because we cannot: as soon as we pause, the escalator reaches the end of the ride and we have to get off and find another.”
Advent allows us to learn how to come back to the Center, to the unmoveable reality of God, to the presence of God coming alive within us. Rather than going anywhere we come back to what has always been waiting. We discover patience and expectation again both as a personal virtue and a way of living a life of sustained witness to Christ in the world. Christ is coming into the world. God's promise will come to pass. We can’t rush it, control it or make it work for our ends. We can patiently prepare for it and be able to receive it when it comes whether it looks like what we expect or not. Advent is that gift of time to learn to be awake, to learn how to listen for the alarm clocks.
Perhaps the holy task before each of us this week is to discover what it is that muffles the alarm clocks. Perhaps the holy task is to find our impatience and ask that it be turned into patience. Perhaps our task is to trust in the emptiness or darkness that a holy light will shine within in time. Perhaps the holy task is to learn the discipline of holy pause so that Christ has the place and the space to be born yet again within our hearts. Amen.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
November 22, 2009, Christ the King, Last Sunday after Pentecost
November 22, 2009
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Last Sunday of Pentecost, Year B
Even though today is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent, I suspect that what we really want to hear about is Diocesan Convention. Christ the King Sunday is placed where it is in the liturgical year to remind us of exactly what type of “king” it is that we are awaiting. It is not a powerful king armed with weapons of death and coercion, not a king that is ready to ready to dominate and bend all to his will and desire, not a king that seeks worldly power and control, not a king that will lock us up in a cell. We remember that this is a king that embodies and through whom makes possible that deeper yearning we have for calling forth our very best by nurturing our capacity to be generous, to give dignified life to all, to live in accountability and responsibility with mercy, love and an awareness that we are all subject to the same shortcomings and mistakes. It is that of the self as part of a Body, not a self over and against the rest. This is a deep hope and expectation that we live into only in part. But it to this hope and expectation that Christ is loyal and to which he gives his allegiance. That is also our hope. It is the threshold moment when we step into Advent: that wonderful season of quiet and contemplation about the deepest hope that resides within for what we can be with God’s grace and presence and of preparation of our hearts for the arrival of the one that lived it fully.
There was a wonderful synergy in having our Diocesan Convention on the eve of Christ the King. After many months of hard work and healing, we are on the threshold of expectation and hope for the new, for the arrival of our next Bishop. We are now preparing our hearts for this new arrival and all the promise that it bears. We have lived through a difficult and painful recent past and have emerged stronger, wiser, and more able to be gracious with each other. We, like Mary, have been able to say yes to the unknown with trust and a deep faith that it will be for good.
So, what exactly did we say yes to these past two days for our Diocese? Quite a lot. Much was done in a short time and I have to say I think we established a Diocesan Convention business land speed record in doing our work. I’ve been to a good number of conventions by now and I must say, we were moving. If one checked out for too long or took too lengthy of a break one came back to find the train had moved on by about 5 stations. This, I believe, is a sign that we had done our work well and were ready.
The Rev. Michael Hanley was elected as our new Diocesan Bishop. I hope that most of you have read about him and the other candidates in the diocesan newspaper or on the diocesan website. He was elected on the 2nd vote. This is truly a rare thing. I doubt any of us expected it to go quite that quickly. When the first vote results came in we were one vote shy of electing him on right then. One ballot later and he was overwhelming voted in as bishop by both lay and clergy alike. To say we were excited and joyous was an understatement. We were all just smiling with happiness, even those of us who had voted for someone else. And here is why: all three candidates were so superb that we knew we were going to be in good hands no matter how it turned out. But to see such a clear sense coming from lay and clergy from the start indicates a deep common discernment and movement of the Holy Spirit. I admit that I waffled a lot between Andy and Michael. It was always a dance of 49% to 51%. So when I voted the first round for Andy and saw the results, I was able with a glad heart to give my second vote to Michael. Michael is grounded, experienced, possessed of a good sense of humor (a most necessary trait for a Bishop), and ready to listen, learn and encourage. I truly believe we are going to be in very good, very compassionate, very able hands.
On Saturday we skyped with Michael to say congratulations in person and to also sing him Happy Birthday. He is eager to join us and humbled at our confidence in and call of him. I look forward to his first visitation with us and for the future mission and ministry he will support us in and challenge us to do.
All this electing was done by about 11 a.m. Friday morning. In short order we got through several reports and lunch. After lunch we looked at and voted on all our resolutions except the two related to changes to our canons and constitution, in other words, the DPA. On three ballots we elected all people to various diocesan posts. The first resolution we passed was on a statement of support for health care coverage for all. It passed with no discussion.
Moving on, we arrived at the second resolution for consideration, that policy on Same-Gender Blessings to affirm what was passed at General Convention earlier this year. This resolution states that “the Bishop of Oregon provide generous pastoral response to meet the needs of this Church by authorizing the blessing of such partnership by the clergy of this diocese who may choose to do so.” Those clergy who in good conscience cannot do so are likewise supported by the Bishop. This passed after no discussion by an overwhelming majority and with only about a dozen dissenting voices. We continue to move forward in this difficult, yet important work, of full acceptance of all God’s children in the Church.
We next passed a resolution to endorse the Charter for Lifelong Christian Formation as voted on by General Convention. This too passed by an overwhelming majority after a few comments from the floor. Lastly, in similar fashion we voted to establish the first Sunday of Lent as Episcopal Relief and Development Sunday. And then, it was 3: 30, we were an hour and half ahead of schedule for the day and also almost done with all the work set aside for Saturday. Naptime and break were obviously in order. We returned later that evening for a sit-down dinner and a chance to honor and thank various people in the Diocese and most especially Bishop Sandy and Mary.
On Saturday we gathered for the discussion on changing our DPA structure. While new enough to this Diocese to not know all the background, I do know that there has long been a need to restructure this process and mechanism and that it has been under discussion for a long time. I also know that a rather significant number of parishes do not pay their DPA because the current structure is obsolete and creates an undue burden on small parishes. Last year, a change was voted on that passed by a simple majority that would have substantially reduces the DPAs assessed. Such canonical changes require a 2/3 majority (which was not achieved last year), so another vote on it was required this year. Many felt the reduction was too drastic and that many other issues were not addressed. Many voted for it out of frustration and to galvanize some action.
During the past year a small group of very knowledgeable and capable people worked on an alternative version. This version allows for a reduction for most parishes along with mechanisms for parishes that are in financial hardship to work with the diocese and negotiate a payment that is truly equitable and responsive to their particular situation. The hope is that given this new collaborative approach most parishes not paying their DPA will now be able to do so in a way that benefits them, benefits the larger work of the Diocese, and affirms our participation in the Church in Western Oregon. It is about mission and ministry, commitment and accountability.
The vote to replace lasts year’s version with the substitute passed by a large majority. There was then some lengthy discussion about whether we should vote on this new version with various amendments or vote to refer it to a committee appointed by the new Bishop. The idea behind the referral was both that there is still some work to be done on the new version—after all this is a complex and multi-faceted issue and there is indeed room for further clarification—and also to give our new Bishop who is very skilled in this type of work the chance to come in and help refine it rather than receiving a substantial change that has already been approved. In the end, we voted by a large margin not to refer to committee and to approve the new version. Indeed, the new version was passed by a 2/3 majority by both lay and clergy and thus is now an official change to our canons.
The Resurrection delegates came in of a common mind to support the new version, but to vote to refer it to committee for the reasons given above. When the vote came, all voted for referral except me. I changed my mind. And here is why. One, the new version is not perfect, but we are still able to revise and revisit it. Those who worked on it are highly talented in this area and have done tremendous work. It is a vast improvement on what was and lives into the spirit of who we are becoming as a diocese as far as governance style and approach. The new bishop and those who worked on it so far will be able to flesh it out further and refine it, bringing to our next convention amendments for improving and clarifying it so that it works well.
Two, it seemed to me that after so many years of talking we needed to do something, to get off the fence, to actually take the plunge and try something. What we had to vote on this year, unlike last year’s proposal that I did not support, is very, very good. If we wait until something is perfect we will never do anything. It was time to give it a go.
And three, I realized that we needed to move forward and own this lingering business of ours that predates the new bishop. To put it on hold once more for further discussion once the new bishop is here is also a way to shift responsibility. If we did it now, it was ours and ours alone. To wait for approval until the new bishop was here created to my mind the opportunity to then make it the Bishop’s new DPA policy. For those who were then not pleased with it, it could become something the bishop did that they didn’t like and thus his fault, problem, etc. I wanted to avoid this possibility and encourage us to begin this collaboratively and honestly.
All in all, we did good work and it was truly a celebration. We have a wonderful new phase of life before us and we continue to grow into the full stature and maturity of Christ here in this Diocese. We are ready to move forward, to live creatively, to continue to become more and more the disciples Christ invites us to be. We are strong; we are committed to this Church; we are safe. And we have a lot of difficult, wonderful and amazing work to do. And do it we shall with God’s help. Amen.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Last Sunday of Pentecost, Year B
Even though today is Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday before Advent, I suspect that what we really want to hear about is Diocesan Convention. Christ the King Sunday is placed where it is in the liturgical year to remind us of exactly what type of “king” it is that we are awaiting. It is not a powerful king armed with weapons of death and coercion, not a king that is ready to ready to dominate and bend all to his will and desire, not a king that seeks worldly power and control, not a king that will lock us up in a cell. We remember that this is a king that embodies and through whom makes possible that deeper yearning we have for calling forth our very best by nurturing our capacity to be generous, to give dignified life to all, to live in accountability and responsibility with mercy, love and an awareness that we are all subject to the same shortcomings and mistakes. It is that of the self as part of a Body, not a self over and against the rest. This is a deep hope and expectation that we live into only in part. But it to this hope and expectation that Christ is loyal and to which he gives his allegiance. That is also our hope. It is the threshold moment when we step into Advent: that wonderful season of quiet and contemplation about the deepest hope that resides within for what we can be with God’s grace and presence and of preparation of our hearts for the arrival of the one that lived it fully.
There was a wonderful synergy in having our Diocesan Convention on the eve of Christ the King. After many months of hard work and healing, we are on the threshold of expectation and hope for the new, for the arrival of our next Bishop. We are now preparing our hearts for this new arrival and all the promise that it bears. We have lived through a difficult and painful recent past and have emerged stronger, wiser, and more able to be gracious with each other. We, like Mary, have been able to say yes to the unknown with trust and a deep faith that it will be for good.
So, what exactly did we say yes to these past two days for our Diocese? Quite a lot. Much was done in a short time and I have to say I think we established a Diocesan Convention business land speed record in doing our work. I’ve been to a good number of conventions by now and I must say, we were moving. If one checked out for too long or took too lengthy of a break one came back to find the train had moved on by about 5 stations. This, I believe, is a sign that we had done our work well and were ready.
The Rev. Michael Hanley was elected as our new Diocesan Bishop. I hope that most of you have read about him and the other candidates in the diocesan newspaper or on the diocesan website. He was elected on the 2nd vote. This is truly a rare thing. I doubt any of us expected it to go quite that quickly. When the first vote results came in we were one vote shy of electing him on right then. One ballot later and he was overwhelming voted in as bishop by both lay and clergy alike. To say we were excited and joyous was an understatement. We were all just smiling with happiness, even those of us who had voted for someone else. And here is why: all three candidates were so superb that we knew we were going to be in good hands no matter how it turned out. But to see such a clear sense coming from lay and clergy from the start indicates a deep common discernment and movement of the Holy Spirit. I admit that I waffled a lot between Andy and Michael. It was always a dance of 49% to 51%. So when I voted the first round for Andy and saw the results, I was able with a glad heart to give my second vote to Michael. Michael is grounded, experienced, possessed of a good sense of humor (a most necessary trait for a Bishop), and ready to listen, learn and encourage. I truly believe we are going to be in very good, very compassionate, very able hands.
On Saturday we skyped with Michael to say congratulations in person and to also sing him Happy Birthday. He is eager to join us and humbled at our confidence in and call of him. I look forward to his first visitation with us and for the future mission and ministry he will support us in and challenge us to do.
All this electing was done by about 11 a.m. Friday morning. In short order we got through several reports and lunch. After lunch we looked at and voted on all our resolutions except the two related to changes to our canons and constitution, in other words, the DPA. On three ballots we elected all people to various diocesan posts. The first resolution we passed was on a statement of support for health care coverage for all. It passed with no discussion.
Moving on, we arrived at the second resolution for consideration, that policy on Same-Gender Blessings to affirm what was passed at General Convention earlier this year. This resolution states that “the Bishop of Oregon provide generous pastoral response to meet the needs of this Church by authorizing the blessing of such partnership by the clergy of this diocese who may choose to do so.” Those clergy who in good conscience cannot do so are likewise supported by the Bishop. This passed after no discussion by an overwhelming majority and with only about a dozen dissenting voices. We continue to move forward in this difficult, yet important work, of full acceptance of all God’s children in the Church.
We next passed a resolution to endorse the Charter for Lifelong Christian Formation as voted on by General Convention. This too passed by an overwhelming majority after a few comments from the floor. Lastly, in similar fashion we voted to establish the first Sunday of Lent as Episcopal Relief and Development Sunday. And then, it was 3: 30, we were an hour and half ahead of schedule for the day and also almost done with all the work set aside for Saturday. Naptime and break were obviously in order. We returned later that evening for a sit-down dinner and a chance to honor and thank various people in the Diocese and most especially Bishop Sandy and Mary.
On Saturday we gathered for the discussion on changing our DPA structure. While new enough to this Diocese to not know all the background, I do know that there has long been a need to restructure this process and mechanism and that it has been under discussion for a long time. I also know that a rather significant number of parishes do not pay their DPA because the current structure is obsolete and creates an undue burden on small parishes. Last year, a change was voted on that passed by a simple majority that would have substantially reduces the DPAs assessed. Such canonical changes require a 2/3 majority (which was not achieved last year), so another vote on it was required this year. Many felt the reduction was too drastic and that many other issues were not addressed. Many voted for it out of frustration and to galvanize some action.
During the past year a small group of very knowledgeable and capable people worked on an alternative version. This version allows for a reduction for most parishes along with mechanisms for parishes that are in financial hardship to work with the diocese and negotiate a payment that is truly equitable and responsive to their particular situation. The hope is that given this new collaborative approach most parishes not paying their DPA will now be able to do so in a way that benefits them, benefits the larger work of the Diocese, and affirms our participation in the Church in Western Oregon. It is about mission and ministry, commitment and accountability.
The vote to replace lasts year’s version with the substitute passed by a large majority. There was then some lengthy discussion about whether we should vote on this new version with various amendments or vote to refer it to a committee appointed by the new Bishop. The idea behind the referral was both that there is still some work to be done on the new version—after all this is a complex and multi-faceted issue and there is indeed room for further clarification—and also to give our new Bishop who is very skilled in this type of work the chance to come in and help refine it rather than receiving a substantial change that has already been approved. In the end, we voted by a large margin not to refer to committee and to approve the new version. Indeed, the new version was passed by a 2/3 majority by both lay and clergy and thus is now an official change to our canons.
The Resurrection delegates came in of a common mind to support the new version, but to vote to refer it to committee for the reasons given above. When the vote came, all voted for referral except me. I changed my mind. And here is why. One, the new version is not perfect, but we are still able to revise and revisit it. Those who worked on it are highly talented in this area and have done tremendous work. It is a vast improvement on what was and lives into the spirit of who we are becoming as a diocese as far as governance style and approach. The new bishop and those who worked on it so far will be able to flesh it out further and refine it, bringing to our next convention amendments for improving and clarifying it so that it works well.
Two, it seemed to me that after so many years of talking we needed to do something, to get off the fence, to actually take the plunge and try something. What we had to vote on this year, unlike last year’s proposal that I did not support, is very, very good. If we wait until something is perfect we will never do anything. It was time to give it a go.
And three, I realized that we needed to move forward and own this lingering business of ours that predates the new bishop. To put it on hold once more for further discussion once the new bishop is here is also a way to shift responsibility. If we did it now, it was ours and ours alone. To wait for approval until the new bishop was here created to my mind the opportunity to then make it the Bishop’s new DPA policy. For those who were then not pleased with it, it could become something the bishop did that they didn’t like and thus his fault, problem, etc. I wanted to avoid this possibility and encourage us to begin this collaboratively and honestly.
All in all, we did good work and it was truly a celebration. We have a wonderful new phase of life before us and we continue to grow into the full stature and maturity of Christ here in this Diocese. We are ready to move forward, to live creatively, to continue to become more and more the disciples Christ invites us to be. We are strong; we are committed to this Church; we are safe. And we have a lot of difficult, wonderful and amazing work to do. And do it we shall with God’s help. Amen.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
November 15, 2009, 24th Sunday after Pentecost
November 15, 2009
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
24 Pentecost, Year B
Daniel 12:1-3, Ps 16, Hebrews 10:11-25, Mark 13:1-8
In the name of God, who abides over and around us, the living Word, Christ, who abides among us, and the Spirit that abides within us. Amen.
When you hear the words from Mark, what images, ideas or emotions come to mind? (ask for people to offer a word or description) Would you believe me if I said that today’s readings, particularly the reading from Daniel and the Gospel, are meant to inspire hope? Not just any hope, but a particular expression of it we as the Church call Christian hope? I understand if you are a bit skeptical. These stories are not easy at first reading or perhaps even the 29th to see as hopeful.
There are lots of variations of hope out there. There is hope for what we think will pass with enough effort and determination. For instance, if we do our homework and study with reasonably consistent effort we will move into the next grade. There is apocalyptic-style hope—often met in conversations about passages such as these—that at the end we know we are marked off as God’s special property and the rest of you sorry lot go to the other place. A vindictive kind of hope meant to give security about Mysteries that our not fully ours to know.
There is the hope of emotional longing such as hoping to get the attention of the person with whom we are infatuated or for a long-held dream or goal to come true. Then there is the overly optimistic hope that is determined to find a positive outlook no matter what. I found a quote that captures this rather well: “Erv had a gift for optimism. He believed what he wanted to. Ruth said that if Erv tossed a ball in the air three times, tried to hit it three times with a bat, and three times missed, he would, undisturbed, conclude: Wow. What a pitcher.” On occasion this type of hope helps us find humor and balance. However, if this is the operational understanding on a regular basis, this variety of hope makes it easy to avoid the painful and difficult truth and only seeing what it is that we want to see, no matter how out of touch it may be. This type of hope is present quite often, I think, in political discourse.
Authentic Christian hope, I believe, is none of these. It is something much more demanding and much more realistic. It is rooted in steadfastness to a belief in a loving God that ultimately will redeem this creation for the kingdom no matter how messed up we humans get. And will redeem it not by the means we so often use in our attempts to get the world the way we want it, but by the means we see used by Christ. It is rooted in a deep trust in the importance and life-giving spirit of the Good News. It is a conviction we believe must be held close to our hearts and lived no matter what else is going on around us and no matter how futile it all seems. That’s a big challenge. But it is the challenge of prophetic and end-time imagery.
First of all, we need to get underneath our limited, literal, modern way of reading these texts, and most of us take these literally. In the time, place and culture in which they were written they were not viewed as a form of fortune telling, accurate predictions about specific details of coming events. Daniel was not an ancient Jewish Nostrodamus. Neither was Jesus. These prophetic images were a form of instruction, of teaching. We are given a blunt hint of this in the story itself: When he, Jesus, was sitting on the Mount of Olives… This is the stance of a teacher and Jesus is indeed instructing his disciples.
Such prophecies, such teachings, were a diagnosis of the moral and spiritual health of the people. They were meant to teach, that is to show people how to look at the world around them, in a way that led to understanding. Such prophecies were meant to show that all was not well in the life of the people. It was both a personal and a communal diagnosis for faithfulness to God as given in the Torah was shown very clearly in the common life of the people: caring for the vulnerable, not exploiting workers and slaves, not hording so that others were hungry or homeless, sharing wealth through the practice of tithe, etc. It was also personal for if selfishness, greed, rivalry and lack of concern, etc. for others is strong in our hearts it is shown in the institutions we build.
Jesus reminds his disciples, and by extension us, of this by his image of the great buildings, the magnificent Temple built to worship God in awe and splendour, being razed. Do not place your deepest hope and commitment into these things, he is saying. All human institutions fall short of God’s vision. They are vulnerable to losing their way, and almost always do in time. None of them is or can bring about the kingdom of God. All of them, even the biggest of buildings and the most powerful of institutions or nations, can be overthrown and brought to the ground. It happens all the time and we see it in the wars and famines and chaos that plague our world. All these other things are simultaneously the death throes and the birth pangs, for it is a moment for something new to emerge. But we are called to remain steadfast in our trust in, sharing of, and living out the Gospel. We are asked to be strong in our hope and trust in the Gospel, to bear witness in the midst of the darkest times and to bear witness at all times, even when it seems our witness is insignificantly small and ineffectual.
This is the Christian hope that we are called to hold fast. It is not a guarantee that because we trust in Jesus our life will be smooth sailing or that the world is as it should be. It is rather, that in the midst of the darkest of hours and we are tempted to say why, why continue to struggle for what is good or just or decent when the forces against it seem so overwhelmingly powerful, we keep a steady light shining on the Gospel. We do not abandon it or try to make it support the current status quo, but rather continue to witness to it no matter how few we are or powerless it seems in making a difference. Our horizon is not God’s, but our witness and commitment is essential to keep that horizon and hope alive in the world and to keep true hope alive in us.
I admit that this was a hard and necessary challenge that I needed to hear. It is very hard for me more often than I would like to admit, to keep believing the effort of trying to live out the Gospel is worth it. Perhaps this is something some of you struggle with as well. I struggle with a sense of futility and while I can’t abandon it I find it hard to hope, to give energy to it, to trust that it is worth dedicating my life to. Being the action-oriented and idealistic person that I am, I want to see it making a difference in measurable and profound ways and so often I see nothing of the sort. But that is where Jesus gives me a kick in the pants and says, you follow because it is true and meaningful in and of itself and for the little bit of the world you occupy. Get over yourself and your grandiose ideas of effectiveness. You don’t trust this because of the results given as proof in the life around you beforehand, you trust so you can be a part in ways you can’t even imagine of the future and the presence of the kingdom.
Or as Samwise Gamgee in Lord of the Rings at one of the bleakest, most empty moments when it seems that evil and destruction will win no matter what tells Frodo that they must keep on, they must hope, because they believe there is something good in this world and that it is worth fighting for. For us, that is the Gospel. To live for it and into it against the greatest odds, against all the reasonable arguments why it won’t really work, against all the force and power that can crush our imitation of Christ’s way of being, is the hope and the steadfastness Jesus calls us to. With God there is always a new beginning, a new dawn, a resurrection after the worst of calamity. We can’t avoid the pain and suffering that are part of life, but we can hope in and live for a particular type of birth out of that death—a resurrection and a possibility given to us again.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
24 Pentecost, Year B
Daniel 12:1-3, Ps 16, Hebrews 10:11-25, Mark 13:1-8
In the name of God, who abides over and around us, the living Word, Christ, who abides among us, and the Spirit that abides within us. Amen.
When you hear the words from Mark, what images, ideas or emotions come to mind? (ask for people to offer a word or description) Would you believe me if I said that today’s readings, particularly the reading from Daniel and the Gospel, are meant to inspire hope? Not just any hope, but a particular expression of it we as the Church call Christian hope? I understand if you are a bit skeptical. These stories are not easy at first reading or perhaps even the 29th to see as hopeful.
There are lots of variations of hope out there. There is hope for what we think will pass with enough effort and determination. For instance, if we do our homework and study with reasonably consistent effort we will move into the next grade. There is apocalyptic-style hope—often met in conversations about passages such as these—that at the end we know we are marked off as God’s special property and the rest of you sorry lot go to the other place. A vindictive kind of hope meant to give security about Mysteries that our not fully ours to know.
There is the hope of emotional longing such as hoping to get the attention of the person with whom we are infatuated or for a long-held dream or goal to come true. Then there is the overly optimistic hope that is determined to find a positive outlook no matter what. I found a quote that captures this rather well: “Erv had a gift for optimism. He believed what he wanted to. Ruth said that if Erv tossed a ball in the air three times, tried to hit it three times with a bat, and three times missed, he would, undisturbed, conclude: Wow. What a pitcher.” On occasion this type of hope helps us find humor and balance. However, if this is the operational understanding on a regular basis, this variety of hope makes it easy to avoid the painful and difficult truth and only seeing what it is that we want to see, no matter how out of touch it may be. This type of hope is present quite often, I think, in political discourse.
Authentic Christian hope, I believe, is none of these. It is something much more demanding and much more realistic. It is rooted in steadfastness to a belief in a loving God that ultimately will redeem this creation for the kingdom no matter how messed up we humans get. And will redeem it not by the means we so often use in our attempts to get the world the way we want it, but by the means we see used by Christ. It is rooted in a deep trust in the importance and life-giving spirit of the Good News. It is a conviction we believe must be held close to our hearts and lived no matter what else is going on around us and no matter how futile it all seems. That’s a big challenge. But it is the challenge of prophetic and end-time imagery.
First of all, we need to get underneath our limited, literal, modern way of reading these texts, and most of us take these literally. In the time, place and culture in which they were written they were not viewed as a form of fortune telling, accurate predictions about specific details of coming events. Daniel was not an ancient Jewish Nostrodamus. Neither was Jesus. These prophetic images were a form of instruction, of teaching. We are given a blunt hint of this in the story itself: When he, Jesus, was sitting on the Mount of Olives… This is the stance of a teacher and Jesus is indeed instructing his disciples.
Such prophecies, such teachings, were a diagnosis of the moral and spiritual health of the people. They were meant to teach, that is to show people how to look at the world around them, in a way that led to understanding. Such prophecies were meant to show that all was not well in the life of the people. It was both a personal and a communal diagnosis for faithfulness to God as given in the Torah was shown very clearly in the common life of the people: caring for the vulnerable, not exploiting workers and slaves, not hording so that others were hungry or homeless, sharing wealth through the practice of tithe, etc. It was also personal for if selfishness, greed, rivalry and lack of concern, etc. for others is strong in our hearts it is shown in the institutions we build.
Jesus reminds his disciples, and by extension us, of this by his image of the great buildings, the magnificent Temple built to worship God in awe and splendour, being razed. Do not place your deepest hope and commitment into these things, he is saying. All human institutions fall short of God’s vision. They are vulnerable to losing their way, and almost always do in time. None of them is or can bring about the kingdom of God. All of them, even the biggest of buildings and the most powerful of institutions or nations, can be overthrown and brought to the ground. It happens all the time and we see it in the wars and famines and chaos that plague our world. All these other things are simultaneously the death throes and the birth pangs, for it is a moment for something new to emerge. But we are called to remain steadfast in our trust in, sharing of, and living out the Gospel. We are asked to be strong in our hope and trust in the Gospel, to bear witness in the midst of the darkest times and to bear witness at all times, even when it seems our witness is insignificantly small and ineffectual.
This is the Christian hope that we are called to hold fast. It is not a guarantee that because we trust in Jesus our life will be smooth sailing or that the world is as it should be. It is rather, that in the midst of the darkest of hours and we are tempted to say why, why continue to struggle for what is good or just or decent when the forces against it seem so overwhelmingly powerful, we keep a steady light shining on the Gospel. We do not abandon it or try to make it support the current status quo, but rather continue to witness to it no matter how few we are or powerless it seems in making a difference. Our horizon is not God’s, but our witness and commitment is essential to keep that horizon and hope alive in the world and to keep true hope alive in us.
I admit that this was a hard and necessary challenge that I needed to hear. It is very hard for me more often than I would like to admit, to keep believing the effort of trying to live out the Gospel is worth it. Perhaps this is something some of you struggle with as well. I struggle with a sense of futility and while I can’t abandon it I find it hard to hope, to give energy to it, to trust that it is worth dedicating my life to. Being the action-oriented and idealistic person that I am, I want to see it making a difference in measurable and profound ways and so often I see nothing of the sort. But that is where Jesus gives me a kick in the pants and says, you follow because it is true and meaningful in and of itself and for the little bit of the world you occupy. Get over yourself and your grandiose ideas of effectiveness. You don’t trust this because of the results given as proof in the life around you beforehand, you trust so you can be a part in ways you can’t even imagine of the future and the presence of the kingdom.
Or as Samwise Gamgee in Lord of the Rings at one of the bleakest, most empty moments when it seems that evil and destruction will win no matter what tells Frodo that they must keep on, they must hope, because they believe there is something good in this world and that it is worth fighting for. For us, that is the Gospel. To live for it and into it against the greatest odds, against all the reasonable arguments why it won’t really work, against all the force and power that can crush our imitation of Christ’s way of being, is the hope and the steadfastness Jesus calls us to. With God there is always a new beginning, a new dawn, a resurrection after the worst of calamity. We can’t avoid the pain and suffering that are part of life, but we can hope in and live for a particular type of birth out of that death—a resurrection and a possibility given to us again.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Monday, November 2, 2009
All Saints Day, November 1, 2009
November 1, 2009
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
All Saints, Year B
Isaiah 25:6-9, Psalm 24, Revelation 21:1-6a, Johjn 11:32-44
For many of us today’s Gospel is a surprise. On All Saints’ we are accustomed to hearing the words of the Beatitudes, those beautiful and challenging teachings of Jesus that invite us into blessedness. But the Revised Common Lectionary has not chosen that section of Matthew. Instead, we hear the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead. We are left to puzzle out why this passage is chosen to illuminate the idea of the saints.
There is an immediate wisdom in this story being read today. Most if not all of us have known the grief of Martha and Mary. We have known the pain of losing someone dear to us, someone without whom we aren’t sure life can go on. Many of those were named today as we remembered our dead, our dear ones who are now at peace with God. In the midst of our immediate grief we feel at sea and lost. We want a different answer from life, from God even as much as we know death is part of biological life and always has been. We can echo those who said surely someone who can give sight back to the blind could have prevented Lazarus’ dying. Surely our medicine, with so much new knowledge, should have been able to stop the disease. Or, surely an all-powerful God could have stopped that accident from happening. Natural questions that are part of our grief.
We also see Jesus who is moved by our grief, indeed, grieves himself for his friend. If we truly believe in Jesus’ full humanity as well as his full divinity then we have an amazing assurance here that God experiences our pain and hurt. Even more profoundly, in Jesus, God knows it as we know it—a union of experience and reality between creator and created.
The story moves on as Jesus does his greatest sign yet. He raises Lazarus from the dead to show God’s glory and to demonstrate that he is the resurrection and the life. Just before we join this story, Mary confronts Jesus about her brother’s death and Jesus replies that he is resurrection and he is life, to which Mary answers that she believes. Note the present tense of those words. It is important. More importantly, he shows that Lazarus in his deepest reality is now partaking in eternal life in God, is now alive in way we can not fully imagine for it is not the same as the life we know before death. Lazarus is part of that communion of saints that exists beyond time and space and that can at times be so intimately present to us. Fully alive in God, fully dead in the material sense of the world we inhabit. Yet again a paradox in our faith that invites in hope and reminds of us the deep Mystery at the heart of it all.
There are some disturbing parts to the story. In fact, if we are honest it is a bit gruesome. We have no idea what Lazarus looks like. Is he called forth as a resuscitated corpse? He does not speak a word. He does nothing else but come forth from the tomb. He is unbound and let go. But to where? It is not a happy ending where he goes home with his sisters, sits down to dinner and they pick up as before. Lazarus does not reintegrate with his former life. What he is exactly and what happens to him is never fully answered.
Which brings us to the perhaps the metaphor and the allegory that his rising and unbinding are meant to invite us to consider. Perhaps we are meant to see an allegory for our life as Christians, our life as an active, living part of the Body of Christ. When we become baptized as Christians we symbolically die and we are symbolically raised to new life, to everlasting life. This idea is part of the Thanksgiving over the Water that we will hear in just a few moments as we prepare to baptize a new member into this communion of saints. “We thank you Father, for the water of Baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit.” The raising of Lazarus can be seen to my mind as a graphic depiction of the symbol of baptism, our rebirth into the present great mystery of life as part of the resurrected One. What a joyful and hopeful story we are joining.
It is also an allegory for the freedom that we are meant to encounter and destined for once we are reborn into this new journey, a new way of being in the world. Freedom is one of the persistent themes throughout Scripture. It is one of God’s deep hopes for us. Lazarus is bound in death and was also bound in life. We all are. It is a way we image the sin and death that ensnare and infect us. But life in God and for God is a release from that bondage. We hear this too in the words prayed over the water of the font: “Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise. In it your Son Jesus received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.” Baptism is the action for us that is a reflection of Jesus’ command to the crowd to unbind Lazarus and let him go. Baptism unbinds us from sin and the power and fear of death so that we can be those people whose lives reflect the Beatitudes, whose lives are witness to life, resurrected life, over death, of love over fear and hostility. We are offered a joyful freedom to celebrate, live, love and give—all through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Baptism is the claiming of a radical freedom that we learn about through participation in community, through the sacraments, and through hearing, hearing and hearing again the Gospel of the Christ.
Today we are witnesses to the birth of a new saint, a new blessed one of Jesus. We are present at the gift of radical freedom offered and received. We who are already baptized are reminded of the tremendous response we have made and the sometimes difficult, yet life-giving hope it holds forth for us. So in communion with all the saints past, present and yet to come, we once again remember the mystery, join in the mystery, and become part of reality of an ever-present, ever-loving God who makes his home among us. We celebrate with joy that before all else we are followers of Christ and that as we grow in his stature more and more of life—all that it is and has—becomes consecrated and given to him and the work of his church in the world—a foretaste of the kingdom of heaven, a feast, a place of grace and belonging.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
All Saints, Year B
Isaiah 25:6-9, Psalm 24, Revelation 21:1-6a, Johjn 11:32-44
For many of us today’s Gospel is a surprise. On All Saints’ we are accustomed to hearing the words of the Beatitudes, those beautiful and challenging teachings of Jesus that invite us into blessedness. But the Revised Common Lectionary has not chosen that section of Matthew. Instead, we hear the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead. We are left to puzzle out why this passage is chosen to illuminate the idea of the saints.
There is an immediate wisdom in this story being read today. Most if not all of us have known the grief of Martha and Mary. We have known the pain of losing someone dear to us, someone without whom we aren’t sure life can go on. Many of those were named today as we remembered our dead, our dear ones who are now at peace with God. In the midst of our immediate grief we feel at sea and lost. We want a different answer from life, from God even as much as we know death is part of biological life and always has been. We can echo those who said surely someone who can give sight back to the blind could have prevented Lazarus’ dying. Surely our medicine, with so much new knowledge, should have been able to stop the disease. Or, surely an all-powerful God could have stopped that accident from happening. Natural questions that are part of our grief.
We also see Jesus who is moved by our grief, indeed, grieves himself for his friend. If we truly believe in Jesus’ full humanity as well as his full divinity then we have an amazing assurance here that God experiences our pain and hurt. Even more profoundly, in Jesus, God knows it as we know it—a union of experience and reality between creator and created.
The story moves on as Jesus does his greatest sign yet. He raises Lazarus from the dead to show God’s glory and to demonstrate that he is the resurrection and the life. Just before we join this story, Mary confronts Jesus about her brother’s death and Jesus replies that he is resurrection and he is life, to which Mary answers that she believes. Note the present tense of those words. It is important. More importantly, he shows that Lazarus in his deepest reality is now partaking in eternal life in God, is now alive in way we can not fully imagine for it is not the same as the life we know before death. Lazarus is part of that communion of saints that exists beyond time and space and that can at times be so intimately present to us. Fully alive in God, fully dead in the material sense of the world we inhabit. Yet again a paradox in our faith that invites in hope and reminds of us the deep Mystery at the heart of it all.
There are some disturbing parts to the story. In fact, if we are honest it is a bit gruesome. We have no idea what Lazarus looks like. Is he called forth as a resuscitated corpse? He does not speak a word. He does nothing else but come forth from the tomb. He is unbound and let go. But to where? It is not a happy ending where he goes home with his sisters, sits down to dinner and they pick up as before. Lazarus does not reintegrate with his former life. What he is exactly and what happens to him is never fully answered.
Which brings us to the perhaps the metaphor and the allegory that his rising and unbinding are meant to invite us to consider. Perhaps we are meant to see an allegory for our life as Christians, our life as an active, living part of the Body of Christ. When we become baptized as Christians we symbolically die and we are symbolically raised to new life, to everlasting life. This idea is part of the Thanksgiving over the Water that we will hear in just a few moments as we prepare to baptize a new member into this communion of saints. “We thank you Father, for the water of Baptism. In it we are buried with Christ in his death. By it we share in his resurrection. Through it we are reborn by the Holy Spirit.” The raising of Lazarus can be seen to my mind as a graphic depiction of the symbol of baptism, our rebirth into the present great mystery of life as part of the resurrected One. What a joyful and hopeful story we are joining.
It is also an allegory for the freedom that we are meant to encounter and destined for once we are reborn into this new journey, a new way of being in the world. Freedom is one of the persistent themes throughout Scripture. It is one of God’s deep hopes for us. Lazarus is bound in death and was also bound in life. We all are. It is a way we image the sin and death that ensnare and infect us. But life in God and for God is a release from that bondage. We hear this too in the words prayed over the water of the font: “Through it you led the children of Israel out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise. In it your Son Jesus received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.” Baptism is the action for us that is a reflection of Jesus’ command to the crowd to unbind Lazarus and let him go. Baptism unbinds us from sin and the power and fear of death so that we can be those people whose lives reflect the Beatitudes, whose lives are witness to life, resurrected life, over death, of love over fear and hostility. We are offered a joyful freedom to celebrate, live, love and give—all through the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. Baptism is the claiming of a radical freedom that we learn about through participation in community, through the sacraments, and through hearing, hearing and hearing again the Gospel of the Christ.
Today we are witnesses to the birth of a new saint, a new blessed one of Jesus. We are present at the gift of radical freedom offered and received. We who are already baptized are reminded of the tremendous response we have made and the sometimes difficult, yet life-giving hope it holds forth for us. So in communion with all the saints past, present and yet to come, we once again remember the mystery, join in the mystery, and become part of reality of an ever-present, ever-loving God who makes his home among us. We celebrate with joy that before all else we are followers of Christ and that as we grow in his stature more and more of life—all that it is and has—becomes consecrated and given to him and the work of his church in the world—a foretaste of the kingdom of heaven, a feast, a place of grace and belonging.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
October 11, 2009, The 19th Sunday after Pentecost
Sunday, October 11, 2009
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Year B, Proper 23
Amos 5:6-7, Ps. 90:12-17, Hebrews 4:12-16, Mark 10:17-31
Whenever I hear or read this passage of the Gospel I am shaken. I want to look for the loophole or the escape hatch. The obvious one is to say that, well, this command to sell all and give to the poor is for him specifically and not for me. But that delusion vanishes as I read further and here the words of Jesus saying how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom. Suddenly, the story has a universal applicability. I am reminded once again of how diametrically opposed the vision of the kingdom of God is from the vision of the American Dream. I claim to follow Jesus and then realize yet again how enmeshed I am in the world about me. See, I understand myself to be like the rich young man, or perhaps somewhere between the man and the disciples who chime in that they’ve left everything. As I thought about what to say today in response to such a full and rich passage, two opposing pairs come to my mind: God’s love and challenging invitation and what is consecrated—our lives to God or our lives to the world.
Let’s look at the first one: God’s love and challenging invitation. The hope in the story that I hear is always in that phrase, “Jesus, looking at him, loved him.” This rich young man is a decent man. He is honest, faithful, caring and sincere. He lives a good and upright life within the culture that is his. Jesus honors this. But the young man coming to Jesus signifies, at least to my mind, that even though he has lived this decent life he is hungry for more. He feels deep in his being it is not enough; there is something more, something deeper, something even more life giving. Jesus is where he sees this and so he runs up to him and prostrates himself—a rich man to whom others would bow himself bows at the feet of a wandering, disturbing man of a lower social strata. He wants to hear the Good News.
Before we hear the words that surely must have been hard to hear, Jesus looks with love, with compassion, on this earnest, decent person. His words are direct, but said with care: “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” Often we tend to hear these words as said with scorn or harsh judgment. Not so. Jesus, who is so keenly aware of the power of wealth and the chimera of security to lure us away from a focus on God and by extension our fellow human beings, is also aware of how fragile, how vulnerable we are. We are pulled by our obligations and responsibilities to provide for ourselves and those closest to us. If we choose a life that doesn’t seem to put us or our children on the path to upward mobility we are put down and criticized. We are in a tough spot.
Jesus though sees the promise underneath and gives it a challenging, but encouraging nudge. But most importantly he starts the whole encounter with a reminder that the unearned, unconditional love of God for us exists first. Then from that love we are invited to live into the challenging vision of the kingdom of God. All too often we hear it, either in our mind or from others, inverted: we must live up to the challenge successfully and then we will receive God’s love. As Jesus demonstrates, it is just the opposite. Love for us comes first; and when we can accept this, the challenge becomes less grievous and more joyful.
And this bring us to look at that second opposing pair I mentioned: the idea of what we consider consecrated.
There are several definitions of the word consecrate. In reading the Gospels and the vision Jesus lays out of the kingdom of God it seems that this definition is the operative one: set apart as sacred; dedicate solemnly to a sacred or religious purpose; make fit for religious use. In living our lives in such a way as to follow Jesus, to take the radical and difficult steps of letting go of the things of this world to be builders of the kingdom, we are in effect consecrating our lives to serve God. We do this as persons and even more so as the Church—a different type of community. All that we are and have is consecrated to this purpose: our time, our things, our money, our dreams, our suffering. And the promise is a new family of many houses, members and fields, along with persecution, for to live this life is to engage fully the suffering and pain and evil of the world. It is not an escape; it is an active engagement. It is a communal vision and one that hopefully can inspire the larger world around it.
There is another definition of consecrate and it is this one that all too often is what happens. It is this: to make an object of veneration or regard. Too often in the course of human life since human life as such began we get the focus wrong. Instead of consecrating our lives and its fruits to God, as things to serve the Holy One, we consecrate the things themselves. Just think of all the things that are “consecrated” in our society in this way: good looks, hip clothes, prestigious jobs, money, sports, sex, etc. These become the ends that are served before God.
Part of the core of our life as followers of Jesus is learning to truly see other people for who they are, warts and all, and to enter into relationship with them. To cultivate this ability we need to learn silence and presence. We are consecrating ourselves to the service of others rather than our own success or ego. We need to have time to be with people without a goal: we go for a walk and sit by a river rather than network; we have dinner with our family instead of another power lunch; we sit vigil by a sick person’s bedside; we sit and look at the world instead of working more overtime or taking on more activities we really can’t manage; we allow ourselves to see the heart of someone not all the surface stuff. The gift is the brothers and mothers and sisters and children of the kingdom of God.
For at the end of the day it matters not how much or how little we have but if we have connection, vital connection to other people. At the end of the day a fancy title cannot replace the ability to sit with someone in their pain or suffering as a steady, silent presence that will not leave. At the end of the day the gift of seeing all people no matter how flawed or messed up as reflections of part of God’s being gives us stores of compassion, the freedom to try new things, the openness of heart to embody a new society. At the end of the day it is not our net worth that matters, but if we have been able to see the worth of all people and live into relationships of dignity, respect and equity. This is the realness of life, the stuff that matters: authentic life with others not a ceaseless striving for outer trappings that at the end of the day can perhaps give us a sense of security but not love, not connection, not belonging, not the kingdom. Perhaps with God we can learn this sooner rather than later, now and not tomorrow, and live into it in our own lives and in the life we advocate for ourselves and others.
Which is why the community of faith is so important. Here we receive another vision, one that rejoices in who we each are with our gifts and abilities, and strives to live a different kind of life that honors all people. We come to learn about ourselves, those things in us that break our connection to one another, so that we can see another way to live. We strive to consecrate our lives to that vision drawn by Jesus time and again. We intentionally turn our lives over to God for with God all things are possible. We come to consecrate ourselves to be part of that kingdom of God and to live, struggles and all, for the sake of the good news.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Year B, Proper 23
Amos 5:6-7, Ps. 90:12-17, Hebrews 4:12-16, Mark 10:17-31
Whenever I hear or read this passage of the Gospel I am shaken. I want to look for the loophole or the escape hatch. The obvious one is to say that, well, this command to sell all and give to the poor is for him specifically and not for me. But that delusion vanishes as I read further and here the words of Jesus saying how hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom. Suddenly, the story has a universal applicability. I am reminded once again of how diametrically opposed the vision of the kingdom of God is from the vision of the American Dream. I claim to follow Jesus and then realize yet again how enmeshed I am in the world about me. See, I understand myself to be like the rich young man, or perhaps somewhere between the man and the disciples who chime in that they’ve left everything. As I thought about what to say today in response to such a full and rich passage, two opposing pairs come to my mind: God’s love and challenging invitation and what is consecrated—our lives to God or our lives to the world.
Let’s look at the first one: God’s love and challenging invitation. The hope in the story that I hear is always in that phrase, “Jesus, looking at him, loved him.” This rich young man is a decent man. He is honest, faithful, caring and sincere. He lives a good and upright life within the culture that is his. Jesus honors this. But the young man coming to Jesus signifies, at least to my mind, that even though he has lived this decent life he is hungry for more. He feels deep in his being it is not enough; there is something more, something deeper, something even more life giving. Jesus is where he sees this and so he runs up to him and prostrates himself—a rich man to whom others would bow himself bows at the feet of a wandering, disturbing man of a lower social strata. He wants to hear the Good News.
Before we hear the words that surely must have been hard to hear, Jesus looks with love, with compassion, on this earnest, decent person. His words are direct, but said with care: “You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.” Often we tend to hear these words as said with scorn or harsh judgment. Not so. Jesus, who is so keenly aware of the power of wealth and the chimera of security to lure us away from a focus on God and by extension our fellow human beings, is also aware of how fragile, how vulnerable we are. We are pulled by our obligations and responsibilities to provide for ourselves and those closest to us. If we choose a life that doesn’t seem to put us or our children on the path to upward mobility we are put down and criticized. We are in a tough spot.
Jesus though sees the promise underneath and gives it a challenging, but encouraging nudge. But most importantly he starts the whole encounter with a reminder that the unearned, unconditional love of God for us exists first. Then from that love we are invited to live into the challenging vision of the kingdom of God. All too often we hear it, either in our mind or from others, inverted: we must live up to the challenge successfully and then we will receive God’s love. As Jesus demonstrates, it is just the opposite. Love for us comes first; and when we can accept this, the challenge becomes less grievous and more joyful.
And this bring us to look at that second opposing pair I mentioned: the idea of what we consider consecrated.
There are several definitions of the word consecrate. In reading the Gospels and the vision Jesus lays out of the kingdom of God it seems that this definition is the operative one: set apart as sacred; dedicate solemnly to a sacred or religious purpose; make fit for religious use. In living our lives in such a way as to follow Jesus, to take the radical and difficult steps of letting go of the things of this world to be builders of the kingdom, we are in effect consecrating our lives to serve God. We do this as persons and even more so as the Church—a different type of community. All that we are and have is consecrated to this purpose: our time, our things, our money, our dreams, our suffering. And the promise is a new family of many houses, members and fields, along with persecution, for to live this life is to engage fully the suffering and pain and evil of the world. It is not an escape; it is an active engagement. It is a communal vision and one that hopefully can inspire the larger world around it.
There is another definition of consecrate and it is this one that all too often is what happens. It is this: to make an object of veneration or regard. Too often in the course of human life since human life as such began we get the focus wrong. Instead of consecrating our lives and its fruits to God, as things to serve the Holy One, we consecrate the things themselves. Just think of all the things that are “consecrated” in our society in this way: good looks, hip clothes, prestigious jobs, money, sports, sex, etc. These become the ends that are served before God.
Part of the core of our life as followers of Jesus is learning to truly see other people for who they are, warts and all, and to enter into relationship with them. To cultivate this ability we need to learn silence and presence. We are consecrating ourselves to the service of others rather than our own success or ego. We need to have time to be with people without a goal: we go for a walk and sit by a river rather than network; we have dinner with our family instead of another power lunch; we sit vigil by a sick person’s bedside; we sit and look at the world instead of working more overtime or taking on more activities we really can’t manage; we allow ourselves to see the heart of someone not all the surface stuff. The gift is the brothers and mothers and sisters and children of the kingdom of God.
For at the end of the day it matters not how much or how little we have but if we have connection, vital connection to other people. At the end of the day a fancy title cannot replace the ability to sit with someone in their pain or suffering as a steady, silent presence that will not leave. At the end of the day the gift of seeing all people no matter how flawed or messed up as reflections of part of God’s being gives us stores of compassion, the freedom to try new things, the openness of heart to embody a new society. At the end of the day it is not our net worth that matters, but if we have been able to see the worth of all people and live into relationships of dignity, respect and equity. This is the realness of life, the stuff that matters: authentic life with others not a ceaseless striving for outer trappings that at the end of the day can perhaps give us a sense of security but not love, not connection, not belonging, not the kingdom. Perhaps with God we can learn this sooner rather than later, now and not tomorrow, and live into it in our own lives and in the life we advocate for ourselves and others.
Which is why the community of faith is so important. Here we receive another vision, one that rejoices in who we each are with our gifts and abilities, and strives to live a different kind of life that honors all people. We come to learn about ourselves, those things in us that break our connection to one another, so that we can see another way to live. We strive to consecrate our lives to that vision drawn by Jesus time and again. We intentionally turn our lives over to God for with God all things are possible. We come to consecrate ourselves to be part of that kingdom of God and to live, struggles and all, for the sake of the good news.
October 4, 2009, The Feast of St. Francis
October 4, 2009
The Feast of St. Francis
The Rev. Tasha Brubaker Garrison
During my last year of college I took a course in nationalism. It was a fascinating course. On one of the first days we were asked to list the ways we identified ourselves. We each came up with our words and then we shared them. Often what pops into our minds first are the identities that hold the most weight for us. And while I don’t remember my list exactly or in the order I wrote them down completely accurately, I do have a decent recollection. My list went something like this: woman, white/Euro-American, Christian, Californian, student, only child and perhaps one or two more. Others list were similar or markedly different. Some included identities I didn’t claim though others would certainly see me from those angles. Today that list would probably look different, with Christian or Christian disciple probably being first given the pattern my life has followed and the way God has worked on my heart.
I wonder what the list would have looked like for St. Francis before he became St. Francis. Francesco Bernadone was a brash, spoiled youth. His life was that of privilege and wealth though not great education. The son of a successful cloth merchant he was surely the life of the party. He got into brawls, went off on a crusade or two seeking fame and adventure, and eventually spent a rather long time in jail in Perugia, I am not sure for what act of hooliganism. I imagine his list looked like this: man, rich Umbrian, adventurer, upper class, and perhaps a few more with Christian somewhere at the bottom. Like much of the world since Christianity became the official religion of Rome and other kingdoms, many if not most people were born into it and followed it as a matter of course—one among many identities. It was not an intentional, life-altering conversion as it was for the first generations. But that conversion still does happen. Francis came out of jail a transformed man intent on following the Gospel literally. If he had to list his identities I think it would have boiled down to one: disciple of Christ.
As legend goes his father was none to pleased with his son’s behavior and wanted him to settle down and take on responsibilities to the family and the business. The dénouement came in church when Francis quite literally stripped himself naked, tossing beautiful clothes and cloaks on the floor, and left to take up the life of an itinerant servant of the Gospel married to Lady Poverty. People did not know what to make of him. Surely many whispered behind raised hands and the eyebrows of upper crust Assisi reached new heights. What was that ridiculous child doing! Much the same was said about Jesus. Even his family was at a loss. And yet while confounded and repelled by his extreme change in lifestyle, people were also drawn to it and intrigued by it for there was a honesty, a courage, a purity of motive that shown through and reminded them of deeper truths and hopes. He was seen around Assisi barefoot, in simple, rough clothes, begging for food and preaching purity of heart and peace to all. He loved all creatures with an infinite love that reflected God’s love. He lived in companionship with animals as diverse as wolves and birds. He worked with his hands, swept and cleaned churches, cared for the sick and lepers, and sent food to brigands with greetings of affection. He spent much time alone in prayer. He owned nothing beyond the clothes on his back and as others joined his order things could be given or lent to them but they could have no money and no property.
In his literal following of the Gospel he clearly grasped one of the central points of Jesus’ teaching. More than any other topic Jesus speaks of the dilemma of money and wealth, even modest financial security, and serving God. He is clear that one cannot serve both. The pursuit of things, of money, pulls us into a way of life that places self at the center. It is that life that then tempts us even more strongly than we already are into jealously, rivalry, selfishness, power and control over others. Conversely, serving God does not mean that we are to have nothing at all for anyone and simply lie down and die. Rather, it is to use what we have modestly and first and foremost for the well-being of others. In caring for one another we ultimately will have enough for ourselves, but only if our hearts have God, love of God and service to all things created by God, at our heart and as our prime motivation.
There is an old saying for preachers. It goes like this: the Gospel is meant to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. It’s helpful as far as it goes. It can easily slide into giving guilt trips to those who are comfortable in worldly terms without recognizing that affliction comes in many guises, and it can treat the afflicted with pity and as perpetual victims without realizing that the marginalized in this world are often in need of empowerment and spiritual challenge as well. Francis embodies this tension for us. He afflicts, niggles, disturbs us and at the same time comforts and inspires us. No other saint is as popular as he. Outside of Mary who else more frequently adorns our gardens? We may be more at ease with him in a corner with the flowers where his radical message doesn’t confront us too often, but he is there all the same.
This tension of attraction and repulsion was present from the start of his ministry. In time a few joined with him. His witness grabbed the souls of enough men and women to turn them into a recognized movement within the Church. Yet many were bewildered. As he wrote in the Franciscan Rule of 1223: “The brothers shall have nothing of their own, neither house, nor land, nor anything, but as pilgrims and strangers in this world serving the Lord in poverty and humility, let them confidently go asking for alms. Nor let them be ashamed of this, for the Lord made himself poor for us in this world. Let this be your portion, which leads into the land of the living. Cling wholly to this, my most beloved brothers, and you shall wish to have in this world nothing else than the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” What he asked was difficult and utterly counter-cultural. I doubt I could give up all I own to follow him if he walked by today. I would fight desperately to keep my dog and my oboe, assuming Blaine wanted to go with me. In effect, I would become homeless in a world that sees the homeless as generally a nuisance to be dealt with and something we would rather not see. Talk about scary. But I sense that his vision would also draw me.
Now, I doubt that anyone is going to have a moment of stripping naked in worship today and starting a new life just like that of Francis. Though nothing is impossible with God. But perhaps by remembering and recalling the intense incarnation of the Gospel in Francis we can find the way into the next step on our journey into a life centered in and having at its center God. For myself it invites me to engage with more concentrated prayer the thought of joining an order, something that has long played at the edges of my heart even as I work to give more away, live with less and less, and try my very best to serve others. For you, it will be whatever it is that is poking at your edges.
As Sam Portaro writes: “ Traveling without encumbrance, these roving monks have been a constant reminder through the ages that we are not hostages to creation, but the blessed recipients of its bounty, and stewards of its riches. Francis and those who follow in his way preach to us by living as though the gospel were a reality; they live as though the kingdom of God were present, the victory of Christ over this world as real as the closing Dow Jones average and the morning commute. They are an icon of vocation for every Christian, searching us and compelling us to see what we might be, and to live it.
The Feast of St. Francis
The Rev. Tasha Brubaker Garrison
During my last year of college I took a course in nationalism. It was a fascinating course. On one of the first days we were asked to list the ways we identified ourselves. We each came up with our words and then we shared them. Often what pops into our minds first are the identities that hold the most weight for us. And while I don’t remember my list exactly or in the order I wrote them down completely accurately, I do have a decent recollection. My list went something like this: woman, white/Euro-American, Christian, Californian, student, only child and perhaps one or two more. Others list were similar or markedly different. Some included identities I didn’t claim though others would certainly see me from those angles. Today that list would probably look different, with Christian or Christian disciple probably being first given the pattern my life has followed and the way God has worked on my heart.
I wonder what the list would have looked like for St. Francis before he became St. Francis. Francesco Bernadone was a brash, spoiled youth. His life was that of privilege and wealth though not great education. The son of a successful cloth merchant he was surely the life of the party. He got into brawls, went off on a crusade or two seeking fame and adventure, and eventually spent a rather long time in jail in Perugia, I am not sure for what act of hooliganism. I imagine his list looked like this: man, rich Umbrian, adventurer, upper class, and perhaps a few more with Christian somewhere at the bottom. Like much of the world since Christianity became the official religion of Rome and other kingdoms, many if not most people were born into it and followed it as a matter of course—one among many identities. It was not an intentional, life-altering conversion as it was for the first generations. But that conversion still does happen. Francis came out of jail a transformed man intent on following the Gospel literally. If he had to list his identities I think it would have boiled down to one: disciple of Christ.
As legend goes his father was none to pleased with his son’s behavior and wanted him to settle down and take on responsibilities to the family and the business. The dénouement came in church when Francis quite literally stripped himself naked, tossing beautiful clothes and cloaks on the floor, and left to take up the life of an itinerant servant of the Gospel married to Lady Poverty. People did not know what to make of him. Surely many whispered behind raised hands and the eyebrows of upper crust Assisi reached new heights. What was that ridiculous child doing! Much the same was said about Jesus. Even his family was at a loss. And yet while confounded and repelled by his extreme change in lifestyle, people were also drawn to it and intrigued by it for there was a honesty, a courage, a purity of motive that shown through and reminded them of deeper truths and hopes. He was seen around Assisi barefoot, in simple, rough clothes, begging for food and preaching purity of heart and peace to all. He loved all creatures with an infinite love that reflected God’s love. He lived in companionship with animals as diverse as wolves and birds. He worked with his hands, swept and cleaned churches, cared for the sick and lepers, and sent food to brigands with greetings of affection. He spent much time alone in prayer. He owned nothing beyond the clothes on his back and as others joined his order things could be given or lent to them but they could have no money and no property.
In his literal following of the Gospel he clearly grasped one of the central points of Jesus’ teaching. More than any other topic Jesus speaks of the dilemma of money and wealth, even modest financial security, and serving God. He is clear that one cannot serve both. The pursuit of things, of money, pulls us into a way of life that places self at the center. It is that life that then tempts us even more strongly than we already are into jealously, rivalry, selfishness, power and control over others. Conversely, serving God does not mean that we are to have nothing at all for anyone and simply lie down and die. Rather, it is to use what we have modestly and first and foremost for the well-being of others. In caring for one another we ultimately will have enough for ourselves, but only if our hearts have God, love of God and service to all things created by God, at our heart and as our prime motivation.
There is an old saying for preachers. It goes like this: the Gospel is meant to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. It’s helpful as far as it goes. It can easily slide into giving guilt trips to those who are comfortable in worldly terms without recognizing that affliction comes in many guises, and it can treat the afflicted with pity and as perpetual victims without realizing that the marginalized in this world are often in need of empowerment and spiritual challenge as well. Francis embodies this tension for us. He afflicts, niggles, disturbs us and at the same time comforts and inspires us. No other saint is as popular as he. Outside of Mary who else more frequently adorns our gardens? We may be more at ease with him in a corner with the flowers where his radical message doesn’t confront us too often, but he is there all the same.
This tension of attraction and repulsion was present from the start of his ministry. In time a few joined with him. His witness grabbed the souls of enough men and women to turn them into a recognized movement within the Church. Yet many were bewildered. As he wrote in the Franciscan Rule of 1223: “The brothers shall have nothing of their own, neither house, nor land, nor anything, but as pilgrims and strangers in this world serving the Lord in poverty and humility, let them confidently go asking for alms. Nor let them be ashamed of this, for the Lord made himself poor for us in this world. Let this be your portion, which leads into the land of the living. Cling wholly to this, my most beloved brothers, and you shall wish to have in this world nothing else than the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.” What he asked was difficult and utterly counter-cultural. I doubt I could give up all I own to follow him if he walked by today. I would fight desperately to keep my dog and my oboe, assuming Blaine wanted to go with me. In effect, I would become homeless in a world that sees the homeless as generally a nuisance to be dealt with and something we would rather not see. Talk about scary. But I sense that his vision would also draw me.
Now, I doubt that anyone is going to have a moment of stripping naked in worship today and starting a new life just like that of Francis. Though nothing is impossible with God. But perhaps by remembering and recalling the intense incarnation of the Gospel in Francis we can find the way into the next step on our journey into a life centered in and having at its center God. For myself it invites me to engage with more concentrated prayer the thought of joining an order, something that has long played at the edges of my heart even as I work to give more away, live with less and less, and try my very best to serve others. For you, it will be whatever it is that is poking at your edges.
As Sam Portaro writes: “ Traveling without encumbrance, these roving monks have been a constant reminder through the ages that we are not hostages to creation, but the blessed recipients of its bounty, and stewards of its riches. Francis and those who follow in his way preach to us by living as though the gospel were a reality; they live as though the kingdom of God were present, the victory of Christ over this world as real as the closing Dow Jones average and the morning commute. They are an icon of vocation for every Christian, searching us and compelling us to see what we might be, and to live it.
Monday, September 28, 2009
September 27, 2009, 17th Sunday after Pentecost
September 27, 2009
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Year B, 17th Sunday after Pentecost
Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29; Psalm 19:7-14; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50
It's pretty hard to make a connection between the portion of Mark's Gospel we hear today and baptism. The closest we get at first glance is the mention of the cup of water. But actually there is quite a bit, for baptism is both a sacred, mysterious and complete event and a moment along the path of conversion into a Christian—a follower of Jesus. At the heart of this is the notion of illumination. This is an old and orthodox understanding of baptism: it is about illuminating our hearts and minds with the knowledge, the wisdom, of Jesus. The process of illumination transforms us and turns us more and more into the image of Jesus. It's a risky road. It might lead to being cast out, called naïve or impractical or unpatriotic or heretical. It might lead us to suffer or die for the love and life of others who are ground down by the ways of the world. We can forget how serious this process is. And serious it is once we really open ourselves up to it.
It is that power, that seriousness, that perhaps we see a hint of in Jesus' comments about cutting off limbs. I think it describes the paradoxically painful and life-giving process of opening ourselves up to the God of all creation that created us for goodness, for love, for mutual interdependence. We discover attitudes, beliefs, stances, behaviors and such that we realize can no longer live in us as a follower of the Anointed One. And it is often a radical act of will, a hard act of will, to give them up. As we are illuminated in our hearts we see what we are stumbling over. The cost of not removing the stumbling blocks is nothing less then the loss of our very soul. Perhaps that is what is meant by being thrown into hell—living a life with a lost soul.
The act of receiving the Sacrament of Baptism is a profound and intentional act of claiming our souls. It is an act of naming that our souls fully live when brought into the life of Jesus and under the shining light of God's glory. We become little ones, children of God, beginning to be grow again in a new life marked by Jesus’ life. The hope, I think, is that when people see a Christian it is somehow apparent in how they live, how they speak, and how they love.
The reason that I am going on about Baptism is that today we are, as a community, going to celebrate the preparation of a member of this congregation for this holy Sacrament. One of our parish will be admitted to the catechumenate, the preparation process for baptism, as soon as this sermon is over. It is a beautiful and powerful act and by having the community mark and honor this step we take seriously the importance of baptism. It is not just something we do; it is utterly and completely life-changing.
The early Church took the preparation for baptism very seriously. Rites and courses of instruction varied from Jerusalem to Byzantium to Rome, but what they all had in common was that it was a lengthy process and the baptismal rite itself was elaborate and complex. In the Byzantium rite people were enrolled at the third week of Lent and had to take instruction during the week. Each candidate underwent three exorcisms after which he or she was now a catechumen. It is important to realize that these exorcisms weren’t in the vein we understand them now: a radical cure for possession. Rather, it was a cleansing and a purifying from the contamination of the world. Along with this the celebrant said a prayer over the candidate, breathed on her three times and sealed her three times with oil—on the forehead, the mouth and the breast. Lovely litanies for those to be enlightened (as they were called) were prayed by the community. On Good Friday there was the Rite of Renunciation and Allegiance. At the Easter Vigil the font is blessed with breath and signing and incense. Lengthy prayers were made. The oil of gladness was blessed. The catechumen was anointed with oil before baptism and heard these words: Blessed be God, who enlightens and sanctifies everyone who comes into the world, now and forever and unto the ages of ages. Then the person was submerged three times (and one was naked for this) and then anointed again afterwards, as well as being dressed in a new white robe.
In early Rome the rite was similar. Upon admission the catechumen was given a morsel of blessed salt upon the tongue as a sign of wisdom and God's favor. Then in the coming weeks, the catechumen underwent instruction and a series of scrutinies. Again, an exorcism was performed. The Creed and the Lord's Prayer were handed over and these were to be memorized. Before baptism there was a final exorcism and something called the Effeta and Anointing before Baptism wherein the priest touched the ears and nostrils of the catechecum with spit saying Effeta, that is, be opened, unto an odor of sweetness. But thou, O devil, take flight, for the judgment of God has drawn near. After submersion, there was a custom of blessing water, honey and milk. Water was the spirit of truth and the milk and honey was a reminder of the promised land flowing with milk and honey. The mixture of the milk and honey signified the union of heavenly and earthly substance in Christ. The newly baptized were given this mixture at the time of communion, their first communion.
In looking at our history we see how tame our baptismal rites have become in comparison. In many places people are reclaiming some of the lost ritual. More and more people ask for full immersion, for example. I think much of this is to help us remember through the action the profound, the life-altering nature, that Baptism is for those of us who seek it. The language of the early prayers invokes that earth-shattering significance of what was taking place. They are full of the language of being born, of emerging anew from the womb of the Church, the enlightening of the heart and the mind, the seeing ourselves as infants, little children, children in Christ, leaving the old world and its ways behind once and for all to join into this new reality, this new life. This language was woven throughout the entire liturgy not just the time right before baptism. There was a deep symbol being enacted through stripping of clothes, prayers, anointing, etc. that pointed to one’s death, indeed were the very actions done to a person’s body at death, and then the symbol of being born through the submersion and coming out of the water naked, the dressing and blessing of the person by the priest, deacons and deaconesses—spiritual midwives—and the reception into the new family by being fed and given drink. Life is transformed into new life through this act that recalls the death and resurrection of Christ. What we are after is what we were, yet so much more than that. We are different; we are part of another reality that exists within this world, yet is not the same as it. This is a bold and audacious claim! And it is the one we make at baptism.
Clement of Alexandria, one of the great figures of the early Church, wrote extensively on the centrality of baptism. To him we are the children, we the baptized. Our life is now intimately involved in God, Christ, Spirit, resurrection, forgiveness and hope. We are a new people—our first task is to grow as disciples. Here is a little summation of Clement’s main understandings of baptism as distilled by Richard Norris, a contemporary church historian:
The first [theme] is that Christian initiation, with the formation and discipline it involves, marks, for Clement, a definite boundary: a boundary in people’s relation to God, a boundary in their inner sense of who they are, and a social boundary that marks out a “new people”—a people who live out the human enterprise in a new way. The second theme can be summed up in the two words “child” and paideia (training). Clement will not allow that Baptism needs supplementation of any sort; it sets people in the way of salvation firmly and surely. The baptized are “children of God”. Nevertheless they are children, and the living out of the new life is therefore, in his eyes, an affair of continuous learning and growing. To put the matter briskly, what Baptism creates is a collection of disciples, apprentices of the divine Word, whose common life is, in every sense of the term, a practice.
Now on this picture we need to reflect—carefully and, for that matter, critically. The baptismal community as Clement pictures it is not, when one peers closely at it, a phenomenon that we find very familiar. In spite of the fact that he was, in his time and place, a notorious liberal, and quite possible suspect in some circles for just that reason, he is clear in his mind that the Church is not a religious institution in the service of its society; it is another society, living a new and different sort of life, which one enters only through a personal revolution and which for that reason is inevitably set apart in its world. It is a collection of people whose business it is constantly to rehearse a divinely authored play whose first actual, full performance will occur in the Age to Come. What its member are presently engaged in is the enterprise of learning their parts; …a continuing process of paideia. Christ “is to us a spotless image; to him we are to try with all our might to assimilate our souls.”
As we prepare and baptize new little ones we too are reminded that as part of this other society we also are children growing into the stature of Christ. Baptism isn’t the end; it is just the beginning. We are to look at our baptismal vows and see what makes us stumble in living them out. We are to look and see at how we are growing as a community and as individuals in prayer, worship, love, forgiveness and resembling Jesus. We pray together, confess together, walk together following Jesus in peace. After all, that is the community we have joined and it is our God-given task. We are assured of salvation, but we are simultaneously charged to live into that salvation actively here and now. We are to retell and retell the story and see how it is being told today in our world. A holy task for we, holy children, a holy people, of God.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Year B, 17th Sunday after Pentecost
Numbers 11:4-6, 10-16, 24-29; Psalm 19:7-14; James 5:13-20; Mark 9:38-50
It's pretty hard to make a connection between the portion of Mark's Gospel we hear today and baptism. The closest we get at first glance is the mention of the cup of water. But actually there is quite a bit, for baptism is both a sacred, mysterious and complete event and a moment along the path of conversion into a Christian—a follower of Jesus. At the heart of this is the notion of illumination. This is an old and orthodox understanding of baptism: it is about illuminating our hearts and minds with the knowledge, the wisdom, of Jesus. The process of illumination transforms us and turns us more and more into the image of Jesus. It's a risky road. It might lead to being cast out, called naïve or impractical or unpatriotic or heretical. It might lead us to suffer or die for the love and life of others who are ground down by the ways of the world. We can forget how serious this process is. And serious it is once we really open ourselves up to it.
It is that power, that seriousness, that perhaps we see a hint of in Jesus' comments about cutting off limbs. I think it describes the paradoxically painful and life-giving process of opening ourselves up to the God of all creation that created us for goodness, for love, for mutual interdependence. We discover attitudes, beliefs, stances, behaviors and such that we realize can no longer live in us as a follower of the Anointed One. And it is often a radical act of will, a hard act of will, to give them up. As we are illuminated in our hearts we see what we are stumbling over. The cost of not removing the stumbling blocks is nothing less then the loss of our very soul. Perhaps that is what is meant by being thrown into hell—living a life with a lost soul.
The act of receiving the Sacrament of Baptism is a profound and intentional act of claiming our souls. It is an act of naming that our souls fully live when brought into the life of Jesus and under the shining light of God's glory. We become little ones, children of God, beginning to be grow again in a new life marked by Jesus’ life. The hope, I think, is that when people see a Christian it is somehow apparent in how they live, how they speak, and how they love.
The reason that I am going on about Baptism is that today we are, as a community, going to celebrate the preparation of a member of this congregation for this holy Sacrament. One of our parish will be admitted to the catechumenate, the preparation process for baptism, as soon as this sermon is over. It is a beautiful and powerful act and by having the community mark and honor this step we take seriously the importance of baptism. It is not just something we do; it is utterly and completely life-changing.
The early Church took the preparation for baptism very seriously. Rites and courses of instruction varied from Jerusalem to Byzantium to Rome, but what they all had in common was that it was a lengthy process and the baptismal rite itself was elaborate and complex. In the Byzantium rite people were enrolled at the third week of Lent and had to take instruction during the week. Each candidate underwent three exorcisms after which he or she was now a catechumen. It is important to realize that these exorcisms weren’t in the vein we understand them now: a radical cure for possession. Rather, it was a cleansing and a purifying from the contamination of the world. Along with this the celebrant said a prayer over the candidate, breathed on her three times and sealed her three times with oil—on the forehead, the mouth and the breast. Lovely litanies for those to be enlightened (as they were called) were prayed by the community. On Good Friday there was the Rite of Renunciation and Allegiance. At the Easter Vigil the font is blessed with breath and signing and incense. Lengthy prayers were made. The oil of gladness was blessed. The catechumen was anointed with oil before baptism and heard these words: Blessed be God, who enlightens and sanctifies everyone who comes into the world, now and forever and unto the ages of ages. Then the person was submerged three times (and one was naked for this) and then anointed again afterwards, as well as being dressed in a new white robe.
In early Rome the rite was similar. Upon admission the catechumen was given a morsel of blessed salt upon the tongue as a sign of wisdom and God's favor. Then in the coming weeks, the catechumen underwent instruction and a series of scrutinies. Again, an exorcism was performed. The Creed and the Lord's Prayer were handed over and these were to be memorized. Before baptism there was a final exorcism and something called the Effeta and Anointing before Baptism wherein the priest touched the ears and nostrils of the catechecum with spit saying Effeta, that is, be opened, unto an odor of sweetness. But thou, O devil, take flight, for the judgment of God has drawn near. After submersion, there was a custom of blessing water, honey and milk. Water was the spirit of truth and the milk and honey was a reminder of the promised land flowing with milk and honey. The mixture of the milk and honey signified the union of heavenly and earthly substance in Christ. The newly baptized were given this mixture at the time of communion, their first communion.
In looking at our history we see how tame our baptismal rites have become in comparison. In many places people are reclaiming some of the lost ritual. More and more people ask for full immersion, for example. I think much of this is to help us remember through the action the profound, the life-altering nature, that Baptism is for those of us who seek it. The language of the early prayers invokes that earth-shattering significance of what was taking place. They are full of the language of being born, of emerging anew from the womb of the Church, the enlightening of the heart and the mind, the seeing ourselves as infants, little children, children in Christ, leaving the old world and its ways behind once and for all to join into this new reality, this new life. This language was woven throughout the entire liturgy not just the time right before baptism. There was a deep symbol being enacted through stripping of clothes, prayers, anointing, etc. that pointed to one’s death, indeed were the very actions done to a person’s body at death, and then the symbol of being born through the submersion and coming out of the water naked, the dressing and blessing of the person by the priest, deacons and deaconesses—spiritual midwives—and the reception into the new family by being fed and given drink. Life is transformed into new life through this act that recalls the death and resurrection of Christ. What we are after is what we were, yet so much more than that. We are different; we are part of another reality that exists within this world, yet is not the same as it. This is a bold and audacious claim! And it is the one we make at baptism.
Clement of Alexandria, one of the great figures of the early Church, wrote extensively on the centrality of baptism. To him we are the children, we the baptized. Our life is now intimately involved in God, Christ, Spirit, resurrection, forgiveness and hope. We are a new people—our first task is to grow as disciples. Here is a little summation of Clement’s main understandings of baptism as distilled by Richard Norris, a contemporary church historian:
The first [theme] is that Christian initiation, with the formation and discipline it involves, marks, for Clement, a definite boundary: a boundary in people’s relation to God, a boundary in their inner sense of who they are, and a social boundary that marks out a “new people”—a people who live out the human enterprise in a new way. The second theme can be summed up in the two words “child” and paideia (training). Clement will not allow that Baptism needs supplementation of any sort; it sets people in the way of salvation firmly and surely. The baptized are “children of God”. Nevertheless they are children, and the living out of the new life is therefore, in his eyes, an affair of continuous learning and growing. To put the matter briskly, what Baptism creates is a collection of disciples, apprentices of the divine Word, whose common life is, in every sense of the term, a practice.
Now on this picture we need to reflect—carefully and, for that matter, critically. The baptismal community as Clement pictures it is not, when one peers closely at it, a phenomenon that we find very familiar. In spite of the fact that he was, in his time and place, a notorious liberal, and quite possible suspect in some circles for just that reason, he is clear in his mind that the Church is not a religious institution in the service of its society; it is another society, living a new and different sort of life, which one enters only through a personal revolution and which for that reason is inevitably set apart in its world. It is a collection of people whose business it is constantly to rehearse a divinely authored play whose first actual, full performance will occur in the Age to Come. What its member are presently engaged in is the enterprise of learning their parts; …a continuing process of paideia. Christ “is to us a spotless image; to him we are to try with all our might to assimilate our souls.”
As we prepare and baptize new little ones we too are reminded that as part of this other society we also are children growing into the stature of Christ. Baptism isn’t the end; it is just the beginning. We are to look at our baptismal vows and see what makes us stumble in living them out. We are to look and see at how we are growing as a community and as individuals in prayer, worship, love, forgiveness and resembling Jesus. We pray together, confess together, walk together following Jesus in peace. After all, that is the community we have joined and it is our God-given task. We are assured of salvation, but we are simultaneously charged to live into that salvation actively here and now. We are to retell and retell the story and see how it is being told today in our world. A holy task for we, holy children, a holy people, of God.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
September 20, 2009, 16th Sunday after Pentecost
Sunday, September 20, 2009
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
16th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 20
Jeremiah11:18-20, Ps 54, James3:13-4:3,7-8a, Mark 9:30-37
Have you ever experienced being a non-person? By that I mean, being viewed as invisible or without social value? Or visible but with a negative, harmful social value? Most of us have on a small scale: the time we were teased and cast out for a day or week at school, the relative that dismissed us or has cut us off. Some of us have experienced it socially depending on our station in life and the way we are identified. Most women have known a time when they were treated as a non-person in a world still struggling with equality and rights for the female sex. Some current non-persons in our collective life are illegal immigrants, the homeless, convicts and in all too many places those who constitute the group called GLBT. Non-persons are at the bottom of the social scale of least to greatest. And most of us don't want to be at the bottom end for good reason. The system is founded on enshrined maltreatment, from neglect to killing (think of Matthew Shepherd, James Bird and the homeless man called Pac-man who was beaten to death here just a few months ago) of those on the lower end of the spectrum.
Jesus today not only turns that system on its head, but subverts it. None of us would consider children non-persons. Children are valued and treasured in our culture. They are seen as full of wonder and innocence, human beings to be formed and nurtured. And while our understanding and the reality on the ground with the number of children living in poverty and need continuing to grow may not be in synch with each other, none of us would simply not see a child as a human being. It's a truism in fund raising that people can't say no to children and we see that used in appeals and campaigns all the time. And that is likely due to this Gospel today.
In Jesus' time children were non-beings. The world of antiquity didn't begin to take notice of offspring until they reached adolescence and were thus nascent adults. The Roman world, which Palestine was a part of at the time of Jesus' life, was clearly a non-child focused culture. This is not to say that children were unloved or neglected, but that children simply didn't signify in public life. So, when Jesus puts a child in the midst of the disciples as an illustration, his followers are gob smacked. A child had no business hanging out with a bunch of adults and a respected teacher. In fact, this child might even have been a household slave. Even more scandalous!
When Jesus tells the disciples that those who want to be first must be last and servant of all he isn't simply saying let's shake up the distribution pattern. Let's just switch people's places within the same structure. That really isn't changing anything is it for the structure remains the same. He effectively calls for a re-creation of the structure with the words “servant of all”. When we are being a servant to all we aren't basing our decisions on who is greater and who is lesser. We aren't being kind to someone because they have power and influence and this is a chip we can call in later. We aren't being helpful to someone who is lesser to get an advantage over him. Servant to all is an equalizer of worth. It flattens the curve and the line points directly to God. Why is this so? Because Jesus makes the explicit connection that a servant child is a reflection of God, of the Holy One. To receive this non-person with welcome and care is the exact same thing as welcoming God. Now talk about a radical notion.
The only thing that limits us is our thinking. Today's Gospel is the perfect reading for an impassioned social justice sermon, and boy was I tempted! Jesus had a vision of radical love and inclusion of all that takes us to a place beyond right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, to a transforming way of being with each other that shapes us to love and heals us of our sin. We start from a place where first all our welcome and all persons reveal in themselves the image of God and then move from there to construct our relationships, our right relationships, with each other. In our world, we tend to start by first sorting and then building, which keeps us spinning in circles. But this isn't going to be a social justice sermon per se.
And here is why. The first disciples upon hearing this were dumbfounded. They couldn't wrap their minds around this notion. They had a failure of imagination and the ability to rethink things. Before social justice, before any truly real change, Jesus shows us we need to fire up and engage our imaginations!
The early church was a shock to the world around it because men and women worshipped together and shared the gifts of the Spirit. Slaves and free shared a meal. It was a radically different grouping of people and people couldn’t imagine it. But the earliest Christians could and did because of the imagination of Jesus, drawing on the very best, the very heart of his Jewish faith. In his world and the vision he shared there were no non-beings. No one was superfluous or expendable. The early Christians had to open their minds and imaginations to understand the resurrection, the meaning of the cross and the presence of Christ still among them. Were they scared? Yes, we hear it in today’s Gospel. Yet, their re-born imaginations were able to find a way to express this new hope to others and capture their hearts.
Imagination is the locus of creativity, revelation, flexibility and possibility. It is the home of hope. As we grow up our imaginations calcify, ossify, and we begin to only believe that the way of the world is possible. We become practical to the point of resignation. But life and the life of the spirit are living, active, pulsing things that needs our imaginations to work. Perhaps Jesus put a child in the midst of the disciples to remind them of the amazing gift that children’s imaginations are. Imagination spans the gap between what is and what can be—that vision of the divine kingdom that embodies the love of Christ and the essence of the beatitudes: blessed are the merciful, the hungry, the peacemakers…
Here are a few samples of what the spirit-filled imagination of the early Church was able to envision and make real. Though there was never an explicit command for it, many in the early Church quickly understood that slavery was incompatible with the life of Jesus. Manumission of slaves was a common occurrence in the early Church. Women served as deacons, teachers, leaders and probably even priests in the earliest days. For the first three hundred years the Church was pacifist for it could not reconcile Jesus’ hard command to love our neighbors and our enemies with war. The desert fathers and mothers laid the groundwork for the monastic option of life that grew within the Church. Most of us don’t realize that the option for a woman to live a theologically and socially valued life as a single, unmarried person was a revelation in antiquity. To become a nun was to gain an amazing freedom over one’s person and life. Hospitals and orphanages were fruits of the early Christians’ imagination and so much more. In time, the Church began more and more to accommodate the world as is so clearly seen, for example, even in the Epistles where woman are quickly put back into their old social place.
But the imaginative work of Jesus still has lived on. Whether recognized or not the idea of universal human rights comes from Christian roots. Every great movement for change that has lifted up the non-beings and the poor and the ignored has been a great act of imagination. The first abolitionists were considered crazy. It was impossible for America to survive without slavery. The movement to end segregation and legal disenfranchisement was likewise met with disbelief. But the imagination that is lit and sustained by the vision of Jesus can dream great dreams and not only dream them but find the way to get from what is to what is possible. That is the great task of our faith in God; not to make God fit into our world, but to call our world forward into God’s kingdom. And not only our faith in God, our love of Jesus the Christ, and our trust in his teachings are needed, but our imaginations as well. That is essential. Without it our churches too begin to ossify and calcify. They begin to look just like the world around them instead of being the leaven, the carbonation, the electrifying place where our souls come to be given the power to act for the future and the hope of God’s kingdom.
The invitation in today’s Gospel is, I think, that call to fire up our imaginations. As we read the Gospel, hear the Good News, what dreams does it spark in us? What impossibilities does it invite us to think just might be possibilities? What might it let each of us imagine for our own lives and for our common life together? What dream might it hold for the larger world in which we live that is struggling so hard now in the systems and relationships it has created? Ponder the texts. Pray with them. And in our prayer may we let our imaginations run wild and unfettered. May we let our convictions about what can’t be or what is impractical be put aside so the holy one can crack through our set patterns to the deeper creative wells still flowing underneath. And while it was said by Paul Valery, I think Jesus would agree: “To return what exists to pure possibility; that is the deep, the hidden work.” Amen.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
16th Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 20
Jeremiah11:18-20, Ps 54, James3:13-4:3,7-8a, Mark 9:30-37
Have you ever experienced being a non-person? By that I mean, being viewed as invisible or without social value? Or visible but with a negative, harmful social value? Most of us have on a small scale: the time we were teased and cast out for a day or week at school, the relative that dismissed us or has cut us off. Some of us have experienced it socially depending on our station in life and the way we are identified. Most women have known a time when they were treated as a non-person in a world still struggling with equality and rights for the female sex. Some current non-persons in our collective life are illegal immigrants, the homeless, convicts and in all too many places those who constitute the group called GLBT. Non-persons are at the bottom of the social scale of least to greatest. And most of us don't want to be at the bottom end for good reason. The system is founded on enshrined maltreatment, from neglect to killing (think of Matthew Shepherd, James Bird and the homeless man called Pac-man who was beaten to death here just a few months ago) of those on the lower end of the spectrum.
Jesus today not only turns that system on its head, but subverts it. None of us would consider children non-persons. Children are valued and treasured in our culture. They are seen as full of wonder and innocence, human beings to be formed and nurtured. And while our understanding and the reality on the ground with the number of children living in poverty and need continuing to grow may not be in synch with each other, none of us would simply not see a child as a human being. It's a truism in fund raising that people can't say no to children and we see that used in appeals and campaigns all the time. And that is likely due to this Gospel today.
In Jesus' time children were non-beings. The world of antiquity didn't begin to take notice of offspring until they reached adolescence and were thus nascent adults. The Roman world, which Palestine was a part of at the time of Jesus' life, was clearly a non-child focused culture. This is not to say that children were unloved or neglected, but that children simply didn't signify in public life. So, when Jesus puts a child in the midst of the disciples as an illustration, his followers are gob smacked. A child had no business hanging out with a bunch of adults and a respected teacher. In fact, this child might even have been a household slave. Even more scandalous!
When Jesus tells the disciples that those who want to be first must be last and servant of all he isn't simply saying let's shake up the distribution pattern. Let's just switch people's places within the same structure. That really isn't changing anything is it for the structure remains the same. He effectively calls for a re-creation of the structure with the words “servant of all”. When we are being a servant to all we aren't basing our decisions on who is greater and who is lesser. We aren't being kind to someone because they have power and influence and this is a chip we can call in later. We aren't being helpful to someone who is lesser to get an advantage over him. Servant to all is an equalizer of worth. It flattens the curve and the line points directly to God. Why is this so? Because Jesus makes the explicit connection that a servant child is a reflection of God, of the Holy One. To receive this non-person with welcome and care is the exact same thing as welcoming God. Now talk about a radical notion.
The only thing that limits us is our thinking. Today's Gospel is the perfect reading for an impassioned social justice sermon, and boy was I tempted! Jesus had a vision of radical love and inclusion of all that takes us to a place beyond right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable, to a transforming way of being with each other that shapes us to love and heals us of our sin. We start from a place where first all our welcome and all persons reveal in themselves the image of God and then move from there to construct our relationships, our right relationships, with each other. In our world, we tend to start by first sorting and then building, which keeps us spinning in circles. But this isn't going to be a social justice sermon per se.
And here is why. The first disciples upon hearing this were dumbfounded. They couldn't wrap their minds around this notion. They had a failure of imagination and the ability to rethink things. Before social justice, before any truly real change, Jesus shows us we need to fire up and engage our imaginations!
The early church was a shock to the world around it because men and women worshipped together and shared the gifts of the Spirit. Slaves and free shared a meal. It was a radically different grouping of people and people couldn’t imagine it. But the earliest Christians could and did because of the imagination of Jesus, drawing on the very best, the very heart of his Jewish faith. In his world and the vision he shared there were no non-beings. No one was superfluous or expendable. The early Christians had to open their minds and imaginations to understand the resurrection, the meaning of the cross and the presence of Christ still among them. Were they scared? Yes, we hear it in today’s Gospel. Yet, their re-born imaginations were able to find a way to express this new hope to others and capture their hearts.
Imagination is the locus of creativity, revelation, flexibility and possibility. It is the home of hope. As we grow up our imaginations calcify, ossify, and we begin to only believe that the way of the world is possible. We become practical to the point of resignation. But life and the life of the spirit are living, active, pulsing things that needs our imaginations to work. Perhaps Jesus put a child in the midst of the disciples to remind them of the amazing gift that children’s imaginations are. Imagination spans the gap between what is and what can be—that vision of the divine kingdom that embodies the love of Christ and the essence of the beatitudes: blessed are the merciful, the hungry, the peacemakers…
Here are a few samples of what the spirit-filled imagination of the early Church was able to envision and make real. Though there was never an explicit command for it, many in the early Church quickly understood that slavery was incompatible with the life of Jesus. Manumission of slaves was a common occurrence in the early Church. Women served as deacons, teachers, leaders and probably even priests in the earliest days. For the first three hundred years the Church was pacifist for it could not reconcile Jesus’ hard command to love our neighbors and our enemies with war. The desert fathers and mothers laid the groundwork for the monastic option of life that grew within the Church. Most of us don’t realize that the option for a woman to live a theologically and socially valued life as a single, unmarried person was a revelation in antiquity. To become a nun was to gain an amazing freedom over one’s person and life. Hospitals and orphanages were fruits of the early Christians’ imagination and so much more. In time, the Church began more and more to accommodate the world as is so clearly seen, for example, even in the Epistles where woman are quickly put back into their old social place.
But the imaginative work of Jesus still has lived on. Whether recognized or not the idea of universal human rights comes from Christian roots. Every great movement for change that has lifted up the non-beings and the poor and the ignored has been a great act of imagination. The first abolitionists were considered crazy. It was impossible for America to survive without slavery. The movement to end segregation and legal disenfranchisement was likewise met with disbelief. But the imagination that is lit and sustained by the vision of Jesus can dream great dreams and not only dream them but find the way to get from what is to what is possible. That is the great task of our faith in God; not to make God fit into our world, but to call our world forward into God’s kingdom. And not only our faith in God, our love of Jesus the Christ, and our trust in his teachings are needed, but our imaginations as well. That is essential. Without it our churches too begin to ossify and calcify. They begin to look just like the world around them instead of being the leaven, the carbonation, the electrifying place where our souls come to be given the power to act for the future and the hope of God’s kingdom.
The invitation in today’s Gospel is, I think, that call to fire up our imaginations. As we read the Gospel, hear the Good News, what dreams does it spark in us? What impossibilities does it invite us to think just might be possibilities? What might it let each of us imagine for our own lives and for our common life together? What dream might it hold for the larger world in which we live that is struggling so hard now in the systems and relationships it has created? Ponder the texts. Pray with them. And in our prayer may we let our imaginations run wild and unfettered. May we let our convictions about what can’t be or what is impractical be put aside so the holy one can crack through our set patterns to the deeper creative wells still flowing underneath. And while it was said by Paul Valery, I think Jesus would agree: “To return what exists to pure possibility; that is the deep, the hidden work.” Amen.
Monday, September 14, 2009
September 13, 2009, 15th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B
Sunday, September 13, 2009
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Year B, Proper 19
Isaiah 50:4-9a, James 3:1-12, Mark 8:27-38
One day Socrates, the great philosopher, came upon an acquaintance who ran up to him excitedly and said, “Socrates, do you know what I just heard about one of your students?”
“Wait a moment,” Socrates replied. “Before you tell me I’d like you to pass a little test. It's called the Triple Filter Test.”
“Triple filter?”
“That's right,” Socrates continued. “Before you talk to me about my student let's take a moment to filter what you're going to say. The first filter is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?”
“No,” the man said, “actually I just heard about it and...”
“All right,” said Socrates. “So you don't really know if it's true or not. Now let's try the second filter, the filter of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about my student something good?”
“No, on the contrary...”
“So,” Socrates continued, “you want to tell me something bad about him, even though you're not certain it's true?”
The man shrugged, a little embarrassed.
Socrates continued. “You may still pass the test though, because there is a third filter—the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my student going to be useful to me?”
“No, not really...”
“Well,” concluded Socrates, “if what you want to tell me is neither True, nor Good nor even Useful, why tell it to me at all?”
The man was defeated and ashamed.
This is the reason Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high esteem.
James, in his own way, is also a great philosopher, though he speaks in a more colorful and theological style. His reference is always the love of Christ and our task as followers of his which is to imitate him as best we can with self-awareness and intention. As highly verbal creatures he calls us to confront that most basic of actions that we often engage in without thinking—talking.
Talking is rich in metaphorical meaning. It goes all the way back to the start of things. In Genesis we hear that God speaks the world into being. Speaking is a creative act. It is a powerful act. It is an act of relationship. And it is an act of forming identity.
In the story of creation the word that is spoken, the wind that blows over the face of the waters is the Spirit of God. The Gospel of John opens with the story of the Word becoming flesh, a renewing of the creation that God made and holds in being. That word is named as Jesus the Christ and a light that the darkness could not overcome. That word is what caused all to be and is life.
In some Native American traditions the power of word and speech is revered and accordingly used sparingly. There is the practice in some places to speak to the corn as it is sown, a ministry of the women. They speak to the corn as it is planted, as it sprouts and grows, calling it into becoming and growing as a force of life for their people. Such an act is not superstitious or unfounded. Science has proven the intuitive wisdom of this. Plants spoken to with love and gentleness thrive; plants that are spoken to harshly or treated brutally shrivel and die.
James is reminding us of the power of words, of speech. Speech has the ability to effect events, to shape realities, to steer a course of action. But our speech unlike that of the divine is tainted. Our tongues deal out not only life, but death; blessings and curses. Our speech is more powerful than we know. The evil of the tongue is not that we can speak, but that we use it so carelessly! We are victims to pride and ego, flinging words around carelessly and enjoying their power yet avoiding an awareness of how easily they are a force for destruction and harm.
Gossip, prejudices, distortion of facts, spin...all these are the consequences of a tongue not tamed to Goodness, Truth and Usefulness. All these are small things that can result in massive destruction and impact. Just think of the outright lies and distortions being spoken to undermine a rational, reasoned and thorough conversation about substantive reform, or public health care option. One senator yelling “you lie” has sparked a firestorm, and a distraction. If the stakes weren't so high it would almost by comical. As it is, tens of millions of people's lives and health are hanging in the balance.
Or at a more personal level we know the power of words in shaping our perceptions. When we are teased or made fun of we are marked by those words. They create a bit of the fabric that is our self-identity. Children who are called stupid or ugly believe it. It is their reality. And for some it turns into a destructive fire that consumes them and those around them.
James calls those of us who are Christians to remember how powerful our tongues can be. And while I suspect he would affirm all that Socrates said, he takes it further. It is a creative act. It is an act that binds us to God and to each other. It has real impact on who we become and what happens around us. It is theological in that it is revealing of who we are and what we are meant to be. Does our speech reflect the grace and love and forgiveness of God? Or does it play to our own purposes? Or even worse, does it play into our sin, which seeks to hurt and dominate and control others? Does our speech violate a fundamental truth: doing unto another that which we wouldn’t want done to us.
What do our words create? That is the question. It is a spiritual question and a spiritual reality. To tame our tongues to the law of love, to tie our words to only the good things that come forth in our hearts, is to make manifest the love and grace of God. As long as our speech pollutes the world with the things from within that contaminate us, we are still spiritual infants. We are harming our own souls at the same time we inflict pain on another. It is creating something, but not for good. But there is Good News in this. I think that the more we come to know our own souls as vessels of the creative light and life of God, residing within and around us, the more we grow out of the need to hurt or judge or control. If we can touch that light, we let God work in us and we see ourselves in a new way. We heal and let go and grow into an ever-increasing realization that to love another is the same as loving self is the same as loving God. We can grow in understanding without having to diminish another. We find new ways of accountability without vengeance and how to live with each other without dominance. But it all starts within and with the energy, the creative life of our words that pour forth from our tongues.
It is also a move towards humility. For when we speak of faith in God or our own religious path or the nature of the divine our words so quickly become weapons. My version is right and yours is wrong. I am saved and you are not. But to do so is to curse another is it not? And is it not the heights of arrogance to claim that one person or one group of people has the whole story on God? Even Jesus never claims that! Do we have a revelation? Yes. Is it true? Yes. Is it the totality of the nature of God? No, for it is imparted to and through we frail, limited creatures, which are really quite small. However, when we connect with the creative light within we touch the holy and find that it is more than we can ever put in to words. This is common of all mystical and spiritual events. And therein is our clue. Our faith has allowed us into the holy of holies and it is a place beyond words. We can only share it in part and listen when others share their way into that same space. How much more than we when teach or share our faith are we to do so in a way that blesses! How much more must our words be a spring of fresh water that invite without force! We can share our faith with a firm conviction, but always in a way that finds room for the other’s experience without condemnation or judgment. For it is from those we least expect that we often run smack into God’s ongoing revelation. See the Bible for multiple examples. And we can only fully experience God’s ongoing revelation when our tongues are harnessed for good, usefulness, truth…and life.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Year B, Proper 19
Isaiah 50:4-9a, James 3:1-12, Mark 8:27-38
One day Socrates, the great philosopher, came upon an acquaintance who ran up to him excitedly and said, “Socrates, do you know what I just heard about one of your students?”
“Wait a moment,” Socrates replied. “Before you tell me I’d like you to pass a little test. It's called the Triple Filter Test.”
“Triple filter?”
“That's right,” Socrates continued. “Before you talk to me about my student let's take a moment to filter what you're going to say. The first filter is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?”
“No,” the man said, “actually I just heard about it and...”
“All right,” said Socrates. “So you don't really know if it's true or not. Now let's try the second filter, the filter of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about my student something good?”
“No, on the contrary...”
“So,” Socrates continued, “you want to tell me something bad about him, even though you're not certain it's true?”
The man shrugged, a little embarrassed.
Socrates continued. “You may still pass the test though, because there is a third filter—the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my student going to be useful to me?”
“No, not really...”
“Well,” concluded Socrates, “if what you want to tell me is neither True, nor Good nor even Useful, why tell it to me at all?”
The man was defeated and ashamed.
This is the reason Socrates was a great philosopher and held in such high esteem.
James, in his own way, is also a great philosopher, though he speaks in a more colorful and theological style. His reference is always the love of Christ and our task as followers of his which is to imitate him as best we can with self-awareness and intention. As highly verbal creatures he calls us to confront that most basic of actions that we often engage in without thinking—talking.
Talking is rich in metaphorical meaning. It goes all the way back to the start of things. In Genesis we hear that God speaks the world into being. Speaking is a creative act. It is a powerful act. It is an act of relationship. And it is an act of forming identity.
In the story of creation the word that is spoken, the wind that blows over the face of the waters is the Spirit of God. The Gospel of John opens with the story of the Word becoming flesh, a renewing of the creation that God made and holds in being. That word is named as Jesus the Christ and a light that the darkness could not overcome. That word is what caused all to be and is life.
In some Native American traditions the power of word and speech is revered and accordingly used sparingly. There is the practice in some places to speak to the corn as it is sown, a ministry of the women. They speak to the corn as it is planted, as it sprouts and grows, calling it into becoming and growing as a force of life for their people. Such an act is not superstitious or unfounded. Science has proven the intuitive wisdom of this. Plants spoken to with love and gentleness thrive; plants that are spoken to harshly or treated brutally shrivel and die.
James is reminding us of the power of words, of speech. Speech has the ability to effect events, to shape realities, to steer a course of action. But our speech unlike that of the divine is tainted. Our tongues deal out not only life, but death; blessings and curses. Our speech is more powerful than we know. The evil of the tongue is not that we can speak, but that we use it so carelessly! We are victims to pride and ego, flinging words around carelessly and enjoying their power yet avoiding an awareness of how easily they are a force for destruction and harm.
Gossip, prejudices, distortion of facts, spin...all these are the consequences of a tongue not tamed to Goodness, Truth and Usefulness. All these are small things that can result in massive destruction and impact. Just think of the outright lies and distortions being spoken to undermine a rational, reasoned and thorough conversation about substantive reform, or public health care option. One senator yelling “you lie” has sparked a firestorm, and a distraction. If the stakes weren't so high it would almost by comical. As it is, tens of millions of people's lives and health are hanging in the balance.
Or at a more personal level we know the power of words in shaping our perceptions. When we are teased or made fun of we are marked by those words. They create a bit of the fabric that is our self-identity. Children who are called stupid or ugly believe it. It is their reality. And for some it turns into a destructive fire that consumes them and those around them.
James calls those of us who are Christians to remember how powerful our tongues can be. And while I suspect he would affirm all that Socrates said, he takes it further. It is a creative act. It is an act that binds us to God and to each other. It has real impact on who we become and what happens around us. It is theological in that it is revealing of who we are and what we are meant to be. Does our speech reflect the grace and love and forgiveness of God? Or does it play to our own purposes? Or even worse, does it play into our sin, which seeks to hurt and dominate and control others? Does our speech violate a fundamental truth: doing unto another that which we wouldn’t want done to us.
What do our words create? That is the question. It is a spiritual question and a spiritual reality. To tame our tongues to the law of love, to tie our words to only the good things that come forth in our hearts, is to make manifest the love and grace of God. As long as our speech pollutes the world with the things from within that contaminate us, we are still spiritual infants. We are harming our own souls at the same time we inflict pain on another. It is creating something, but not for good. But there is Good News in this. I think that the more we come to know our own souls as vessels of the creative light and life of God, residing within and around us, the more we grow out of the need to hurt or judge or control. If we can touch that light, we let God work in us and we see ourselves in a new way. We heal and let go and grow into an ever-increasing realization that to love another is the same as loving self is the same as loving God. We can grow in understanding without having to diminish another. We find new ways of accountability without vengeance and how to live with each other without dominance. But it all starts within and with the energy, the creative life of our words that pour forth from our tongues.
It is also a move towards humility. For when we speak of faith in God or our own religious path or the nature of the divine our words so quickly become weapons. My version is right and yours is wrong. I am saved and you are not. But to do so is to curse another is it not? And is it not the heights of arrogance to claim that one person or one group of people has the whole story on God? Even Jesus never claims that! Do we have a revelation? Yes. Is it true? Yes. Is it the totality of the nature of God? No, for it is imparted to and through we frail, limited creatures, which are really quite small. However, when we connect with the creative light within we touch the holy and find that it is more than we can ever put in to words. This is common of all mystical and spiritual events. And therein is our clue. Our faith has allowed us into the holy of holies and it is a place beyond words. We can only share it in part and listen when others share their way into that same space. How much more than we when teach or share our faith are we to do so in a way that blesses! How much more must our words be a spring of fresh water that invite without force! We can share our faith with a firm conviction, but always in a way that finds room for the other’s experience without condemnation or judgment. For it is from those we least expect that we often run smack into God’s ongoing revelation. See the Bible for multiple examples. And we can only fully experience God’s ongoing revelation when our tongues are harnessed for good, usefulness, truth…and life.
Friday, September 11, 2009
September 6, 2009, Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 6, 2009
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 18
The Rev. Tasha Brubaker Garrison
A story I picked up while living back East…
Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to out patients at the clinic.
One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a truly awful looking man. “Why, he’s hardly taller than my eight-year-old,” I thought as I stared at the stooped, shriveled body. But the appalling thing was his face, lopsided from swelling, red and raw. Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, “Good evening. I’ve come to see if you’ve a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there’s no bus ‘til morning.”
He told me he’d been hunting for a room since noon but with no success, no one seemed to have one. “I guess it’s my face…I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments…” For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me: “I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early in the morning.”
I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch. I went inside and finished getting supper. When we were ready, I asked the old man if he would join us. “No, thank you. I have plenty.” And he held up a brown paper bag.
When I had finished the dishes, I went out on the porch to talk with him a few minutes. It didn’t take a long time to see that this old man had an oversized heart crowded into that tiny body. He told me he fished for a living to support his daughter, her five children, and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury.
He didn’t tell it by way of complaint; in fact, every other sentence was prefaced with a thanks to God for a blessing. He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin cancer. He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going.
At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children’s room for him. When I got up in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded and the little man was out on the porch. He refused breakfast, but just before he left for his bus, haltingly, as if asking a great favor, he said, “Could I please come back and stay next time I have a treatment? I won’t put you out a bit. I can sleep fine in a chair.” He paused a moment and then added, “Your children made me feel at home. Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don’t seem to mind.” I told him he was welcome to come again.
And on his next trip he arrived a little after seven in the morning. As a gift, he brought a big fish and a quart of the largest oysters I had ever seen. He said he had shucked them that morning before he left so that they’d be nice and fresh. I knew his bus left at 4:00 a.m. and I wondered what time he had to get up in order to do this for us.
In the years he came to stay overnight with us there was never a time that he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden. Other times we received packages in the mail, always by special deliver; fish and oysters packed in a box of fresh young spinach or kale, every leaf carefully washed. Knowing that he must walk three miles to mail these, and knowing how little money he had made the gifts doubly precious.
When I received these little remembrances, I often thought of a comment our next-door neighbor made after he left that first morning. “Did you keep that awful looking man last night? I turned him away! You can lose roomers by putting up such people!” Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice. But oh! If only they could have know him, perhaps their illnesses would have been easier to bear. I know our family always will be grateful to have known him.
The ways in which we humans are in the habit of judging and showing partiality! The way our partiality shows what we value most! It is clear what the neighbor values and fears. Sadly, her reaction is all too typical. And we know too deep down that we are not intended to be this way with one another. We know something is amiss, yet we struggle to get ourselves right.
James’ words today help us to get out of the tangle. He cuts to the chase and chastises the early Christians who within decades of the earthly ministry of Jesus for creating ranks and distinctions among themselves and trying to encourage the “right kind of people” to attend their church. But who is the wrong kind of person, James asks? For if we are all neighbors the outer trappings only reveal how the world has placed us but not our hearts and not our God. The church is that absolutely open table of all that Jesus practiced—replicated and shared and disseminated for it has the power to change the world. Yet all to easily it begins to mimic it.
James in his direct way reminds the early church of two facts: one the Church is love in doing not in name only and two, the highest law is to love neighbor as self. Now one can argue that the love of neighbor is clearly referring only to fellow Christians, and certainly James is pointing out where the community is falling short internally. But does that really hold up? Jesus again and again included those who were not insiders. He challenged his fellow Jews with the story of the Good Samaritan thereby extending the concept of neighbor to be greater than common ethnic identification. And in the Gospel today his healing goes beyond the national bounds to a Syrophoenician woman and her child. It is the orientation of our heart and spirits that make us able to receive the Good News of Jesus, not our pedigree. The family of God is always bigger than we want to make it. The neighbor is all we encounter, probably most especially the one we want to disregard.
The other truth he reminds us of is that love is not a spiritual concept for private contemplation that is disconnected from the world. Love is not a reverencing of God “out there”. Love is caring concretely and tangibly for those around us. God’s love is made known or not in how we treat each other. James is reminding us that God’s love is very much about social concern and justice, and we had better not fool ourselves into thinking otherwise. Partiality undermines love. It reveals where we have split the human family all made in God’s image into categories of lesser and more. And to do so is to begin to unravel the revelation of the common meal and the common table that Jesus spread for us—the all-encompassing vision of the kingdom of God.
In looking into our hearts we will be able to see where partiality is at work. When we examine our partiality, both private and corporate we can ask some important questions. What is underneath it? What are the assumptions we haven’t questioned? What is it we are avoiding and why? Our partiality often reveals what we are avoiding or ignoring. We will also discover our own poverty, our own lack. It’s an illuminating place. For me I notice that I am very partial towards conversations with others who are highly educated, quick on their intellectual feet, ready to engage in some good verbal dialogue. The poverty it reveals in me all too often is my own need to be recognized for my brains, my insecurity and need for accolades, my own pride and vanity. It can lead me to not pay equal attention to the wisdom and knowledge of those who are perhaps not outward intellectuals, but certainly have much to teach me and much to enrich my life. It’s not a one-way street with me being the only one with something of value to offer. And academically smart people aren’t superior human beings.
In that paradoxical way of faith when we respond to the poverty of another we find that our own poverty is responded to as well. The old man was poor in things, but rich in spirit and faith. He gave of that to this family that welcomed him and gave to him of their material wealth. They gave and received from each other through the act of putting aside partiality in favor of seeing a common humanity. Imagine how much less fear and anger and abuse and violence there might be in this world if we could treat each other this way!
Perhaps the challenge of James we can take home this week is to spend some time looking into our soul at our own partiality. Where? Towards whom? About what? And when we find that it is leading us into a place of disregard and contempt we can look there to find our own poverty. We can also then begin again to let it go in favor of the amazing vision of Jesus where all are important and equally needed at the table. We can be healed of our poverties by allowing ourselves to be there for one another, giving of our wealth, whatever its form, to meet the lack in others and vice versa. We can grow more alive because we see our life being fed by all others and not by having to prove we are more important than others. We can embody a faith that has works and is therefore alive.
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 18
The Rev. Tasha Brubaker Garrison
A story I picked up while living back East…
Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to out patients at the clinic.
One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a truly awful looking man. “Why, he’s hardly taller than my eight-year-old,” I thought as I stared at the stooped, shriveled body. But the appalling thing was his face, lopsided from swelling, red and raw. Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, “Good evening. I’ve come to see if you’ve a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there’s no bus ‘til morning.”
He told me he’d been hunting for a room since noon but with no success, no one seemed to have one. “I guess it’s my face…I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments…” For a moment I hesitated, but his next words convinced me: “I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early in the morning.”
I told him we would find him a bed, but to rest on the porch. I went inside and finished getting supper. When we were ready, I asked the old man if he would join us. “No, thank you. I have plenty.” And he held up a brown paper bag.
When I had finished the dishes, I went out on the porch to talk with him a few minutes. It didn’t take a long time to see that this old man had an oversized heart crowded into that tiny body. He told me he fished for a living to support his daughter, her five children, and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury.
He didn’t tell it by way of complaint; in fact, every other sentence was prefaced with a thanks to God for a blessing. He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease, which was apparently a form of skin cancer. He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going.
At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children’s room for him. When I got up in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded and the little man was out on the porch. He refused breakfast, but just before he left for his bus, haltingly, as if asking a great favor, he said, “Could I please come back and stay next time I have a treatment? I won’t put you out a bit. I can sleep fine in a chair.” He paused a moment and then added, “Your children made me feel at home. Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don’t seem to mind.” I told him he was welcome to come again.
And on his next trip he arrived a little after seven in the morning. As a gift, he brought a big fish and a quart of the largest oysters I had ever seen. He said he had shucked them that morning before he left so that they’d be nice and fresh. I knew his bus left at 4:00 a.m. and I wondered what time he had to get up in order to do this for us.
In the years he came to stay overnight with us there was never a time that he did not bring us fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden. Other times we received packages in the mail, always by special deliver; fish and oysters packed in a box of fresh young spinach or kale, every leaf carefully washed. Knowing that he must walk three miles to mail these, and knowing how little money he had made the gifts doubly precious.
When I received these little remembrances, I often thought of a comment our next-door neighbor made after he left that first morning. “Did you keep that awful looking man last night? I turned him away! You can lose roomers by putting up such people!” Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice. But oh! If only they could have know him, perhaps their illnesses would have been easier to bear. I know our family always will be grateful to have known him.
The ways in which we humans are in the habit of judging and showing partiality! The way our partiality shows what we value most! It is clear what the neighbor values and fears. Sadly, her reaction is all too typical. And we know too deep down that we are not intended to be this way with one another. We know something is amiss, yet we struggle to get ourselves right.
James’ words today help us to get out of the tangle. He cuts to the chase and chastises the early Christians who within decades of the earthly ministry of Jesus for creating ranks and distinctions among themselves and trying to encourage the “right kind of people” to attend their church. But who is the wrong kind of person, James asks? For if we are all neighbors the outer trappings only reveal how the world has placed us but not our hearts and not our God. The church is that absolutely open table of all that Jesus practiced—replicated and shared and disseminated for it has the power to change the world. Yet all to easily it begins to mimic it.
James in his direct way reminds the early church of two facts: one the Church is love in doing not in name only and two, the highest law is to love neighbor as self. Now one can argue that the love of neighbor is clearly referring only to fellow Christians, and certainly James is pointing out where the community is falling short internally. But does that really hold up? Jesus again and again included those who were not insiders. He challenged his fellow Jews with the story of the Good Samaritan thereby extending the concept of neighbor to be greater than common ethnic identification. And in the Gospel today his healing goes beyond the national bounds to a Syrophoenician woman and her child. It is the orientation of our heart and spirits that make us able to receive the Good News of Jesus, not our pedigree. The family of God is always bigger than we want to make it. The neighbor is all we encounter, probably most especially the one we want to disregard.
The other truth he reminds us of is that love is not a spiritual concept for private contemplation that is disconnected from the world. Love is not a reverencing of God “out there”. Love is caring concretely and tangibly for those around us. God’s love is made known or not in how we treat each other. James is reminding us that God’s love is very much about social concern and justice, and we had better not fool ourselves into thinking otherwise. Partiality undermines love. It reveals where we have split the human family all made in God’s image into categories of lesser and more. And to do so is to begin to unravel the revelation of the common meal and the common table that Jesus spread for us—the all-encompassing vision of the kingdom of God.
In looking into our hearts we will be able to see where partiality is at work. When we examine our partiality, both private and corporate we can ask some important questions. What is underneath it? What are the assumptions we haven’t questioned? What is it we are avoiding and why? Our partiality often reveals what we are avoiding or ignoring. We will also discover our own poverty, our own lack. It’s an illuminating place. For me I notice that I am very partial towards conversations with others who are highly educated, quick on their intellectual feet, ready to engage in some good verbal dialogue. The poverty it reveals in me all too often is my own need to be recognized for my brains, my insecurity and need for accolades, my own pride and vanity. It can lead me to not pay equal attention to the wisdom and knowledge of those who are perhaps not outward intellectuals, but certainly have much to teach me and much to enrich my life. It’s not a one-way street with me being the only one with something of value to offer. And academically smart people aren’t superior human beings.
In that paradoxical way of faith when we respond to the poverty of another we find that our own poverty is responded to as well. The old man was poor in things, but rich in spirit and faith. He gave of that to this family that welcomed him and gave to him of their material wealth. They gave and received from each other through the act of putting aside partiality in favor of seeing a common humanity. Imagine how much less fear and anger and abuse and violence there might be in this world if we could treat each other this way!
Perhaps the challenge of James we can take home this week is to spend some time looking into our soul at our own partiality. Where? Towards whom? About what? And when we find that it is leading us into a place of disregard and contempt we can look there to find our own poverty. We can also then begin again to let it go in favor of the amazing vision of Jesus where all are important and equally needed at the table. We can be healed of our poverties by allowing ourselves to be there for one another, giving of our wealth, whatever its form, to meet the lack in others and vice versa. We can grow more alive because we see our life being fed by all others and not by having to prove we are more important than others. We can embody a faith that has works and is therefore alive.
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