The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 9:2-7, Psalm 96, Titus 2:11-14, Luke 2:1-20
Christmas Eve, 2010
There is something so beautiful about this story that instinctively we feel it must be true. Whether we are Christian or not this story captivates us, invites us into the inside of life to find an eternal truth—a divine understanding. We sense a truth in this story that is deeper and more real than if all the “facts” of it actually happened as described. This is the heart of myth. A myth is not a lie; a myth is not just an invention of fancy. A myth, as one very precocious five-year old explained, is a story that is not true on the outside, but true on the inside. All the details may not be utterly accurate, but that isn’t the heart of the matter. The heart is the truth that is within and that emerges through the way the story is told.
The heart of this story tonight is that God comes to us as one of us in the very same way that all of us come into this world: as a baby, a child. The heart of this story is that through the life of this child we discover how the love and peace of God takes flesh and is lived in the here and now. The heart of this story is that the deep hope for peace on earth is possible and it will become real through what we do and how we understand the world. It is also a collision of myths.
The story takes place in the time of the Roman Empire. Based in Rome its troops and its bureaucrats were stationed throughout the empire’s domain—a domain that covered continents. Calm, called peace by the Emperor, was maintained through strong-arm control, repression, occupation and the imposition of Rome’s norms as the best and only form of civilization.
The myth of the day was that of Rome’s inherent superiority and the greatness of its kingdom for all who were under its control or sway. Luke starts his story by reminding us of this other myth—Augustus was ruler of all the world. He was called the Prince of Peace, Our Lord, Son of God, Counselor and many other titles. They should sound familiar to our ears for they are ones we use for Jesus. But these were the common appellations for the Caesars: found on coins, engraved on statues, recorded in histories.
The peace and order of Rome was also a myth, perhaps better named propaganda or spin. It is here we find the crucial difference. A myth, a true myth, is one that speaks to a universal, to an understanding about human nature and reality that helps us know who we are and what we are, to a revelation of the holy that is larger than any particular people or kingdom or culture. The false myths take a particular and try to make it a universal. This was Rome. What the shepherds heard was the true myth that echoes across the universe eternally.
Luke is inviting us to juxtapose these two kinds of myth and to understand the truth revealed in this child born in humble circumstances to parents trying to survive in a hard and brutal world. Peace comes to all as a gift, not by force. The reviled and outcast, the poor and the rich, the wise and the foolish, all are able to come to Bethlehem to be touched by grace and love. The holy is born in a child that lies in a feeding trough in a city that’s name means house of bread. We are to understand that it is God that feeds us in all ways from the grain of the fields to the spiritual food of the soul. The holy is tangible in a family, in a mother and father, in stars that sing and a universe that reveals God’s glory. These are only some of the truths this story is giving us.
Yet the central truth Luke wants us to grasp is that of the angels’ message: peace on earth. When we glory in God, respond to God and to the God revealed in each other than peace is not merely a wish, but a possibility. The inside truth of this myth is the continual longing of us humans for peace. The plea and hope for it rings through thousands of years of history. The shepherds yearned for it as much as we still do today in a world that is so riddled with violence and seemingly endless war.
Perhaps no story better captures the way that this baby creates peace on earth and this myth becomes experienced truth than the one I am about to share:
My dear sister Janet,
It is 2:00 in the morning and most of our men are asleep in their dugouts—yet I could not sleep myself before writing to you of the wonderful events of Christmas Eve. In truth, what happened seems almost like a fairy tale, and if I hadn’t been through it myself, I would scarce believe it. Just imagine: While you and the family sang carols before the fire there in London, I did the same with enemy soldiers here on the battlefields of France!
As I wrote before, there has been little serious fighting of late. The first battles of the war left so many dead that both sides have held back until replacements could come from home. So we have mostly stayed in our trenches and waited.
But what a terrible waiting it has been! Knowing that any moment an artillery shell might land and explode beside us in the trench, killing or maiming several men. And in daylight not daring to lift our heads above ground, for fear of a sniper’s bullet.
Through all this, we couldn’t help feeling curious about the German soldiers across the way. After all, they faced the same dangers we did, and slogged about in the same muck. What’s more, their first trench was only 50 yards from ours. Between us lay No Man’s Land, bordered on both sides by barbed wire—yet they were close enough we sometimes heard their voices.
Of course, we hated them when they killed our friends. But other times, we joked about them and almost felt we had something in common. And now it seems they felt the same.
Just yesterday morning—Christmas Eve Day—we had our first good freeze. Cold as we were, we welcomed it, because at least the mud froze solid. Everything was tinged white with frost, while a bright sun shone over all. Perfect Christmas weather.
During the day, there was little shelling or rifle fire from either side. And as darkness fell on our Christmas Eve, the shooting stopped entirely. Our first complete silence in months! We hoped it might promise a peaceful holiday, but we didn’t count on it. We’d been told the Germans might attack and try to catch us off guard.
I went to the dugout to rest, and lying on my cot, I must have drifted asleep. All at once my friend John was shaking me awake, saying, “Come and see! See what the Germans are doing!” I grabbed my rifle, stumbled out into the trench, and stuck my head cautiously above the sandbags.
I never hope to see a stranger and more lovely sight. Clusters of tiny lights were shining all along the German line, left and right as far as the eye could see.
“What is it?” I asked in bewilderment, and John answered, “Christmas trees!”
And so it was. The Germans had placed Christmas trees in front of their trenches, lit by candle or lantern like beacons of good will.
And then we heard their voices raised in song.
Stille nacht, heilige nacht . . . .
This carol may not yet be familiar to us in Britain, but John knew it and translated: “Silent night, holy night.” I’ve never heard one lovelier—or more meaningful, in that quiet, clear night, its dark softened by a first-quarter moon.
When the song finished, the men in our trenches applauded. Yes, British soldiers applauding Germans! Then one of our own men started singing, and we all joined in.
The first Nowell, the angel did say . . . .
In truth, we sounded not nearly as good as the Germans, with their fine harmonies. But they responded with enthusiastic applause of their own and then began another.
O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum . . . .
Then we replied.
O come all ye faithful . . . .
But this time they joined in, singing the same words in Latin.
Adeste fideles . . . .
British and German harmonizing across No Man’s Land! I would have thought nothing could be more amazing—but what came next was more so.
“English, come over!” we heard one of them shout. “You no shoot, we no shoot.”
There in the trenches, we looked at each other in bewilderment. Then one of us shouted jokingly, “You come over here.”
To our astonishment, we saw two figures rise from the trench, climb over their barbed wire, and advance unprotected across No Man’s Land. One of them called, “Send officer to talk.”
I saw one of our men lift his rifle to the ready, and no doubt others did the same—but our captain called out, “Hold your fire.” Then he climbed out and went to meet the Germans halfway. We heard them talking, and a few minutes later, the captain came back with a German cigar in his mouth!
“We’ve agreed there will be no shooting before midnight tomorrow,” he announced. “But sentries are to remain on duty, and the rest of you, stay alert.”
Across the way, we could make out groups of two or three men starting out of trenches and coming toward us. Then some of us were climbing out too, and in minutes more, there we were in No Man’s Land, over a hundred soldiers and officers of each side, shaking hands with men we’d been trying to kill just hours earlier!
Before long a bonfire was built, and around it we mingled—British khaki and German grey. I must say, the Germans were the better dressed, with fresh uniforms for the holiday.
Only a couple of our men knew German, but more of the Germans knew English. I asked one of them why that was.
“Because many have worked in England!” he said. “Before all this, I was a waiter at the Hotel Cecil. Perhaps I waited on your table!”
“Perhaps you did!” I said, laughing.
He told me he had a girlfriend in London and that the war had interrupted their plans for marriage. I told him, “Don’t worry. We’ll have you beat by Easter, then you can come back and marry the girl.”
He laughed at that. Then he asked if I’d send her a postcard he’d give me later, and I promised I would.
Another German had been a porter at Victoria Station. He showed me a picture of his family back in Munich. His eldest sister was so lovely, I said I should like to meet her someday. He beamed and said he would like that very much and gave me his family’s address.
Even those who could not converse could still exchange gifts—our cigarettes for their cigars, our tea for their coffee, our corned beef for their sausage. Badges and buttons from uniforms changed owners, and one of our lads walked off with the infamous spiked helmet! I myself traded a jackknife for a leather equipment belt—a fine souvenir to show when I get home.
Newspapers too changed hands, and the Germans howled with laughter at ours. They assured us that France was finished and Russia nearly beaten too. We told them that was nonsense, and one of them said, “Well, you believe your newspapers and we’ll believe ours.”
Clearly they are lied to—yet after meeting these men, I wonder how truthful our own newspapers have been. These are not the “savage barbarians” we’ve read so much about. They are men with homes and families, hopes and fears, principles and, yes, love of country. In other words, men like ourselves. Why are we led to believe otherwise?
As it grew late, a few more songs were traded around the fire, and then all joined in for—I am not lying to you—“Auld Lang Syne.” Then we parted with promises to meet again tomorrow, and even some talk of a football match.
I was just starting back to the trenches when an older German clutched my arm. “My God,” he said, “why cannot we have peace and all go home?”
I told him gently, “That you must ask your emperor.”
He looked at me then, searchingly. “Perhaps, my friend. But also we must ask our hearts.”
And so, dear sister, tell me, has there ever been such a Christmas Eve in all history? And what does it all mean, this impossible befriending of enemies?
For the fighting here, of course, it means regrettably little. Decent fellows those soldiers may be, but they follow orders and we do the same. Besides, we are here to stop their army and send it home, and never could we shirk that duty.
Still, one cannot help imagine what would happen if the spirit shown here were caught by the nations of the world. Of course, disputes must always arise. But what if our leaders were to offer well wishes in place of warnings? Songs in place of slurs? Presents in place of reprisals? Would not all war end at once?
All nations say they want peace. Yet on this Christmas morning, I wonder if we want it quite enough.
Your loving brother, Tom
This recounting of this true event was written by Aaron Shepherd and he has truly captured the truth of this story that has in time become a myth, true mostly on the outside and true on the inside.
If we truly long for the Messiah, for that peace, than we too can hear the songs of the angels’ in the night sky. These soldiers heard it and joined in. They touched the deep inner truth of the myth and held it. They knew that it was in this story of a child who comes to us as a bearer of peace that true salvation and wholeness are found. And for a time they lived it and by their witness asked us all to choose the truer story. The question remains—do we want peace enough? It is possible. The story sings across time and space if our hearts can perceive the angelic host in the stars and the heavenly hosts. The longed for Messiah is here with us if we can embrace it and allow his life to transform ours. It can happen, it does happen. But we, like those soldiers and shepherds must get up and go to Bethlehem to see this thing that God has made known to us.
Monday, December 27, 2010
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
December 19, 2010, The Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 7:10-16, Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18, Romans 1:1-7, Matthew 1:18-25
Advent IV, Year A
The story of Jesus' birth—yes, this is it in Matthew in that line “until she had borne a son”—is not the easiest of stories to connect to the season of Advent. It is so stark and to the point (and Matthew's author had many points he was making in the short 8 verses) that it is hard to connect it to the themes of anticipation, waiting, receptivity, and so forth that we tend to associate with Advent. It is much easier to make these connections when hearing Luke's version. In trying to think about how to tie this passage in to the theme of waiting that I have been preaching on, I discovered an interesting symmetry in the stories of Mary and Jesus. It may take me awhile to ramble my way there, but I will get there I promise. Let me know if you think what I see makes sense. That symmetry I discovered led me to think of the tensions of waiting and living both in the here and now in a world that still needs full redemption—as our prayers of the people so perfectly illustrated--and being part of the Body of Christ that is living the resurrected life of full redemption and grace.
Tension is one of the things we see in this story today. The tensions laid out here are ones that repeat in this Gospel: tension between the letter and the spirit of the law and between early Christians, many of whom were Jewish, and Jews being two of them. In this story, Joseph chooses not to follow the strict letter of the law in his planned response to Mary's pregnancy. According to the law she would have been stoned. Scholars and historians tend to agree that by this time this punishment was not generally implemented and other ways had been adopted, though still ones that cast shame. Joseph instead, as best he can, opts for mercy in a way that respects both the law and the command to love given by Jesus. This story was written years after Jesus' death and the author is clearly injecting the command to love of Jesus back into this story. Joseph embodies the dilemma of many early Christians who were Jewish and Matthew portrays him to be a prototype and example for these early followers of Jesus. Likewise, we too live in the same tension of adherence to the law and responding to situations where the law or legal response seems inadequate, wrong or misguided, with mercy and love.
Likewise, Jesus is understood to be the son of God by the movement of the Holy Spirit and the participation of Mary. Joseph gives him a human lineage of the house of David. For Paul as we hear in today's readings, it seems quite clear that he understands Jesus' birth and conception to happen in a way like ours (descended from David according to the flesh). Luke takes this story in Matthew and expands on it dramatically. At the time this was written similar stories about the birth of Moses from a virgin were in circulation, so even within culture and scripture there are multiple ways to understand the origin's of Jesus. And that is a good thing. We can explore and engage all of them.
The early hearers of this story weren't worried about the tension of this as we are and all the other issue we have brought into this story such as original sin, purity, a negative view of human sexuality, etc.. The story points to the union of the divine saving plan and the royal human household of Israel—its kings and anointed ones. Matthew's author and his understanding of how Jesus was conceived are concerned not with biological questions, but with the function this person would have in the saving of Israel by God. In other words, the focus is on Jesus' role and function, not his nature. Is he human? Is he divine? Is he a hybrid? These aren't Matthew's questions really. His concern is what this child is going to accomplish for God and for God's people. This story of Jesus' conception and parentage are never referred to again in any way and even if deleted the confession and understanding of Jesus' role as a savior would still stand firm in this Gospel. This is not the proof so to speak of Jesus' identity. It is his life and the cross and what God brings forth from it.
And it is here that I would like to explore a bit and start winding my way to the symmetry between Mary and Jesus. The heart of this whole passage is, at least to me, that line “and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us”. This is the kernel, the nugget of theological insight, the gem. He isn't named Emmanuel of course; he is named Jesus which is play on the Hebrew word “to save” and related to the name Joshua who in the Hebrew Scriptures was a saving figure in history. But Jesus saves us by being with us.
That is the very crux of the incarnation. And it is amazing when we think on it. We preachers often get pressure to always connect the readings with the nitty gritty of daily life, but sometiems we need to simple spend time on our theology and what it proclaims. We need to ponder it and contemplate it for that is what shapes how we see and understand the daily nitty gritty. So for us we hear this: Jesus saves us by being one with us. It is the total and complete merging of divinity and humanity until we perceive that there is no separation between the two in him. And if we belong to him, than our hope too is to be so close to God that our humanity is totally infused with divinity. It is a sharing of natures and being. It is participatory and active and also full of tension—we live in Christ, but all has not been reconciled to him in this world.
It is all about embodiment. We humans are best at understanding what is enfleshed. If we believe as we confess that the nature of God is love, than love came to be embodied in the way we could understand: in a human being. It is about bodies: Jesus' body, Mary's body, Christ's Body, my body, your body, our body. It has always puzzled me that for so much of the church for so long there was, and still is, disdain and even feelings of disgust towards the human body. It is precisely in a human body that God chooses to express the greatest acts and revelations of love. It is in and through a body that we are fed and grow into Christ's image.
It was at this point in my ramblings that I suddenly saw this mirror image of Jesus and Mary. Before his death Jesus gives us the the Eucharistic Meal, Holy Communion, and it opens with the words, this is my body given for you. Jesus gives his body to the cross to reveal God's salvation. Jesus gives us the gifts of bread and wine understood now to be so much more than that—the very nourishment of God. We are fed by him and through him and our task is to then go out and feed others. We wait for our acts of nourishment to bring forth the kingdom and persevere in doing them even when it seems they have no impact.
Mary is the mirror of this. If Jesus gives us the body of God, Mary gives God her body. She too says this is my body the moment she says yes to the invitation to bear the Messiah. For nine months her very being feeds and nurtures this little life. Her body very literally feeds that of Jesus, just as in time his life will be the food of salvation for her and for all who believe in him. Mary is with Jesus and he with her in the most intertwined and unified way: one dwells within the other. Talk about being with one another! Mary as one person holds within her the divine incarnation of love and brings it forth in the person of Jesus. Jesus as that incarnation shares it with the whole world and allows it to be received by us as a whole and as individual persons. Like Jesus whose body endures the cross and is raised a spiritual body as Paul says, Mary's body bears pain and is forever changed in the act of childbirth. In some ways Jesus and Mary can be seen not only as the Messiah and Virgin Israel, which is certainly one of the many levels that Matthew wants us to read this story on, who is to be saved, but also as the masculine and feminine ways we understand the holy. Jesus does not come to be without her; Mary does not come to fullness of life without him.
And in all of this we find a variety of ways that God is with us. God is within us. God is among us. God is our very being as the Body of Christ. Mary is blessed to be the very first person that the God we know in Jesus is with. He is with her in the most intimate way possible: connected, tethered to her for life and the sustaining of life. In time, it is we who will be tethered to him for sustained life through the bread and the wine and the life and the cross and the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.
Like Mary, we wait. We wait for Jesus to grow in us so fully that we totally and utterly his. We wait for the Body of Christ in the world to be a witness to his mercy and peace and compassion and for the world to respond. We wait for the love of God that was embodied in Jesus to be embodied in each of us and in this world—heaven on earth, where it should be, the will of God indistinguishable from ours.
Isaiah 7:10-16, Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18, Romans 1:1-7, Matthew 1:18-25
Advent IV, Year A
The story of Jesus' birth—yes, this is it in Matthew in that line “until she had borne a son”—is not the easiest of stories to connect to the season of Advent. It is so stark and to the point (and Matthew's author had many points he was making in the short 8 verses) that it is hard to connect it to the themes of anticipation, waiting, receptivity, and so forth that we tend to associate with Advent. It is much easier to make these connections when hearing Luke's version. In trying to think about how to tie this passage in to the theme of waiting that I have been preaching on, I discovered an interesting symmetry in the stories of Mary and Jesus. It may take me awhile to ramble my way there, but I will get there I promise. Let me know if you think what I see makes sense. That symmetry I discovered led me to think of the tensions of waiting and living both in the here and now in a world that still needs full redemption—as our prayers of the people so perfectly illustrated--and being part of the Body of Christ that is living the resurrected life of full redemption and grace.
Tension is one of the things we see in this story today. The tensions laid out here are ones that repeat in this Gospel: tension between the letter and the spirit of the law and between early Christians, many of whom were Jewish, and Jews being two of them. In this story, Joseph chooses not to follow the strict letter of the law in his planned response to Mary's pregnancy. According to the law she would have been stoned. Scholars and historians tend to agree that by this time this punishment was not generally implemented and other ways had been adopted, though still ones that cast shame. Joseph instead, as best he can, opts for mercy in a way that respects both the law and the command to love given by Jesus. This story was written years after Jesus' death and the author is clearly injecting the command to love of Jesus back into this story. Joseph embodies the dilemma of many early Christians who were Jewish and Matthew portrays him to be a prototype and example for these early followers of Jesus. Likewise, we too live in the same tension of adherence to the law and responding to situations where the law or legal response seems inadequate, wrong or misguided, with mercy and love.
Likewise, Jesus is understood to be the son of God by the movement of the Holy Spirit and the participation of Mary. Joseph gives him a human lineage of the house of David. For Paul as we hear in today's readings, it seems quite clear that he understands Jesus' birth and conception to happen in a way like ours (descended from David according to the flesh). Luke takes this story in Matthew and expands on it dramatically. At the time this was written similar stories about the birth of Moses from a virgin were in circulation, so even within culture and scripture there are multiple ways to understand the origin's of Jesus. And that is a good thing. We can explore and engage all of them.
The early hearers of this story weren't worried about the tension of this as we are and all the other issue we have brought into this story such as original sin, purity, a negative view of human sexuality, etc.. The story points to the union of the divine saving plan and the royal human household of Israel—its kings and anointed ones. Matthew's author and his understanding of how Jesus was conceived are concerned not with biological questions, but with the function this person would have in the saving of Israel by God. In other words, the focus is on Jesus' role and function, not his nature. Is he human? Is he divine? Is he a hybrid? These aren't Matthew's questions really. His concern is what this child is going to accomplish for God and for God's people. This story of Jesus' conception and parentage are never referred to again in any way and even if deleted the confession and understanding of Jesus' role as a savior would still stand firm in this Gospel. This is not the proof so to speak of Jesus' identity. It is his life and the cross and what God brings forth from it.
And it is here that I would like to explore a bit and start winding my way to the symmetry between Mary and Jesus. The heart of this whole passage is, at least to me, that line “and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us”. This is the kernel, the nugget of theological insight, the gem. He isn't named Emmanuel of course; he is named Jesus which is play on the Hebrew word “to save” and related to the name Joshua who in the Hebrew Scriptures was a saving figure in history. But Jesus saves us by being with us.
That is the very crux of the incarnation. And it is amazing when we think on it. We preachers often get pressure to always connect the readings with the nitty gritty of daily life, but sometiems we need to simple spend time on our theology and what it proclaims. We need to ponder it and contemplate it for that is what shapes how we see and understand the daily nitty gritty. So for us we hear this: Jesus saves us by being one with us. It is the total and complete merging of divinity and humanity until we perceive that there is no separation between the two in him. And if we belong to him, than our hope too is to be so close to God that our humanity is totally infused with divinity. It is a sharing of natures and being. It is participatory and active and also full of tension—we live in Christ, but all has not been reconciled to him in this world.
It is all about embodiment. We humans are best at understanding what is enfleshed. If we believe as we confess that the nature of God is love, than love came to be embodied in the way we could understand: in a human being. It is about bodies: Jesus' body, Mary's body, Christ's Body, my body, your body, our body. It has always puzzled me that for so much of the church for so long there was, and still is, disdain and even feelings of disgust towards the human body. It is precisely in a human body that God chooses to express the greatest acts and revelations of love. It is in and through a body that we are fed and grow into Christ's image.
It was at this point in my ramblings that I suddenly saw this mirror image of Jesus and Mary. Before his death Jesus gives us the the Eucharistic Meal, Holy Communion, and it opens with the words, this is my body given for you. Jesus gives his body to the cross to reveal God's salvation. Jesus gives us the gifts of bread and wine understood now to be so much more than that—the very nourishment of God. We are fed by him and through him and our task is to then go out and feed others. We wait for our acts of nourishment to bring forth the kingdom and persevere in doing them even when it seems they have no impact.
Mary is the mirror of this. If Jesus gives us the body of God, Mary gives God her body. She too says this is my body the moment she says yes to the invitation to bear the Messiah. For nine months her very being feeds and nurtures this little life. Her body very literally feeds that of Jesus, just as in time his life will be the food of salvation for her and for all who believe in him. Mary is with Jesus and he with her in the most intertwined and unified way: one dwells within the other. Talk about being with one another! Mary as one person holds within her the divine incarnation of love and brings it forth in the person of Jesus. Jesus as that incarnation shares it with the whole world and allows it to be received by us as a whole and as individual persons. Like Jesus whose body endures the cross and is raised a spiritual body as Paul says, Mary's body bears pain and is forever changed in the act of childbirth. In some ways Jesus and Mary can be seen not only as the Messiah and Virgin Israel, which is certainly one of the many levels that Matthew wants us to read this story on, who is to be saved, but also as the masculine and feminine ways we understand the holy. Jesus does not come to be without her; Mary does not come to fullness of life without him.
And in all of this we find a variety of ways that God is with us. God is within us. God is among us. God is our very being as the Body of Christ. Mary is blessed to be the very first person that the God we know in Jesus is with. He is with her in the most intimate way possible: connected, tethered to her for life and the sustaining of life. In time, it is we who will be tethered to him for sustained life through the bread and the wine and the life and the cross and the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.
Like Mary, we wait. We wait for Jesus to grow in us so fully that we totally and utterly his. We wait for the Body of Christ in the world to be a witness to his mercy and peace and compassion and for the world to respond. We wait for the love of God that was embodied in Jesus to be embodied in each of us and in this world—heaven on earth, where it should be, the will of God indistinguishable from ours.
Monday, November 15, 2010
November 14, 2010, 25th Sunday after Pentecost
November 14, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Malachi 4:1-21, Ps 98, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13, Luke 21:5-19
There is an old saying: It's always darkest before the dawn.
If you've ever been up in the early hours it seems true. The darkness seems almost tangible. A heavy stillness covers things. The sky has no light in it, especially once the moon has set. Sometimes the thought has come to my mind, “what if the sun decides not to rise today?” Each morning the rising sun is a small miracle for those with eyes of faith to see it, ensuring that life continues on this planet. The gift of light and warmth is given each day by a loving God. A sunrise is a symbol of hope; a sunrise is a reminder that God is faithful and reliable.
But in that darkness there is a choice we make. Do we hold firm to the belief that the light will come even if at the moment there is no sign of it, or do we become afraid?
It is the same choice the presents itself in all kinds of darkness or times of distress. When we are overwhelmed by burdens or sorrows do we hold fast to the promise of life in Jesus or do we give into fear and despair? When societal problems are huge and seem intractable do we give into anxiety and blaming those who are seen as the face of those problems? When history seems bent on a nihilistic course full of suffering and destruction do we abandon God or our faith that calls us to continue to live as people acting for mercy, peace, reconciliation and compassion? Or do we make an even bigger mistake and think God is causing it all and in so doing judging who is good and who is not?
Our reading from Luke today is posing these kinds of questions. On on leve it was speaking to the very particular history that had happened in ancient Israel. On another it is speaking to the repetition of such events since human nature has changed very little if at all in the 2000 years since.
Let's hear it again, this time from the version “The Message”.
The immediate setting of this reading is the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. It didn't take anyone with special clairvoyant powers to predict this. Judea chaffed under occupation and occasionally there were violent flare-ups. Eventually, the insurrections grew and Rome came down as empires do when those under their sway aren’t behaving as they ought and came down hard, burning the Temple, killing thousands upon thousands. The cultic worship life of Jesus' people was finished. The Temple was never rebuilt and Judaism was practiced in new ways. From the ashes grew the synagogues and rabbinical faith we know today.
In these chaotic and increasingly violent times, the followers of Jesus were handed over, were put on trial and, some think, asked to abandon the non-violent stance to stand in opposition to the Romans. So, Luke is describing real events in the life of the early Church and looking at the present to see what the future holds based on current events.
The trouble is that we have taken these texts and turned them into the final end of the world by God. They are not. They are about what humans have done and continue to do. No one knows when the world will end, not even the Son of God, so anyone who uses such texts and then predicts such events is assuming quite a lot! Apparently, they have more inside information than Jesus! But more to the point is that the pull and the driving energy of such types—the doomsday, apocalypse, types--is FEAR. Fear you will be left behind. Fear you aren't saved. Fear you aren't on the right side of a vengeful God. Fear of others. Fear of changing things, of addressing social problems, because the idea is that things are running their right course and God is driving the truck right towards the wall. Fear if that we did some serious self-reflection we might find that things were found wanting, that maybe we aren’t as right as we thought.
But is that the faith to which we who follow Jesus are called? Is that the Good News he lived and preached?
One of the resounding themes in Scripture from the earliest stories of the Hebrew people to the letters of Paul encouraging the early Church to the Gospels is this: Fear not.
Moses is worried about what to say to Pharaoh. God tells him to not fear; he will be given what he needs. The Israelites fear the change of leaving Egypt and time and again when fear threatens to devour them or causes them to distrust God (think the Golden Calf incident), God gives them signs to encourage them. Often the prophets are a bit anxious about their message, yet God sustains them saying to not be afraid. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be painful consequences to staying true to their message. It does mean that staying true to it is about staying true to oneself and to God’s ultimate hope for us even when that hope will encounter resistance.
The angels who come to Mary and to others always begin their meeting with the words fear not. Though the task given is often one that will be hard and perhaps even lead to death, the assurance is given that God is with them and that fear will destroy their self, their soul, which is a destruction worse than those who can hurt the body….as we hear time and again.
So many of the world’s values, worldly values as we theology wonks say, have as one of their roots fear. We fear that we won’t have enough. We fear those who are different than us though we really can’t say why. We fear change. We fear losing our privilege or our power, if we are one of those who has it. We fear death. And the consequences are greed, hatred, anger, vengeance, war, constructing elaborate rationales as to why some should be poor or exploited or discriminated against as a way to make us feel secure and unafraid. We get stuck in the way things are done because we are afraid of what change may demand. We can be almost perverse in this clinging. Even when we can see that what we are doing is not working, may in fact, be deadly, we resist and avoid and deny.
In my own life I see the consequences when I live out of fear. I become suspicious, narrow, grouchy, and judgmental. I lose the ability to laugh or play. I am increasingly selfish and self-absorbed, unable to see others with clarity. They become projections of my worst thoughts and traits. When Tommy was in the hospital there was a lot to fear. But I looked at the fears, touched them and then let go because I realized if I got lost in the fear I wouldn’t be able to love my child. I am convinced that part of why he lived and is thriving is because I did not let the fear take hold.
Jesus taught something else. Love of others. Love of enemies. Mercy. Trust that if one shares generously with all than all will have enough. Difference does not mean less than. Conflict can lead to peace not violence. Power over others will corrupt us and draw us away from God. In this ethical frame there is not room for fear to shape our response. No, Jesus asks us to hold to another truth: trust. Trust in God and God’s goodness. Trust in living a life shaped by loving stances towards others that can only happen when we don’t start from a place of fear.
Fear is a parasite of the soul. It rots us away from within. And this is what I think Jesus is getting at when he says, “By your endurance you will gain your souls.” Soul, in the Greek “psyche”, can be best understood as life, your self, your whole self. The call Jesus is making is to hold fast to his teachings even when all around you seems to say, what! That’s crazy! Go and get rid of those people or cut funds for this or launch an attack over there to get rid of the threat. In such times it is our thinking and our vision, which is the biggest threat and which feeds the fear that reinforces it. Fear begets fear and when we live in fear there is no room for creativity or seeing new ways forward. It devours us and it eats up our self.
Jesus is saying continue to be true to the Gospel. Continue to stand compassion and the work of reconciliation. Continue to believe sharing is better than hording. Continue to live into a generous and merciful spirit. Continue to see the reflection of God in every person, loved as much as you by the creator. Be humble. He says: “Fear not little flock, for it is God’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” This is true even if in holding true to the Gospel we seem to “lose” in this world.
In this time in our world and in our country, one of the most powerful witnesses we are called to as followers of Jesus is to not succumb to the fear. A healthy group does not use fear or threats to hold together. All day, every day, we are encouraged to be afraid and to distrust others. Fear-mongering, war-mongering and threats are the common coin of conversation. Jesus is telling us who believe in him and follow him to save our lives, to not give into the atmosphere of fear. To not get caught up in fear of immigrants, fear of Muslims, fear of compromise, fear of changing course to avoid coming calamities such as global climate change; fear of crime, etc. etc. We are to be bold voices for trust, for caring, for partnership and possibility, for creative thinking around the very real challenges that face us with the touchstone being mercy and compassion. Talk about swimming against the tide. But Jesus tells us: fear is not of God.
In the Sudan, as you know, there is a civil war raging between the north and south. It is over many things, but the line of demarcation also falls along a religious one of Christians and Muslims. There is a strong Anglican Church in the south and one day two priests saw fighters from the north coming towards them and it was obvious that their intentions were not good. These two men got onto their knees and prayed, in Arabic, for the fighters, praying for blessings for them and for goodness. The fighters spared their lives. Something powerfully good happened here through this witness and act of trust. Imagine what might be if things like this happened more often.
I believe there is no more powerful act we can make at this time than to be people of hope and trust. There is no more vital witness than to stand against the fear and the animosity and hate and anger it spawns. The world needs this witness; it needs this testimony. And this Good News of God is the rising of the sun of righteousness and wings full of healing…in God’s time.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Malachi 4:1-21, Ps 98, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13, Luke 21:5-19
There is an old saying: It's always darkest before the dawn.
If you've ever been up in the early hours it seems true. The darkness seems almost tangible. A heavy stillness covers things. The sky has no light in it, especially once the moon has set. Sometimes the thought has come to my mind, “what if the sun decides not to rise today?” Each morning the rising sun is a small miracle for those with eyes of faith to see it, ensuring that life continues on this planet. The gift of light and warmth is given each day by a loving God. A sunrise is a symbol of hope; a sunrise is a reminder that God is faithful and reliable.
But in that darkness there is a choice we make. Do we hold firm to the belief that the light will come even if at the moment there is no sign of it, or do we become afraid?
It is the same choice the presents itself in all kinds of darkness or times of distress. When we are overwhelmed by burdens or sorrows do we hold fast to the promise of life in Jesus or do we give into fear and despair? When societal problems are huge and seem intractable do we give into anxiety and blaming those who are seen as the face of those problems? When history seems bent on a nihilistic course full of suffering and destruction do we abandon God or our faith that calls us to continue to live as people acting for mercy, peace, reconciliation and compassion? Or do we make an even bigger mistake and think God is causing it all and in so doing judging who is good and who is not?
Our reading from Luke today is posing these kinds of questions. On on leve it was speaking to the very particular history that had happened in ancient Israel. On another it is speaking to the repetition of such events since human nature has changed very little if at all in the 2000 years since.
Let's hear it again, this time from the version “The Message”.
The immediate setting of this reading is the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. It didn't take anyone with special clairvoyant powers to predict this. Judea chaffed under occupation and occasionally there were violent flare-ups. Eventually, the insurrections grew and Rome came down as empires do when those under their sway aren’t behaving as they ought and came down hard, burning the Temple, killing thousands upon thousands. The cultic worship life of Jesus' people was finished. The Temple was never rebuilt and Judaism was practiced in new ways. From the ashes grew the synagogues and rabbinical faith we know today.
In these chaotic and increasingly violent times, the followers of Jesus were handed over, were put on trial and, some think, asked to abandon the non-violent stance to stand in opposition to the Romans. So, Luke is describing real events in the life of the early Church and looking at the present to see what the future holds based on current events.
The trouble is that we have taken these texts and turned them into the final end of the world by God. They are not. They are about what humans have done and continue to do. No one knows when the world will end, not even the Son of God, so anyone who uses such texts and then predicts such events is assuming quite a lot! Apparently, they have more inside information than Jesus! But more to the point is that the pull and the driving energy of such types—the doomsday, apocalypse, types--is FEAR. Fear you will be left behind. Fear you aren't saved. Fear you aren't on the right side of a vengeful God. Fear of others. Fear of changing things, of addressing social problems, because the idea is that things are running their right course and God is driving the truck right towards the wall. Fear if that we did some serious self-reflection we might find that things were found wanting, that maybe we aren’t as right as we thought.
But is that the faith to which we who follow Jesus are called? Is that the Good News he lived and preached?
One of the resounding themes in Scripture from the earliest stories of the Hebrew people to the letters of Paul encouraging the early Church to the Gospels is this: Fear not.
Moses is worried about what to say to Pharaoh. God tells him to not fear; he will be given what he needs. The Israelites fear the change of leaving Egypt and time and again when fear threatens to devour them or causes them to distrust God (think the Golden Calf incident), God gives them signs to encourage them. Often the prophets are a bit anxious about their message, yet God sustains them saying to not be afraid. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be painful consequences to staying true to their message. It does mean that staying true to it is about staying true to oneself and to God’s ultimate hope for us even when that hope will encounter resistance.
The angels who come to Mary and to others always begin their meeting with the words fear not. Though the task given is often one that will be hard and perhaps even lead to death, the assurance is given that God is with them and that fear will destroy their self, their soul, which is a destruction worse than those who can hurt the body….as we hear time and again.
So many of the world’s values, worldly values as we theology wonks say, have as one of their roots fear. We fear that we won’t have enough. We fear those who are different than us though we really can’t say why. We fear change. We fear losing our privilege or our power, if we are one of those who has it. We fear death. And the consequences are greed, hatred, anger, vengeance, war, constructing elaborate rationales as to why some should be poor or exploited or discriminated against as a way to make us feel secure and unafraid. We get stuck in the way things are done because we are afraid of what change may demand. We can be almost perverse in this clinging. Even when we can see that what we are doing is not working, may in fact, be deadly, we resist and avoid and deny.
In my own life I see the consequences when I live out of fear. I become suspicious, narrow, grouchy, and judgmental. I lose the ability to laugh or play. I am increasingly selfish and self-absorbed, unable to see others with clarity. They become projections of my worst thoughts and traits. When Tommy was in the hospital there was a lot to fear. But I looked at the fears, touched them and then let go because I realized if I got lost in the fear I wouldn’t be able to love my child. I am convinced that part of why he lived and is thriving is because I did not let the fear take hold.
Jesus taught something else. Love of others. Love of enemies. Mercy. Trust that if one shares generously with all than all will have enough. Difference does not mean less than. Conflict can lead to peace not violence. Power over others will corrupt us and draw us away from God. In this ethical frame there is not room for fear to shape our response. No, Jesus asks us to hold to another truth: trust. Trust in God and God’s goodness. Trust in living a life shaped by loving stances towards others that can only happen when we don’t start from a place of fear.
Fear is a parasite of the soul. It rots us away from within. And this is what I think Jesus is getting at when he says, “By your endurance you will gain your souls.” Soul, in the Greek “psyche”, can be best understood as life, your self, your whole self. The call Jesus is making is to hold fast to his teachings even when all around you seems to say, what! That’s crazy! Go and get rid of those people or cut funds for this or launch an attack over there to get rid of the threat. In such times it is our thinking and our vision, which is the biggest threat and which feeds the fear that reinforces it. Fear begets fear and when we live in fear there is no room for creativity or seeing new ways forward. It devours us and it eats up our self.
Jesus is saying continue to be true to the Gospel. Continue to stand compassion and the work of reconciliation. Continue to believe sharing is better than hording. Continue to live into a generous and merciful spirit. Continue to see the reflection of God in every person, loved as much as you by the creator. Be humble. He says: “Fear not little flock, for it is God’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” This is true even if in holding true to the Gospel we seem to “lose” in this world.
In this time in our world and in our country, one of the most powerful witnesses we are called to as followers of Jesus is to not succumb to the fear. A healthy group does not use fear or threats to hold together. All day, every day, we are encouraged to be afraid and to distrust others. Fear-mongering, war-mongering and threats are the common coin of conversation. Jesus is telling us who believe in him and follow him to save our lives, to not give into the atmosphere of fear. To not get caught up in fear of immigrants, fear of Muslims, fear of compromise, fear of changing course to avoid coming calamities such as global climate change; fear of crime, etc. etc. We are to be bold voices for trust, for caring, for partnership and possibility, for creative thinking around the very real challenges that face us with the touchstone being mercy and compassion. Talk about swimming against the tide. But Jesus tells us: fear is not of God.
In the Sudan, as you know, there is a civil war raging between the north and south. It is over many things, but the line of demarcation also falls along a religious one of Christians and Muslims. There is a strong Anglican Church in the south and one day two priests saw fighters from the north coming towards them and it was obvious that their intentions were not good. These two men got onto their knees and prayed, in Arabic, for the fighters, praying for blessings for them and for goodness. The fighters spared their lives. Something powerfully good happened here through this witness and act of trust. Imagine what might be if things like this happened more often.
I believe there is no more powerful act we can make at this time than to be people of hope and trust. There is no more vital witness than to stand against the fear and the animosity and hate and anger it spawns. The world needs this witness; it needs this testimony. And this Good News of God is the rising of the sun of righteousness and wings full of healing…in God’s time.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Sermon update September 2010
The Rev. Garrison has been on maternity leave through most of the summer. She is back at work but her sermons have been more spontaneous than scripted so there have been no copies to post.
Monday, June 7, 2010
June 6, 2010, The 2nd Sunday after Pentecost
SERMON preached on the Second Sunday after Pentecost (5C)
6 June, 2010 - Ted Berktold
When I was a young child, my awareness of wartime casualties centered on an annual Memorial Day visit to the grave of my uncle Joe, who was buried in the military cemetery at Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Mom would cut a bouquet of flowers, pack a substantial picnic, and the whole family would drive off for the day listening to the car radio and my mother's re-telling the tragedy of his death on the beach at Anzio in far-away Italy before I was born. He was a name to me - that's about all. I remember a photograph of him - a handsome young man in his soldier's uniform. Watching Ken Burn’s epic series “War” a few years ago gave me a new perspective on Anzio, in the prayer of a soldier there. “God help us,” he said. “And you come yourself. Don’t be sending Jesus. This ain’t no place for children.” When we would arrive at the cemetery with its row upon row of white markers, I would realize that many other people must have died as well, but the numbers never meant very much to me. The day was largely an outing, an unusual kind of outing, but there was nothing sad or gloomy about it. Even my mother used to enjoy it, although she would always end the day saying: "I suppose the time will come when no one will do this." She was right - we don't do it any more. My father is dead, Mom’s in a nursing home, my brothers and sisters are grown up and moved away like me and have other things to do on Memorial Day, so no one goes to that cemetery any more.
Memorial Day is more than an outing. When I visited the D-Day beaches several years ago, I found it more than a tourist destination in the Normandy countryside. Instinctively, I became more and more somber as I drew near the beaches. When I reflect on the amount of life lost in the wars of the last century alone, I shudder. Millions have been killed, including hundreds of thousands of Americans. Millions of British and French and Germans – tens of millions of Russians and Japanese soldiers and civilians - more than I ever imagined looking at those rows of white markers honoring America's dead at Fort Snelling. How many have been scarred or disabled, some for life? How difficult it is to pray out name and rank, week after week, remembering the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan in our own day.
There is a truth, found in Memorial Day, which goes deeper than statistics, a truth we know, but do not always stop to remember. It is this; someone has paid for everything we have. Think about this parish. Although some of you are founding members, this parish was here for many of today’s members when you arrived. Someone else started it. Life is never a free ride. There is a cost involved in anything that amounts to something. No baby is born; no child is raised to maturity without cost to its parents. No job continues through dozens of years without sacrifice. No marriage vows are kept though a lifetime without cost to both people. No nation has ever existed that has cost its people nothing. Think of our own nation, its original inhabitants from whom so much was taken, and its European settlers who established our government and made our laws. Present-day Americans have what we have because others were willing to pay the price for it. Some people paid the full price of their lives to preserve it.
One of the gravest dangers facing the world today is that we think, or at least we are sometimes encouraged to think, that we can have what we want for nothing. If we want happiness, someone else will give it to us. If we want peace, someone, somewhere, will give it to us. That isn't true, of course. The good things in life are bought with a price. The price of our salvation was paid by the blood of Jesus on the cross. In the first centuries after Jesus, spreading that news cost people their lives. Salvation is offered freely to anyone who will receive it, but it came at a great price.
Memorial Day and D-Day raise a question in me. Why do people fight? Why have so many people been killed? What was the potential of the young theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer, executed in a Nazi prison just before the fall of Berlin in 1945, or my own uncle Joe, or the young men and women we name in our prayers each week? How many others were lost who had within them the possibilities of great and creative things that never came to pass? And why do people in families fight? Why are management and labor always at war? Why young and old? Why do Christians fight so much? I don't pretend to know the answer, but this much I can say: People fight because they are aggressive by nature, some much more so than others. We must be aggressive up to a certain point. When we see something we want, we go after it. The complication is that two people often see the same thing. You see it happen among children. Two children want the same toy, so they fight over it. Two business firms want the same contract and fight to get it, because they feel that their future depends on closing that deal.
Competition adds fuel to the aggressive instinct. On a still greater scale, two countries want the same land, the same natural resources, the same oil fields or water, or the same prestige; and they fight for it. They fight, and history makes it clear that one fight leads to another. The war to end all wars was not the last fight. The treaties that followed, according to some historians, made World War II inevitable. To make things more vicious, when one person does something wrong, innocent people suffer the consequences. Life would be much simpler if that were not true. I don't know why God allows that to be. I don't think God planned it so. All I know is that evil is contagious.
The question all this raises on such a weekend is: Must this go on forever? Are we doomed to live in a world like this for the rest of our lives, and are our children to face a world like this? Aggressive people, aggressive nations. One fight leading to another. The innocent suffering as well as the guilty. This much we can say - the cost of life will continue. Aggressive instincts will not disappear from human nature. Conflict of interests will always be a factor in situations and relationships. But fighting need not continue. Peace is possible. We can learn to disagree with opponents and help them learn to disagree with us without destroying one another. We can learn to handle hostility, and keep it under control in our relationships.
The authors of several gospels saw the truth more clearly than we often do. They used a language we don't easily understand; it is the language of the spirit of God. They said, “You can’t serve two masters.” They didn't have to fight people because they didn't have to fight God. Through their relationship with Jesus they were able to tell us that God's love dwells among us, and because of that, peace is possible. Peace on earth, good will among people - that is God's will.
For those who have seen war and felt the power of death, D-Day and Memorial Day are more than an outing. For those of us who have felt God's saving grace, this sacrament is more than a picnic. It is a sacrificial prayer we make in the name of Jesus who died that we might live; who gave his body and his blood as a sign of God's endless love for us. In doing so, he gave us the peace that passes understanding.
Let us pray:
Loving Lord
Let your love be here
Fill us with your peace
Let your joy be here
Fill us with your grace
Let your light be here
Fill us with your power
Let us know that you are here
Fill us with your presence
Today and every day.
Amen.
6 June, 2010 - Ted Berktold
When I was a young child, my awareness of wartime casualties centered on an annual Memorial Day visit to the grave of my uncle Joe, who was buried in the military cemetery at Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Mom would cut a bouquet of flowers, pack a substantial picnic, and the whole family would drive off for the day listening to the car radio and my mother's re-telling the tragedy of his death on the beach at Anzio in far-away Italy before I was born. He was a name to me - that's about all. I remember a photograph of him - a handsome young man in his soldier's uniform. Watching Ken Burn’s epic series “War” a few years ago gave me a new perspective on Anzio, in the prayer of a soldier there. “God help us,” he said. “And you come yourself. Don’t be sending Jesus. This ain’t no place for children.” When we would arrive at the cemetery with its row upon row of white markers, I would realize that many other people must have died as well, but the numbers never meant very much to me. The day was largely an outing, an unusual kind of outing, but there was nothing sad or gloomy about it. Even my mother used to enjoy it, although she would always end the day saying: "I suppose the time will come when no one will do this." She was right - we don't do it any more. My father is dead, Mom’s in a nursing home, my brothers and sisters are grown up and moved away like me and have other things to do on Memorial Day, so no one goes to that cemetery any more.
Memorial Day is more than an outing. When I visited the D-Day beaches several years ago, I found it more than a tourist destination in the Normandy countryside. Instinctively, I became more and more somber as I drew near the beaches. When I reflect on the amount of life lost in the wars of the last century alone, I shudder. Millions have been killed, including hundreds of thousands of Americans. Millions of British and French and Germans – tens of millions of Russians and Japanese soldiers and civilians - more than I ever imagined looking at those rows of white markers honoring America's dead at Fort Snelling. How many have been scarred or disabled, some for life? How difficult it is to pray out name and rank, week after week, remembering the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan in our own day.
There is a truth, found in Memorial Day, which goes deeper than statistics, a truth we know, but do not always stop to remember. It is this; someone has paid for everything we have. Think about this parish. Although some of you are founding members, this parish was here for many of today’s members when you arrived. Someone else started it. Life is never a free ride. There is a cost involved in anything that amounts to something. No baby is born; no child is raised to maturity without cost to its parents. No job continues through dozens of years without sacrifice. No marriage vows are kept though a lifetime without cost to both people. No nation has ever existed that has cost its people nothing. Think of our own nation, its original inhabitants from whom so much was taken, and its European settlers who established our government and made our laws. Present-day Americans have what we have because others were willing to pay the price for it. Some people paid the full price of their lives to preserve it.
One of the gravest dangers facing the world today is that we think, or at least we are sometimes encouraged to think, that we can have what we want for nothing. If we want happiness, someone else will give it to us. If we want peace, someone, somewhere, will give it to us. That isn't true, of course. The good things in life are bought with a price. The price of our salvation was paid by the blood of Jesus on the cross. In the first centuries after Jesus, spreading that news cost people their lives. Salvation is offered freely to anyone who will receive it, but it came at a great price.
Memorial Day and D-Day raise a question in me. Why do people fight? Why have so many people been killed? What was the potential of the young theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer, executed in a Nazi prison just before the fall of Berlin in 1945, or my own uncle Joe, or the young men and women we name in our prayers each week? How many others were lost who had within them the possibilities of great and creative things that never came to pass? And why do people in families fight? Why are management and labor always at war? Why young and old? Why do Christians fight so much? I don't pretend to know the answer, but this much I can say: People fight because they are aggressive by nature, some much more so than others. We must be aggressive up to a certain point. When we see something we want, we go after it. The complication is that two people often see the same thing. You see it happen among children. Two children want the same toy, so they fight over it. Two business firms want the same contract and fight to get it, because they feel that their future depends on closing that deal.
Competition adds fuel to the aggressive instinct. On a still greater scale, two countries want the same land, the same natural resources, the same oil fields or water, or the same prestige; and they fight for it. They fight, and history makes it clear that one fight leads to another. The war to end all wars was not the last fight. The treaties that followed, according to some historians, made World War II inevitable. To make things more vicious, when one person does something wrong, innocent people suffer the consequences. Life would be much simpler if that were not true. I don't know why God allows that to be. I don't think God planned it so. All I know is that evil is contagious.
The question all this raises on such a weekend is: Must this go on forever? Are we doomed to live in a world like this for the rest of our lives, and are our children to face a world like this? Aggressive people, aggressive nations. One fight leading to another. The innocent suffering as well as the guilty. This much we can say - the cost of life will continue. Aggressive instincts will not disappear from human nature. Conflict of interests will always be a factor in situations and relationships. But fighting need not continue. Peace is possible. We can learn to disagree with opponents and help them learn to disagree with us without destroying one another. We can learn to handle hostility, and keep it under control in our relationships.
The authors of several gospels saw the truth more clearly than we often do. They used a language we don't easily understand; it is the language of the spirit of God. They said, “You can’t serve two masters.” They didn't have to fight people because they didn't have to fight God. Through their relationship with Jesus they were able to tell us that God's love dwells among us, and because of that, peace is possible. Peace on earth, good will among people - that is God's will.
For those who have seen war and felt the power of death, D-Day and Memorial Day are more than an outing. For those of us who have felt God's saving grace, this sacrament is more than a picnic. It is a sacrificial prayer we make in the name of Jesus who died that we might live; who gave his body and his blood as a sign of God's endless love for us. In doing so, he gave us the peace that passes understanding.
Let us pray:
Loving Lord
Let your love be here
Fill us with your peace
Let your joy be here
Fill us with your grace
Let your light be here
Fill us with your power
Let us know that you are here
Fill us with your presence
Today and every day.
Amen.
Monday, May 24, 2010
May 23, 2010, The Day of Pentecost
SERMON preached on May 23, 2010 -Pentecost - Ted Berktold
Church of the Resurrection, Eugene
When a volcano erupts, what happens on the surface is a result of unseen things happening underneath. Heat and pressure from gases and molten rock build up. They cause the ground to bulge and quake and then, amidst fire and flooding mud and flowing lava, a volcano is born. What happens under the earth’s crust happens to people. The People of Israel, God's Chosen People, once spiritually powerful and influential, lay dormant despite so much potential force, talk of a messiah, and the promise of God's power. Some Jews thought that the eruption had come with Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth. But it blew up in their faces. Dreams of glory were buried under fear and death, and their hopes were turned to ashes. The disciples, however, did not disband and go fishing. They did as the Lord instructed; they waited. The Lord of all creation, of all the past and all the present, had claimed to be the Lord of the future as well. So they waited.
During Jesus’ time on earth, the disciples got to know him as they walked together and talked together, felt his healing touch, and heard his words of comfort and truth. They began to respect and love him, and place their hope in him before his arrest, but “He was crucified, died, and was buried,” says the Creed. Then something tremendous happened within the earth; so tremendous it still brings a shout of “alleluia” to our lips two thousand years later. Inside the earth itself, God gave life to the crucified one. The stone was rolled back; the Holy One of God arose to rejoin those who had followed him faithfully. Although they had no hope of ever looking into his eyes again or hearing his voice or touching him, they found themselves doing all those things. Now their relationship with Jesus changed. He was still who he had been before the cross, but they made it clear that now he was more, much more. They could touch the holes made by the nails and the spear. They recognized him in the breaking of bread. He came through closed doors. He had become, to use the words we know so well, the risen Christ.
But this, too, had an end. Christians have always regarded the Ascension of our Lord as the ending of Jesus’ presence among us in a special, personal way that will only begin again in the kingdom of God, after this phase of our life has ended. The early Church would need half a century to absorb his departure and speak about his return. The phrase that comes into my mind when I think of the Ascension is “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” In his account of the Ascension, Luke says that the disciples and Mary went home with joy after Jesus ascended into heaven. I know that we must read the lines of scripture before we read between the lines, but I can’t help feeling that their joy was mixed with sadness on the day Jesus departed. I'm not surprised that scripture mentions only joy, for joy and sadness are opposite ends of the same line, and are often intermingled. So they waited, because he told them to. On the Jewish feast of Pentecost, 50 days after Passover, when Jews commemorate the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai, the waiting stopped. We read in the Acts of the Apostles: “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2: 2)
We live in the area of active volcanoes. But we know that the power of a volcano is nothing compared with the power of God; nothing. The disciples poured out of that room on fire with the Holy Spirit. Like volcanic ash, they began to choke the world, and its powers. They drifted toward Spain and Africa, Rome and Corinth. Those original followers, many who had never left their tiny homeland, covered the known world. They preached love, forgiveness. They preached Jesus Christ. They baptized; they immersed others in the Spirit of God which was poured out in them, the same Spirit which is poured out into us in baptism. “In each of us the Spirit is manifested in a particular way; wise speech, healing, ecstatic utterance, or ability to interpret it,” said Paul. He expanded the list in the 12th chapter of Romans. The gift of the Spirit can be administration, teaching, giving to charity, leading. Paul gave no definitive list. The Spirit blows where it will, he said. We do not know where the Spirit of God will be tomorrow.
According to Paul, the gifts of God are given for the building up of the church, Christ’s visible, tangible presence on earth. They are not for the elite few, these gifts. Each member of the church has his or her particular character, from the youngest to the eldest. There is no Christian who does not have one or more of the gifts of the Spirit, and no individual has them all; not even the bishop. So the question for Paul was not: “What is biggest, best gift for a Christian to have?” but rather, “What gifts has the Spirit given to me?” and “How can I use those gifts?” How can the Church discern the gifts of each person, recognize those gifts, and celebrate them? Some gifts are extraordinary, miraculous, sensational. Some are quiet and ordinary, as modest as a welcoming smile to a newcomer on Sunday morning. At bottom, all the gifts are one gift. There is one Lord, one Spirit, who gives the gift of eternal life. “Almighty God, on this day you opened the way to eternal life to every race and nation by the promised gift of your Holy Spirit,” says the collect for today. That life begins today when we live the love of Christ. Love is our experience of eternal life now.
As their relationship with the risen Christ ended when he ascended, the disciples realized that the love they had come to expect from Jesus would now have to come from among themselves. Chapters 13 -17 of John’s Gospel, the portion of the Gospel we have been reading since I came at the beginning of May, are known as the Farewell Discourses because, in them, Jesus was saying goodbye and handing on his work to those who were to continue his mission. Today’s Gospel (John 14: 8-17) is a key section of that farewell speech. The test of their love for him, he said, is that they continue to practice all he taught them. At the end of the Discourses, at the 2Oth verse of Chapter 17, Jesus prayed not only for the disciples among whom he had lived and ministered, but also for “those who believe in me through their word.” Jesus was praying for us; inviting us to inherit the gifts and become divine love in our own day. He knew people would no longer run into him at the marketplace; they would run into us. They would see and hear us, and he knew that through us, they might eventually come to know him. Over the centuries, by way of water and Word, bread and wine, that first Christian community has become us and we have become them. Like the disciples, we may feel tempted to look back nostalgically to the times when Christ was there for us, and not realize he wanted us to be here for him.
Pentecost redirects our vision from ascending Lord to empowering presence; from sky to earth; from far-away God to Christ in our midst. Pentecost is the mission statement of the Church. Celebrating it with you today is a privilege and a joy. Within us burns the flame of Pentecost. Embowered by the Spirit of the Living God, may we always be Christ to each other. Thank you for being Christ to me today.
Let us pray:
May the Spirit’s fire be in our thoughts
Making them true, good and just
May it protect us from the evil one.
May the Spirit’s fire be in our eyes
May it open our eyes to what is good in life and
protect us from what is not.
May the Spirit’s fire be on our lips, so that we may speak the truth in kindness
That we may serve and encourage others and
Be protected from speaking evil.
May the Spirit’s fire be in our ears
that we may hear with a deep, deep listening
and all may know that we respect them.
May the Spirit’s fire be in our arms and hands
So that we may be of service and build up love.
May the Spirit’s fire be in our whole being; in our legs and feet
Enabling us to walk the earth with care
So that we may walk ways of goodness and truth. Amen.
Church of the Resurrection, Eugene
When a volcano erupts, what happens on the surface is a result of unseen things happening underneath. Heat and pressure from gases and molten rock build up. They cause the ground to bulge and quake and then, amidst fire and flooding mud and flowing lava, a volcano is born. What happens under the earth’s crust happens to people. The People of Israel, God's Chosen People, once spiritually powerful and influential, lay dormant despite so much potential force, talk of a messiah, and the promise of God's power. Some Jews thought that the eruption had come with Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth. But it blew up in their faces. Dreams of glory were buried under fear and death, and their hopes were turned to ashes. The disciples, however, did not disband and go fishing. They did as the Lord instructed; they waited. The Lord of all creation, of all the past and all the present, had claimed to be the Lord of the future as well. So they waited.
During Jesus’ time on earth, the disciples got to know him as they walked together and talked together, felt his healing touch, and heard his words of comfort and truth. They began to respect and love him, and place their hope in him before his arrest, but “He was crucified, died, and was buried,” says the Creed. Then something tremendous happened within the earth; so tremendous it still brings a shout of “alleluia” to our lips two thousand years later. Inside the earth itself, God gave life to the crucified one. The stone was rolled back; the Holy One of God arose to rejoin those who had followed him faithfully. Although they had no hope of ever looking into his eyes again or hearing his voice or touching him, they found themselves doing all those things. Now their relationship with Jesus changed. He was still who he had been before the cross, but they made it clear that now he was more, much more. They could touch the holes made by the nails and the spear. They recognized him in the breaking of bread. He came through closed doors. He had become, to use the words we know so well, the risen Christ.
But this, too, had an end. Christians have always regarded the Ascension of our Lord as the ending of Jesus’ presence among us in a special, personal way that will only begin again in the kingdom of God, after this phase of our life has ended. The early Church would need half a century to absorb his departure and speak about his return. The phrase that comes into my mind when I think of the Ascension is “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” In his account of the Ascension, Luke says that the disciples and Mary went home with joy after Jesus ascended into heaven. I know that we must read the lines of scripture before we read between the lines, but I can’t help feeling that their joy was mixed with sadness on the day Jesus departed. I'm not surprised that scripture mentions only joy, for joy and sadness are opposite ends of the same line, and are often intermingled. So they waited, because he told them to. On the Jewish feast of Pentecost, 50 days after Passover, when Jews commemorate the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai, the waiting stopped. We read in the Acts of the Apostles: “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2: 2)
We live in the area of active volcanoes. But we know that the power of a volcano is nothing compared with the power of God; nothing. The disciples poured out of that room on fire with the Holy Spirit. Like volcanic ash, they began to choke the world, and its powers. They drifted toward Spain and Africa, Rome and Corinth. Those original followers, many who had never left their tiny homeland, covered the known world. They preached love, forgiveness. They preached Jesus Christ. They baptized; they immersed others in the Spirit of God which was poured out in them, the same Spirit which is poured out into us in baptism. “In each of us the Spirit is manifested in a particular way; wise speech, healing, ecstatic utterance, or ability to interpret it,” said Paul. He expanded the list in the 12th chapter of Romans. The gift of the Spirit can be administration, teaching, giving to charity, leading. Paul gave no definitive list. The Spirit blows where it will, he said. We do not know where the Spirit of God will be tomorrow.
According to Paul, the gifts of God are given for the building up of the church, Christ’s visible, tangible presence on earth. They are not for the elite few, these gifts. Each member of the church has his or her particular character, from the youngest to the eldest. There is no Christian who does not have one or more of the gifts of the Spirit, and no individual has them all; not even the bishop. So the question for Paul was not: “What is biggest, best gift for a Christian to have?” but rather, “What gifts has the Spirit given to me?” and “How can I use those gifts?” How can the Church discern the gifts of each person, recognize those gifts, and celebrate them? Some gifts are extraordinary, miraculous, sensational. Some are quiet and ordinary, as modest as a welcoming smile to a newcomer on Sunday morning. At bottom, all the gifts are one gift. There is one Lord, one Spirit, who gives the gift of eternal life. “Almighty God, on this day you opened the way to eternal life to every race and nation by the promised gift of your Holy Spirit,” says the collect for today. That life begins today when we live the love of Christ. Love is our experience of eternal life now.
As their relationship with the risen Christ ended when he ascended, the disciples realized that the love they had come to expect from Jesus would now have to come from among themselves. Chapters 13 -17 of John’s Gospel, the portion of the Gospel we have been reading since I came at the beginning of May, are known as the Farewell Discourses because, in them, Jesus was saying goodbye and handing on his work to those who were to continue his mission. Today’s Gospel (John 14: 8-17) is a key section of that farewell speech. The test of their love for him, he said, is that they continue to practice all he taught them. At the end of the Discourses, at the 2Oth verse of Chapter 17, Jesus prayed not only for the disciples among whom he had lived and ministered, but also for “those who believe in me through their word.” Jesus was praying for us; inviting us to inherit the gifts and become divine love in our own day. He knew people would no longer run into him at the marketplace; they would run into us. They would see and hear us, and he knew that through us, they might eventually come to know him. Over the centuries, by way of water and Word, bread and wine, that first Christian community has become us and we have become them. Like the disciples, we may feel tempted to look back nostalgically to the times when Christ was there for us, and not realize he wanted us to be here for him.
Pentecost redirects our vision from ascending Lord to empowering presence; from sky to earth; from far-away God to Christ in our midst. Pentecost is the mission statement of the Church. Celebrating it with you today is a privilege and a joy. Within us burns the flame of Pentecost. Embowered by the Spirit of the Living God, may we always be Christ to each other. Thank you for being Christ to me today.
Let us pray:
May the Spirit’s fire be in our thoughts
Making them true, good and just
May it protect us from the evil one.
May the Spirit’s fire be in our eyes
May it open our eyes to what is good in life and
protect us from what is not.
May the Spirit’s fire be on our lips, so that we may speak the truth in kindness
That we may serve and encourage others and
Be protected from speaking evil.
May the Spirit’s fire be in our ears
that we may hear with a deep, deep listening
and all may know that we respect them.
May the Spirit’s fire be in our arms and hands
So that we may be of service and build up love.
May the Spirit’s fire be in our whole being; in our legs and feet
Enabling us to walk the earth with care
So that we may walk ways of goodness and truth. Amen.
Monday, May 17, 2010
May 16, 2010, 7th Sunday of Easter
Sermon preached on Easter 7 (16 May, 2010) by Ted Berktold
At the Church of the Resurrection, Eugene
The whole of the Easter season is God’s answer to our unavoidable concerns about death. Jesus was killed, dead as could be, then rose from the grave. Perhaps that’s the focus for the whole Church Year, and the reason we don’t need to build pyramids to house a corpse. We hold onto the promise that our essence will continue when our bodies die. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” we say when we bury someone. Much of our faith is about the body; the physical human body. It is, after all, the death of the body of Jesus, and the death of our own bodies, that initiates eternal life in its fullness. We believe that death is our entrance into the presence of God in a way that we can only sense here on earth. We get a foretaste of heaven in the Eucharist. We feel a union with God here in the midst of the Body of Christ, the Church. But we follow and celebrate a Savior who brings eternal life out of death.
My thirteen year old granddaughter prepared a list of books for me to read now that I am retired. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings top that list. Then comes: “Katurah and Lord Death” by Martine Leavitt. I read it first since it was a single modest volume. It’s a blend of folktale, myth and romance. Katurah is a young woman, lost in a forest, who is able to charm Lord Death with a story and gain an extra day of life, in which she must find true love. At one point, when she asks him if it hurts to die, Lord Death replies, “It is life that hurts you, not death.” “Tell me what it is like to die,” she says. “Is it like every night when I fall asleep?” “No. It is like every morning when you wake up,” he answers.
Some say that we are preoccupied with our bodily existence. Medical advances and our civilized way of living have prolonged life. We live, on average, twice as long as people lived a century and half ago. For most of us here today, physical existence is just about as good as it can possibly be, ever, anywhere, for anyone. Death brings that existence to an end. I think it is not so much that we are afraid of death as it is that we begrudge it. It interrupts and interferes with an existence that most of us enjoy, in spite of a certain amount of pain and anxiety. So we tend to think of death as the worst thing that could happen to anybody and we do everything we can to act as though it did not exist. We cloak it with flowers, we screen it behind sentimental music, and we almost never speak about it. It is the elephant in the room for us, isn’t it? Even as we rejoice with Natasha+ and Blaine at the birth of Thomas, we, like them, pray that he will survive multiple operations on his heart; that he will grow up and live a good life.
I want to speak about death today, not in the full splendor of New Testament faith, concerned not so much with what comes after death, as with the coming of death itself. Obviously my perspective is that of an older man who has already lived out most of his years. And I want to begin with this fact; death is not like a disease that comes to some but not to all; death comes to everybody. When you hear people talk about death it often sounds as if they were talking about a terrible accident, as though it struck some poor person who might ordinarily have been expected to avoid it. Death isn’t like that. Death isn’t a tragedy that hits one family and leaves another free and happy. It is more like birth; it happens to everyone. It has no favorites. The person who wrote the 90th psalm, one of the psalms used at burials, took a grim view of life, but at least he was realistic about death. “We are like grass,” he said. “In the morning, with the dew on it, we are fresh and green and alive, but then the reaper comes during the day and mows it, and when you see it in the evening, it is faded and withered.” We are like that, all of us. Here today and gone tomorrow.
The life of every single one of us comes to an end like a story that is told; that is finished. We don’t have all the time in the world. Some people have more time than others, but when you think about the age of the oldest person you know, it’s not very many years. So the psalmist prays, “Teach us so to count our days that we may take it to heart.” Recognizing the shortness of life, we can also appreciate the seriousness of it. I remember my favorite aunt’s final days when I was in my teens. She was a young Franciscan nun, a dynamic high school teacher, full of life and fun, and she was dying of cancer. She said that something happened to her in the few minutes after she left the clinic the day she was diagnosed to be terminal. Everything from that moment on made a deeper impression on her. She went back and read some of her favorite books, and enjoyed them even more than the first time she read them. She came to our farm to spend time with my Mom and our family, and then visited her other siblings. She eventually had only a few weeks, and then a few days. Every day was something precious; every moment was something to be treasured. The love we hoard up in ourselves and never spend on others, we will never give and never spend. The things we don’t appreciate now in life, the beauty in the world and all the things that make life so good, we will never enjoy. We have only one chance to live each day.
It helps me to remember that death is a normal part of a person’s existence. In itself, it is not evil. There may be evil circumstances, like the death that comes from terrorism or disease, or the painful death of starvation which thousands suffer every day. But death in itself is not evil, any more than birth is evil. Nor is death sad when you think about it as a universal experience. Many of us know all too well that with death comes sadness too deep for words when we are separated from someone we have loved. Separation saddens us.
Let me tell you something else about death. There are things that do not die. Beethoven died in 1827, but the concerto he wrote when he was a young man will outlast him for how many years to come? God’s creation, the mountains and the oceans, the sun and earth and stars, outlast and outlive us. Last week I was on the way to school with my grandson who is in the first grade. He informed me that the sun would burn up in five million years and suck the earth and the planets into itself. Not knowing if this worried him, I said, “We won’t have to worry about something that going to happen so many years from now, will we?” “Well, Grampy, you sure won’t!” he replied. Our birth, our life, our death, rest in God in whom we can put our trust. The majesty and timelessness of God is our final defense against the fear of death. The beauty all around us and the glory that can only be from God gives us hope. In spite of the fact that death comes to all of us, that life is short and therefore so serious, nevertheless, life is safe because God is so great. God is our dwelling place from generation to generation. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray:
The God of each sun rising
With new life so surprising
Come to us
The Bread of Life, our Savior
Live in us forever,
And give us the grace to come to you. Amen.
At the Church of the Resurrection, Eugene
The whole of the Easter season is God’s answer to our unavoidable concerns about death. Jesus was killed, dead as could be, then rose from the grave. Perhaps that’s the focus for the whole Church Year, and the reason we don’t need to build pyramids to house a corpse. We hold onto the promise that our essence will continue when our bodies die. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” we say when we bury someone. Much of our faith is about the body; the physical human body. It is, after all, the death of the body of Jesus, and the death of our own bodies, that initiates eternal life in its fullness. We believe that death is our entrance into the presence of God in a way that we can only sense here on earth. We get a foretaste of heaven in the Eucharist. We feel a union with God here in the midst of the Body of Christ, the Church. But we follow and celebrate a Savior who brings eternal life out of death.
My thirteen year old granddaughter prepared a list of books for me to read now that I am retired. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings top that list. Then comes: “Katurah and Lord Death” by Martine Leavitt. I read it first since it was a single modest volume. It’s a blend of folktale, myth and romance. Katurah is a young woman, lost in a forest, who is able to charm Lord Death with a story and gain an extra day of life, in which she must find true love. At one point, when she asks him if it hurts to die, Lord Death replies, “It is life that hurts you, not death.” “Tell me what it is like to die,” she says. “Is it like every night when I fall asleep?” “No. It is like every morning when you wake up,” he answers.
Some say that we are preoccupied with our bodily existence. Medical advances and our civilized way of living have prolonged life. We live, on average, twice as long as people lived a century and half ago. For most of us here today, physical existence is just about as good as it can possibly be, ever, anywhere, for anyone. Death brings that existence to an end. I think it is not so much that we are afraid of death as it is that we begrudge it. It interrupts and interferes with an existence that most of us enjoy, in spite of a certain amount of pain and anxiety. So we tend to think of death as the worst thing that could happen to anybody and we do everything we can to act as though it did not exist. We cloak it with flowers, we screen it behind sentimental music, and we almost never speak about it. It is the elephant in the room for us, isn’t it? Even as we rejoice with Natasha+ and Blaine at the birth of Thomas, we, like them, pray that he will survive multiple operations on his heart; that he will grow up and live a good life.
I want to speak about death today, not in the full splendor of New Testament faith, concerned not so much with what comes after death, as with the coming of death itself. Obviously my perspective is that of an older man who has already lived out most of his years. And I want to begin with this fact; death is not like a disease that comes to some but not to all; death comes to everybody. When you hear people talk about death it often sounds as if they were talking about a terrible accident, as though it struck some poor person who might ordinarily have been expected to avoid it. Death isn’t like that. Death isn’t a tragedy that hits one family and leaves another free and happy. It is more like birth; it happens to everyone. It has no favorites. The person who wrote the 90th psalm, one of the psalms used at burials, took a grim view of life, but at least he was realistic about death. “We are like grass,” he said. “In the morning, with the dew on it, we are fresh and green and alive, but then the reaper comes during the day and mows it, and when you see it in the evening, it is faded and withered.” We are like that, all of us. Here today and gone tomorrow.
The life of every single one of us comes to an end like a story that is told; that is finished. We don’t have all the time in the world. Some people have more time than others, but when you think about the age of the oldest person you know, it’s not very many years. So the psalmist prays, “Teach us so to count our days that we may take it to heart.” Recognizing the shortness of life, we can also appreciate the seriousness of it. I remember my favorite aunt’s final days when I was in my teens. She was a young Franciscan nun, a dynamic high school teacher, full of life and fun, and she was dying of cancer. She said that something happened to her in the few minutes after she left the clinic the day she was diagnosed to be terminal. Everything from that moment on made a deeper impression on her. She went back and read some of her favorite books, and enjoyed them even more than the first time she read them. She came to our farm to spend time with my Mom and our family, and then visited her other siblings. She eventually had only a few weeks, and then a few days. Every day was something precious; every moment was something to be treasured. The love we hoard up in ourselves and never spend on others, we will never give and never spend. The things we don’t appreciate now in life, the beauty in the world and all the things that make life so good, we will never enjoy. We have only one chance to live each day.
It helps me to remember that death is a normal part of a person’s existence. In itself, it is not evil. There may be evil circumstances, like the death that comes from terrorism or disease, or the painful death of starvation which thousands suffer every day. But death in itself is not evil, any more than birth is evil. Nor is death sad when you think about it as a universal experience. Many of us know all too well that with death comes sadness too deep for words when we are separated from someone we have loved. Separation saddens us.
Let me tell you something else about death. There are things that do not die. Beethoven died in 1827, but the concerto he wrote when he was a young man will outlast him for how many years to come? God’s creation, the mountains and the oceans, the sun and earth and stars, outlast and outlive us. Last week I was on the way to school with my grandson who is in the first grade. He informed me that the sun would burn up in five million years and suck the earth and the planets into itself. Not knowing if this worried him, I said, “We won’t have to worry about something that going to happen so many years from now, will we?” “Well, Grampy, you sure won’t!” he replied. Our birth, our life, our death, rest in God in whom we can put our trust. The majesty and timelessness of God is our final defense against the fear of death. The beauty all around us and the glory that can only be from God gives us hope. In spite of the fact that death comes to all of us, that life is short and therefore so serious, nevertheless, life is safe because God is so great. God is our dwelling place from generation to generation. Thanks be to God.
Let us pray:
The God of each sun rising
With new life so surprising
Come to us
The Bread of Life, our Savior
Live in us forever,
And give us the grace to come to you. Amen.
Monday, May 10, 2010
May 9, 2010, 6th Sunday of Easter
SERMON preached on Easter 6 (Mothers’ Day), May 9,2010, by Ted Berktold
Church of the Resurrection, Eugene
"If you know what's good for you, young man," my mother used to say, ""you'll do as you're told." She was right. Her bonding of obedience and goodness holds true. In today's reading from John's Gospel, Jesus says: “Those who love me will keep my word.” (John 17: 20-26) It is an alternate version of last week’s gospel, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments." (John 14: 15) "You'll do what I say." And right there you find the secret of discipline - of discipleship - for they are one and the same. There you find authority, obedience, and love. Without any one of those three, there is no discipleship.
Very little has ever come about in this world without discipline - in a family, in a nation, in a human being, in a church. Self-discipline makes us who we are. If you really care about good health, you have to do what it takes to stay healthy. Have your flu shot, eat right, and get enough sleep and exercise. See your doctor when you need to. I know what happens to me when I ignore the rules. On Mother's Day, I think of the ways Jesus' words apply to a family. There's nothing as enjoyable as a family that knows what discipline means, an orderly way of life that doesn't crush a person's spirit, but releases members of a family so they can be in healthy, happy relationship with others. We've all seen children who, when asked to open a door, close it; or if told that its time to go to bed, even if they are tired, pay no attention and stay up. Going to bed becomes a battle in which both child and parents are miserable.
Some families have the wrong kind of discipline, where there is simply authority and obedience without love. It’s a sad fact that we need agencies to protect children who are victims of unhealthy, unloving authority in their own homes. Obedience for fear of punishment was not the way of Jesus. Unless children love and respect their parents, they will obey them only until they have a chance not to. My fear of my parent's anger seldom matched my deep urge to obey and please them out of love. They acted consistently, important for any authority figure, and they acted as one. At night, they didn't just send me off to bed. One of them went up the stairs as if they were going with a friend. When Jesus returned to Nazareth and was obedient to his parents, he was responding to people who meant what they said, people who loved him, people who walked the roads of life with him. He had, even in childhood, a habit of responding to God with perfect obedience.
What works for families works in communities. If you want to learn anything at school, you have to listen to others, to those who know more than you do. The same applies when you finish schooling and take a job. One of the great fears in American cities today is the alarming growth in the crime rate. While Eugene is not among the most dangerous cities in America, it is also not listed among the safest. A state-wide study indicates that alcoholic beverages are served illegally to one in every three minors seeking to buy them. Would it really feel better if we kept juvenile crime down while adult offenders multiplied? We have a 25 mph speed limit on most streets. Have you ever been in a flow of traffic that observed that speed? You might argue that speeding is not all that bad, but the young might argue that neither is underage drinking. For young and old, in matters large and small, obedience is a thing of the past. Authority has given up in despair. The jails are full. Love has been dropped as an impractical or unsuitable motivation, and we hear a cry on every side, especially in election years, for a return to law and order; enforced law and order. What about the Church? How many people follow the canons which say a member of the church is one who attends worship every Sunday, participates in the activities and ministries of the church, and contributes a portion, a tithe, of their income?
Jesus was a great teacher, one of the greatest in history. He spoke with authority, says the Bible. That doesn't mean he shouted. His disciples knew he meant what he said because he went with them through every thing, through every valley, to the top of every mountain. He went with them because he loved them. He still goes with us in the power of the Holy Spirit because he loves us. Sometimes we would like to forget what he says: Deny yourself, take up your cross every day, take the lowest place, forgive your enemies, be with the sick and the poor and those in prison, love God and love one another; the list goes on.... As his students, we know that what he requires, he requires. Either you do what he says or you leave the class. He doesn't threaten us to get us to listen. We hear what he says because he loves his subject so much, and he loves us so much. His subject is the Kingdom of God and he cares about us with such passion because it was meant for us. His disciples tried to do as he asked, because they loved him. They never quite made the grade, but they never completely gave up, nor did they realize what he was about until they saw him die. That's when they knew how much he cared, and they began to take seriously the commandments he had given them. Their obedience grew out of their love.
W. H. Auden wrote: Obedience to some authority is inescapable; if we reject the authority of tradition, then we must accept the authority of local fashion." Our tradition is Christianity. The authority of that tradition has often been exchanged for the authority of local fashion. I can't help wondering how many people in this un-churched state miss the love of Christ every day, and especially on Sunday, because of local fashion. I believe it’s more important to be here than sipping mocha at Starbucks or out on a golf course; to bring your children here instead of to T-ball or a soccer match. When Jesus says we can't live on bread alone, he means it. When he says you can't live a completely self-centered life, he means it. When he says you have to keep his word, not just hear it, not just repeat it, but keep it, he means it.
We did not come together today to pass judgment on others. We came here to look at ourselves and to remember that we are under the authority of Christ who first loved us and who loves us still, in spite of everything. We came together in love. I believe my mom was right. If we know what's good for us, we'll do what Christ told us to do. Only then can his will be done is us; his kingdom come in us.
Let us pray:
In our worship, in our work, and in our daily living,
May our hearts touch the things we do with love.
May who we are and what we do
bring healing and renewal to others,
the way Christ touches lives all around our community and our world.
May our days never burden us,
and may we approach this day with dreams, possibilities, and the promise of eternal life. Infused with Christ, may our lives become gifts to be received and, at the same time, gifts to be given away. Amen.
Church of the Resurrection, Eugene
"If you know what's good for you, young man," my mother used to say, ""you'll do as you're told." She was right. Her bonding of obedience and goodness holds true. In today's reading from John's Gospel, Jesus says: “Those who love me will keep my word.” (John 17: 20-26) It is an alternate version of last week’s gospel, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments." (John 14: 15) "You'll do what I say." And right there you find the secret of discipline - of discipleship - for they are one and the same. There you find authority, obedience, and love. Without any one of those three, there is no discipleship.
Very little has ever come about in this world without discipline - in a family, in a nation, in a human being, in a church. Self-discipline makes us who we are. If you really care about good health, you have to do what it takes to stay healthy. Have your flu shot, eat right, and get enough sleep and exercise. See your doctor when you need to. I know what happens to me when I ignore the rules. On Mother's Day, I think of the ways Jesus' words apply to a family. There's nothing as enjoyable as a family that knows what discipline means, an orderly way of life that doesn't crush a person's spirit, but releases members of a family so they can be in healthy, happy relationship with others. We've all seen children who, when asked to open a door, close it; or if told that its time to go to bed, even if they are tired, pay no attention and stay up. Going to bed becomes a battle in which both child and parents are miserable.
Some families have the wrong kind of discipline, where there is simply authority and obedience without love. It’s a sad fact that we need agencies to protect children who are victims of unhealthy, unloving authority in their own homes. Obedience for fear of punishment was not the way of Jesus. Unless children love and respect their parents, they will obey them only until they have a chance not to. My fear of my parent's anger seldom matched my deep urge to obey and please them out of love. They acted consistently, important for any authority figure, and they acted as one. At night, they didn't just send me off to bed. One of them went up the stairs as if they were going with a friend. When Jesus returned to Nazareth and was obedient to his parents, he was responding to people who meant what they said, people who loved him, people who walked the roads of life with him. He had, even in childhood, a habit of responding to God with perfect obedience.
What works for families works in communities. If you want to learn anything at school, you have to listen to others, to those who know more than you do. The same applies when you finish schooling and take a job. One of the great fears in American cities today is the alarming growth in the crime rate. While Eugene is not among the most dangerous cities in America, it is also not listed among the safest. A state-wide study indicates that alcoholic beverages are served illegally to one in every three minors seeking to buy them. Would it really feel better if we kept juvenile crime down while adult offenders multiplied? We have a 25 mph speed limit on most streets. Have you ever been in a flow of traffic that observed that speed? You might argue that speeding is not all that bad, but the young might argue that neither is underage drinking. For young and old, in matters large and small, obedience is a thing of the past. Authority has given up in despair. The jails are full. Love has been dropped as an impractical or unsuitable motivation, and we hear a cry on every side, especially in election years, for a return to law and order; enforced law and order. What about the Church? How many people follow the canons which say a member of the church is one who attends worship every Sunday, participates in the activities and ministries of the church, and contributes a portion, a tithe, of their income?
Jesus was a great teacher, one of the greatest in history. He spoke with authority, says the Bible. That doesn't mean he shouted. His disciples knew he meant what he said because he went with them through every thing, through every valley, to the top of every mountain. He went with them because he loved them. He still goes with us in the power of the Holy Spirit because he loves us. Sometimes we would like to forget what he says: Deny yourself, take up your cross every day, take the lowest place, forgive your enemies, be with the sick and the poor and those in prison, love God and love one another; the list goes on.... As his students, we know that what he requires, he requires. Either you do what he says or you leave the class. He doesn't threaten us to get us to listen. We hear what he says because he loves his subject so much, and he loves us so much. His subject is the Kingdom of God and he cares about us with such passion because it was meant for us. His disciples tried to do as he asked, because they loved him. They never quite made the grade, but they never completely gave up, nor did they realize what he was about until they saw him die. That's when they knew how much he cared, and they began to take seriously the commandments he had given them. Their obedience grew out of their love.
W. H. Auden wrote: Obedience to some authority is inescapable; if we reject the authority of tradition, then we must accept the authority of local fashion." Our tradition is Christianity. The authority of that tradition has often been exchanged for the authority of local fashion. I can't help wondering how many people in this un-churched state miss the love of Christ every day, and especially on Sunday, because of local fashion. I believe it’s more important to be here than sipping mocha at Starbucks or out on a golf course; to bring your children here instead of to T-ball or a soccer match. When Jesus says we can't live on bread alone, he means it. When he says you can't live a completely self-centered life, he means it. When he says you have to keep his word, not just hear it, not just repeat it, but keep it, he means it.
We did not come together today to pass judgment on others. We came here to look at ourselves and to remember that we are under the authority of Christ who first loved us and who loves us still, in spite of everything. We came together in love. I believe my mom was right. If we know what's good for us, we'll do what Christ told us to do. Only then can his will be done is us; his kingdom come in us.
Let us pray:
In our worship, in our work, and in our daily living,
May our hearts touch the things we do with love.
May who we are and what we do
bring healing and renewal to others,
the way Christ touches lives all around our community and our world.
May our days never burden us,
and may we approach this day with dreams, possibilities, and the promise of eternal life. Infused with Christ, may our lives become gifts to be received and, at the same time, gifts to be given away. Amen.
May 2, 2010, 5th Sunday of Easter
SERMON preached on Easter 5, May 2, 2010, by Ted Berktold
Church of the Resurrection, Eugene
It is a great privilege for me to join you, the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, as the Church Universal continues to celebrate our oldest, most important feast, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. We had forty serious days of preparation in fasting and prayer and a dramatic series of services during Holy Week. Now we are part-way through the seven weeks of the Easter Season. All of this helps us to focus on the FACT of the resurrection. We are a religion based upon reported facts. Our first question as Episcopalians is not: "Do you know where you're going when you die?" but rather: "Do you know what Christ, who is alive, has done for us? Do you know the power of the resurrection?” People believed that Jesus rose from the dead because they saw him. They saw him dead; then they saw him risen and alive. They talked to him, the way we talk to each other. They touched him; touched the wounds in his hands and side. They ate meals with him, remembering that special Passover meal they shared on the night he was taken away from them.
There are theories that the women in the Gospel story went to the wrong tomb and in a case of mistaken identity, heard a young man (not an angel, of course) say: "He is not here." Perhaps they only thought they heard him say, "He is risen." The cynic might think that the disciples were a radical group capitalizing on a situation to make a social movement out of it. Even for the cynic, however, common sense says that the body of Jesus would soon have been located by his enemies to dispel this talk of resurrection. Jesus' friends would not have been able to destroy his body to make their story sound good - they loved him too much to do that. You may not care what the disciples thought. But they sincerely believed that Jesus was alive after his death.
Not only is it true that they believed Jesus was alive; they believed it unanimously. They disagreed about many things, as we still do throughout the Christian world. Today’s first lesson from the Book of Acts is all about the disagreement over sharing Jesus with non-Jews. After the vision with clean and unclean, or kosher foods mixed with foods that are not kosher, Peter says that God told him not to make a distinction between them (gentiles) and us (Jews). (Acts 11: 1-18) The disciples had opinions on who would be first in God's kingdom. They didn't agree on Jesus' title, or his status. They argued about money, and the role women could play in this new movement. Some of his teachings were slow to win acceptance among them, especially that bit about serving others and dying to self. But when it came to believing that he was alive, that God raised him from the dead, there was not one dissenting voice.
As you might expect, they didn't all speak about it in the same way. Some spoke of the physical dynamics; of wounds that could be touched, of a breakfast they shared with him on a beach. St. Paul spoke of it in terms of a blinding light that struck him down on the way to Damascus. Others said it was the presence of one who joined them as they walked along a road to Emmaus on a dreary day, and made himself known to them at supper, in the breaking of bread. The way you experience another person's presence is not the essential thing. You don't always need to see someone or hear a voice to feel a presence. Sometimes you just know that person is there. The people who knew Jesus best and loved him most knew that he was still with them. They proclaimed it unanimously; they proclaimed it with passion.
We don't often say things with passion. Some people think its bad manners to get too excited, especially in church. It’s hard to get excited about the amount of rainfall this year, or the distance from here to Portland. But if someone you love is falsely accused of a crime, and your opinion of his or her innocence or guilt is asked, you will probably respond with passion. If you asked the early Christians, "Do you believe in the ten commandments?" I'm sure they would all have said, "Yes, we believe." If you asked them, "Do you believe that Jesus is alive?" they would have said exactly the same thing, "Yes, we believe." The difference would have been in the passion with which they said it. They were willing to die for this belief. They were willing to die rather than deny that Jesus was alive, that Jesus was the Christ of God. They weren’t thrown to the lions by the Romans because they ate fish on Friday, sang too loud at services, or wore modest togas. They died because they believed in the resurrection.
And why not? They lived in a dark and dangerous world. We like to think that our world is dark, full of risks and threats of terrorism and war, a dark cloud of volcanic ash crippling airline traffic, and we feel the urgent need for an extra hour of daylight in the summer months. But their world was really dark. There wasn't much for them to look forward to, the little people who knew Jesus. So if death had no power over Jesus, it meant that the light was in him; that light which had almost been blown out over and over again, especially on Good Friday. His resurrection meant that nothing could put out the light. They believed with such a passion because, if Jesus was alive, death was not the last word. There was something for them to look forward to, something for them to live for. Their defeat could be turned into victory. Their darkness could become a divine light. Now the world in which they lived and suffered was a different place.
Easter is about this different world. In it, the Spirit of the risen Lord is present. The Church has always made this its central, passionate fact. Wherever, whenever two or three of us gather in Christ's name and spirit, he is there. He is here, right now. Whenever we rise above resentment and hatred and forgive the one who has offended us, Christ is there. Whenever people like us rise above our trials and tribulations, he is there. Whenever we love unselfishly, there is the risen Christ. “I give you a new commandment,” says Jesus in today’s gospel, “that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13: 31-35) Whenever we let the light of God shine through us so that others might know and feel the presence of Christ in us, there is Jesus, in the power and glory of his resurrection from the grave. The Lord is risen. Sin and death have no dominion over him. Sin and death have no dominion over us. God has willed to lift us up out of the dust of the earth and make us one with Christ. That is cause for our song of “Alleluia.” That is the heart of our faith.
Let us pray:
The Lord of the empty tomb
The conqueror of gloom
Come to us
The Lord on the road to Emmaus
The Lord giving hope to Thomas
Come to us
The Lord appearing on the shore
Giving us life forevermore
Come to us
The Lord in the garden walking
The Lord to Mary talking
Come to us
Abide with us
And fill us with your love. Amen
Church of the Resurrection, Eugene
It is a great privilege for me to join you, the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, as the Church Universal continues to celebrate our oldest, most important feast, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. We had forty serious days of preparation in fasting and prayer and a dramatic series of services during Holy Week. Now we are part-way through the seven weeks of the Easter Season. All of this helps us to focus on the FACT of the resurrection. We are a religion based upon reported facts. Our first question as Episcopalians is not: "Do you know where you're going when you die?" but rather: "Do you know what Christ, who is alive, has done for us? Do you know the power of the resurrection?” People believed that Jesus rose from the dead because they saw him. They saw him dead; then they saw him risen and alive. They talked to him, the way we talk to each other. They touched him; touched the wounds in his hands and side. They ate meals with him, remembering that special Passover meal they shared on the night he was taken away from them.
There are theories that the women in the Gospel story went to the wrong tomb and in a case of mistaken identity, heard a young man (not an angel, of course) say: "He is not here." Perhaps they only thought they heard him say, "He is risen." The cynic might think that the disciples were a radical group capitalizing on a situation to make a social movement out of it. Even for the cynic, however, common sense says that the body of Jesus would soon have been located by his enemies to dispel this talk of resurrection. Jesus' friends would not have been able to destroy his body to make their story sound good - they loved him too much to do that. You may not care what the disciples thought. But they sincerely believed that Jesus was alive after his death.
Not only is it true that they believed Jesus was alive; they believed it unanimously. They disagreed about many things, as we still do throughout the Christian world. Today’s first lesson from the Book of Acts is all about the disagreement over sharing Jesus with non-Jews. After the vision with clean and unclean, or kosher foods mixed with foods that are not kosher, Peter says that God told him not to make a distinction between them (gentiles) and us (Jews). (Acts 11: 1-18) The disciples had opinions on who would be first in God's kingdom. They didn't agree on Jesus' title, or his status. They argued about money, and the role women could play in this new movement. Some of his teachings were slow to win acceptance among them, especially that bit about serving others and dying to self. But when it came to believing that he was alive, that God raised him from the dead, there was not one dissenting voice.
As you might expect, they didn't all speak about it in the same way. Some spoke of the physical dynamics; of wounds that could be touched, of a breakfast they shared with him on a beach. St. Paul spoke of it in terms of a blinding light that struck him down on the way to Damascus. Others said it was the presence of one who joined them as they walked along a road to Emmaus on a dreary day, and made himself known to them at supper, in the breaking of bread. The way you experience another person's presence is not the essential thing. You don't always need to see someone or hear a voice to feel a presence. Sometimes you just know that person is there. The people who knew Jesus best and loved him most knew that he was still with them. They proclaimed it unanimously; they proclaimed it with passion.
We don't often say things with passion. Some people think its bad manners to get too excited, especially in church. It’s hard to get excited about the amount of rainfall this year, or the distance from here to Portland. But if someone you love is falsely accused of a crime, and your opinion of his or her innocence or guilt is asked, you will probably respond with passion. If you asked the early Christians, "Do you believe in the ten commandments?" I'm sure they would all have said, "Yes, we believe." If you asked them, "Do you believe that Jesus is alive?" they would have said exactly the same thing, "Yes, we believe." The difference would have been in the passion with which they said it. They were willing to die for this belief. They were willing to die rather than deny that Jesus was alive, that Jesus was the Christ of God. They weren’t thrown to the lions by the Romans because they ate fish on Friday, sang too loud at services, or wore modest togas. They died because they believed in the resurrection.
And why not? They lived in a dark and dangerous world. We like to think that our world is dark, full of risks and threats of terrorism and war, a dark cloud of volcanic ash crippling airline traffic, and we feel the urgent need for an extra hour of daylight in the summer months. But their world was really dark. There wasn't much for them to look forward to, the little people who knew Jesus. So if death had no power over Jesus, it meant that the light was in him; that light which had almost been blown out over and over again, especially on Good Friday. His resurrection meant that nothing could put out the light. They believed with such a passion because, if Jesus was alive, death was not the last word. There was something for them to look forward to, something for them to live for. Their defeat could be turned into victory. Their darkness could become a divine light. Now the world in which they lived and suffered was a different place.
Easter is about this different world. In it, the Spirit of the risen Lord is present. The Church has always made this its central, passionate fact. Wherever, whenever two or three of us gather in Christ's name and spirit, he is there. He is here, right now. Whenever we rise above resentment and hatred and forgive the one who has offended us, Christ is there. Whenever people like us rise above our trials and tribulations, he is there. Whenever we love unselfishly, there is the risen Christ. “I give you a new commandment,” says Jesus in today’s gospel, “that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13: 31-35) Whenever we let the light of God shine through us so that others might know and feel the presence of Christ in us, there is Jesus, in the power and glory of his resurrection from the grave. The Lord is risen. Sin and death have no dominion over him. Sin and death have no dominion over us. God has willed to lift us up out of the dust of the earth and make us one with Christ. That is cause for our song of “Alleluia.” That is the heart of our faith.
Let us pray:
The Lord of the empty tomb
The conqueror of gloom
Come to us
The Lord on the road to Emmaus
The Lord giving hope to Thomas
Come to us
The Lord appearing on the shore
Giving us life forevermore
Come to us
The Lord in the garden walking
The Lord to Mary talking
Come to us
Abide with us
And fill us with your love. Amen
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Monday, April 12, 2010
April 11, 2010, 2nd Sunday of Easter
April 11, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Acts 5:27-32, Ps. 150, Revelation 1:4-8, John 20:19-31
2nd Sunday of Easter, Year C
How many of us are locked in fear? How many of us, for all our ability to move around and do things, are living behind metaphorical closed doors? For many of us this is true, I think, to a greater or lesser degree. It is for me. At this point in my life the fears are different than they were years ago, yet some of the old ones remain. Here are some of mine: what if I lost my position? What if I really gave as generously as Jesus did even if it meant not being sure I’d have enough for myself reserved for tomorrow? Can I really push the voice of social justice and its direct connection to the Gospel or will I get attacked for being too political? What if people are upset? What if they leave the church? How brave am I really in my claim that I follow and trust in Jesus when the popular image is of a judging, partisan, harsh person who seems to condemn more than love and offer unconditional grace and acceptance? And then there are more private and personal hurts.
I relate to these disciples, these followers, who were huddled together in uncertainty and dread. They had dared to follow Jesus who had by his signs of feeding, healing, accepting as equals women and foreigners, and refusing to judge and punish, directly challenged the order of his society. It had cost him his life. It might cost them theirs. And then, Jesus is there, among them alive.
This is a key point. Alive. Life. The Gospel of John is emphatic that it is Jesus’ life that saves us, not his death. John is clear that it is seeing the life of Jesus and emulating it that releases us from sin, not his dying to wipe some celestial slate clean. And it is this release from sin, the work of forgiveness, that is the crux of the passage today. We are to see the alive Jesus here and now, among us and by our side, just like those disciples. In John such seeing places us in God’s presence and in the new creation where heaven and earth are one.
Sin, in this context, means first and foremost not believing in the revealed truth that Jesus is the Son of God. Sin is lack of faith, of trust, that in Jesus we find life. It is not seeing that we are attached to that vine of life. It is to resist that all God requires for us to know salvation is to receive that love and light. Grace is first, not living by strict morality codes or obeying the demands and agendas of those in power, the authorities. Thus, we circle back to this core truth at the heart of this Gospel: forgiveness of sins is not about us judging and then pardoning or punishing others; it is about seeing with the eyes of Jesus. Only God judges. Our lives are to be shaped by loving and serving them.
This is the work of the church: sometimes hard to tell given some of our more illustrious moments of the past such as witch burning and the Inquisition or more current examples. In this Gospel today it is Pentecost; the Spirit is given to the people to continue living as Jesus lived, willing to serve and love as Jesus did. The work, the purpose of the church and therefore us is this: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” It is to boldly proclaim that Jesus is alive in and among us, giving us strength and hope even in the face of our worst hurts and fears and terrors. Its central point is forgiveness. We live this out by serving one another in love by humble, mutual service as done by Jesus in washing our feet. This was the new commandment.
It is at this point, I believe, that the story of Thomas and this work of the church merge. Jesus meets Thomas where he is. Thomas wants nothing less than what the others have and Jesus, rather than castigating Thomas, indeed meets him where he is. He gives him what he needs. And what Thomas needs is to be able to delve into the hurt and the wounds. The most accurate translation of Thomas’ request is literally “to throw” his hands into the wounds of Jesus. And Jesus allows this saying in effect that we can throw our doubts, worries, and fears on him. I find this very reassuring. I can toss my fears unto him. I can open my doors locked with fear a bit more each day until his life drives it out. This is very much the point of prayer. We can probe our wounds and our hurts so that we can be healed by the living Jesus.
And this is the basis for true forgiveness and of truly learning to love one another as Jesus loved us. This forgiveness allows us to see correctly. This forgiveness allows us to see others as reflections of God that we are to serve and not to harm or judge as unworthy of God or each other. Even Judas was washed and shared in the meal. This forgiveness asks us to question and resist all that diminishes others and ourselves. It is to have them through us experience the transformative love of God.
When we live in this posture of forgiveness so much is opened up. For example, the family member that is a bitter and hard person, someone we really can’t stand or who we don’t want to be around is someone we invite to tell their story. Under all that there is a wound that has never healed. Instead of judging and writing them off, we can find a way to see what is underneath and maybe, just maybe, bring new life to the relationship. Or the person who always criticizes us we decide not to treat with anger, but to deflect the barbs and offer kind words in response. Or a rather amusing, but insightful, example from a Bollywood film I saw three years ago where a man is fed up that his neighbor one floor above him always spits out his tobacco juice on his door and landing. He decides to stop yelling and simple wash it up every day while smiling a warm greeting to the spitter. And finally, one day the spitter winds up, takes aim, sees the neighbor waiting and stops. He has finally learned to see with new eyes that realize he can no longer do such a thing.
In this place of forgiveness we can probe our own hurts and let go of our anger, our need to judge others, our need to justify the way the world is. We can delve underneath conventional politics, and partisan ideologies, to see a deeper and more complex truth to which we must respond. For instance, we can ask the foundational question of if the relentless pursuit of profit is compatible with washing the feet and serving one another in mutual regard. We can look at the greed and desire to profit at others’ expense be it underpaid workers, decisions to not pay for medical procedures, or miners who perish due to unsafe working conditions that were not fixed, which are the wounds of fear and insecurity turned outwards, and work to create something new. We may make new choices in what we buy or how we look at social issues or decide to work to adjust our economic relationships so that reasonable profit and fairness are not seen as mutually exclusive.
Or we look again at the cultural mindset that drugs and drug users are criminal and begin to look for the hurt underneath, both of the users and the society in which they grew up, that needs to be healed. We can begin to see the realities that need the life of the resurrected one invited in, not just condemnation, which simply locks people up as so much garbage and does so in ways profoundly shaped by racism and poverty.
We can look to Jesus sign of feeding the 5,000 and ask how is it that today there is more food than ever in the world and yet more people than ever are hungry because they cannot access what creation freely gives? How is it loving one another when food is controlled in a way that denies it to so many? Does this change what we eat, where we buy our food? Does it encourage us to learn about the realities of the global food system and the devastating impact it is having on farmers and the land? Charity isn’t enough; love and service requires dissolving the divide. The theological truth of Jesus is that God feeds all abundantly. If we believe in Jesus we too feed others all that they need and to create a world where all participate directly in that source. Radical stuff, but that is the nature of forgiveness that flows from a confession of Jesus as God.
These are some of the places that this Gospel takes me. I start from the assurance that in Jesus I meet God and that meeting is grace. I can let go of my fears and wounds and place them on his life so that I can see with his eyes. His eyes are so much better than mine that can be so clouded by misunderstanding, selfishness and anxiety.
Then I can join most fully in the purpose of the church, which is to be a community of people that embody grace, unconditional love and service without qualification. Jesus’ life reveals that no matter who we are or what we are God is love for us. To live that out in fullness and in truth would indeed be a miracle. It is the miracle we are entrusted to perform within ourselves and within this community. We each must see what this means for our own daily life and then we must be open to see what it means for our life in the greater world. As Bishop Jelinek said yesterday at Bishop Michael’s consecration we are to work for the common good and trust that in the common good we will find what is truly good for us each individually as well. Just like he did for Thomas, Jesus will give us exactly what we need when we need it. Just like that first community that wrote John, we are to believe that we are graced and loved as we are. Just like that first community, this sense allows us to see, not as judgers, but as lovers, who are transformed to see the world anew and offer the vision of the kingdom to its sin, its brokenness and its pain.
So this week I invite you to imagine what living out this vision looks like in your own life and what you imagine it could be calling us here at Resurrection to do in our future. Next week, instead of me preaching, I would like for us to share our thoughts and understandings of this, so we can learn from each other what being alive in Christ and sharing his life means to us.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Acts 5:27-32, Ps. 150, Revelation 1:4-8, John 20:19-31
2nd Sunday of Easter, Year C
How many of us are locked in fear? How many of us, for all our ability to move around and do things, are living behind metaphorical closed doors? For many of us this is true, I think, to a greater or lesser degree. It is for me. At this point in my life the fears are different than they were years ago, yet some of the old ones remain. Here are some of mine: what if I lost my position? What if I really gave as generously as Jesus did even if it meant not being sure I’d have enough for myself reserved for tomorrow? Can I really push the voice of social justice and its direct connection to the Gospel or will I get attacked for being too political? What if people are upset? What if they leave the church? How brave am I really in my claim that I follow and trust in Jesus when the popular image is of a judging, partisan, harsh person who seems to condemn more than love and offer unconditional grace and acceptance? And then there are more private and personal hurts.
I relate to these disciples, these followers, who were huddled together in uncertainty and dread. They had dared to follow Jesus who had by his signs of feeding, healing, accepting as equals women and foreigners, and refusing to judge and punish, directly challenged the order of his society. It had cost him his life. It might cost them theirs. And then, Jesus is there, among them alive.
This is a key point. Alive. Life. The Gospel of John is emphatic that it is Jesus’ life that saves us, not his death. John is clear that it is seeing the life of Jesus and emulating it that releases us from sin, not his dying to wipe some celestial slate clean. And it is this release from sin, the work of forgiveness, that is the crux of the passage today. We are to see the alive Jesus here and now, among us and by our side, just like those disciples. In John such seeing places us in God’s presence and in the new creation where heaven and earth are one.
Sin, in this context, means first and foremost not believing in the revealed truth that Jesus is the Son of God. Sin is lack of faith, of trust, that in Jesus we find life. It is not seeing that we are attached to that vine of life. It is to resist that all God requires for us to know salvation is to receive that love and light. Grace is first, not living by strict morality codes or obeying the demands and agendas of those in power, the authorities. Thus, we circle back to this core truth at the heart of this Gospel: forgiveness of sins is not about us judging and then pardoning or punishing others; it is about seeing with the eyes of Jesus. Only God judges. Our lives are to be shaped by loving and serving them.
This is the work of the church: sometimes hard to tell given some of our more illustrious moments of the past such as witch burning and the Inquisition or more current examples. In this Gospel today it is Pentecost; the Spirit is given to the people to continue living as Jesus lived, willing to serve and love as Jesus did. The work, the purpose of the church and therefore us is this: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” It is to boldly proclaim that Jesus is alive in and among us, giving us strength and hope even in the face of our worst hurts and fears and terrors. Its central point is forgiveness. We live this out by serving one another in love by humble, mutual service as done by Jesus in washing our feet. This was the new commandment.
It is at this point, I believe, that the story of Thomas and this work of the church merge. Jesus meets Thomas where he is. Thomas wants nothing less than what the others have and Jesus, rather than castigating Thomas, indeed meets him where he is. He gives him what he needs. And what Thomas needs is to be able to delve into the hurt and the wounds. The most accurate translation of Thomas’ request is literally “to throw” his hands into the wounds of Jesus. And Jesus allows this saying in effect that we can throw our doubts, worries, and fears on him. I find this very reassuring. I can toss my fears unto him. I can open my doors locked with fear a bit more each day until his life drives it out. This is very much the point of prayer. We can probe our wounds and our hurts so that we can be healed by the living Jesus.
And this is the basis for true forgiveness and of truly learning to love one another as Jesus loved us. This forgiveness allows us to see correctly. This forgiveness allows us to see others as reflections of God that we are to serve and not to harm or judge as unworthy of God or each other. Even Judas was washed and shared in the meal. This forgiveness asks us to question and resist all that diminishes others and ourselves. It is to have them through us experience the transformative love of God.
When we live in this posture of forgiveness so much is opened up. For example, the family member that is a bitter and hard person, someone we really can’t stand or who we don’t want to be around is someone we invite to tell their story. Under all that there is a wound that has never healed. Instead of judging and writing them off, we can find a way to see what is underneath and maybe, just maybe, bring new life to the relationship. Or the person who always criticizes us we decide not to treat with anger, but to deflect the barbs and offer kind words in response. Or a rather amusing, but insightful, example from a Bollywood film I saw three years ago where a man is fed up that his neighbor one floor above him always spits out his tobacco juice on his door and landing. He decides to stop yelling and simple wash it up every day while smiling a warm greeting to the spitter. And finally, one day the spitter winds up, takes aim, sees the neighbor waiting and stops. He has finally learned to see with new eyes that realize he can no longer do such a thing.
In this place of forgiveness we can probe our own hurts and let go of our anger, our need to judge others, our need to justify the way the world is. We can delve underneath conventional politics, and partisan ideologies, to see a deeper and more complex truth to which we must respond. For instance, we can ask the foundational question of if the relentless pursuit of profit is compatible with washing the feet and serving one another in mutual regard. We can look at the greed and desire to profit at others’ expense be it underpaid workers, decisions to not pay for medical procedures, or miners who perish due to unsafe working conditions that were not fixed, which are the wounds of fear and insecurity turned outwards, and work to create something new. We may make new choices in what we buy or how we look at social issues or decide to work to adjust our economic relationships so that reasonable profit and fairness are not seen as mutually exclusive.
Or we look again at the cultural mindset that drugs and drug users are criminal and begin to look for the hurt underneath, both of the users and the society in which they grew up, that needs to be healed. We can begin to see the realities that need the life of the resurrected one invited in, not just condemnation, which simply locks people up as so much garbage and does so in ways profoundly shaped by racism and poverty.
We can look to Jesus sign of feeding the 5,000 and ask how is it that today there is more food than ever in the world and yet more people than ever are hungry because they cannot access what creation freely gives? How is it loving one another when food is controlled in a way that denies it to so many? Does this change what we eat, where we buy our food? Does it encourage us to learn about the realities of the global food system and the devastating impact it is having on farmers and the land? Charity isn’t enough; love and service requires dissolving the divide. The theological truth of Jesus is that God feeds all abundantly. If we believe in Jesus we too feed others all that they need and to create a world where all participate directly in that source. Radical stuff, but that is the nature of forgiveness that flows from a confession of Jesus as God.
These are some of the places that this Gospel takes me. I start from the assurance that in Jesus I meet God and that meeting is grace. I can let go of my fears and wounds and place them on his life so that I can see with his eyes. His eyes are so much better than mine that can be so clouded by misunderstanding, selfishness and anxiety.
Then I can join most fully in the purpose of the church, which is to be a community of people that embody grace, unconditional love and service without qualification. Jesus’ life reveals that no matter who we are or what we are God is love for us. To live that out in fullness and in truth would indeed be a miracle. It is the miracle we are entrusted to perform within ourselves and within this community. We each must see what this means for our own daily life and then we must be open to see what it means for our life in the greater world. As Bishop Jelinek said yesterday at Bishop Michael’s consecration we are to work for the common good and trust that in the common good we will find what is truly good for us each individually as well. Just like he did for Thomas, Jesus will give us exactly what we need when we need it. Just like that first community that wrote John, we are to believe that we are graced and loved as we are. Just like that first community, this sense allows us to see, not as judgers, but as lovers, who are transformed to see the world anew and offer the vision of the kingdom to its sin, its brokenness and its pain.
So this week I invite you to imagine what living out this vision looks like in your own life and what you imagine it could be calling us here at Resurrection to do in our future. Next week, instead of me preaching, I would like for us to share our thoughts and understandings of this, so we can learn from each other what being alive in Christ and sharing his life means to us.
Friday, April 9, 2010
April 4, 2010, Easter Day
April 4, 2010
Easter Sunday
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Jeremy was born with what the world saw as a weak, limited body and a slow mind. Though he was 12 he was still in second grade, unable to grasp much. His teacher often became impatient with him and his classmates would get uncomfortable with his squirming. At times, though, he would suddenly speak clearly as if a spot of light had broken in to his mind. In exasperation, the teacher called in Jeremy’s parents one day for a consultation. Jeremy’s teacher spoke to them and said that their child really belonged in a special school. It wasn’t fair for him to distract the other children. Jeremy’s parents answered that there was no school like that nearby. It would be a terrible shock to Jeremy to make such a change and that they knew he liked the school.
After they left, Ms. Miller sat for a while staring out the window. The coldness of the snow outside seemed to penetrate her soul. She wanted to sympathize with Jeremy and his parents. He was their only child and he had a terminal illness, but still she felt it wasn’t right for him to remain in her class. He distracted her from teaching the 18 other students. He would never learn to read or write, so what was the point? As she followed her thoughts she become overwhelmed with guilt. Oh God, she thought, help me to be more patient with Jeremy and quit complaining. My problems are so small compared to theirs.
She did her best to live into her resolve, ignoring Jeremy’s blank looks. One day, he limped to her desk and said in a loud voice, “Ms. Miller, I love you.” She was surprised and stammered a thanks while the other children giggled and snickered.
Spring came, and the class was excited for the coming of Easter. Ms. Miller told them the story of Jesus and Easter, and then to emphasize the idea of new life springing forth, she gave each of the children a large plastic egg. “I want you to take these home and bring them back tomorrow with something inside that shows new life,” she said. “Do you understand?”
“Yes!” the children chimed, all except Jeremy. He just listened intently, his eyes never leaving her face. Had he understood what she had asked, she wondered? Perhaps she should call his parents and explain it to them to be on the safe side. But that night her sink backed up so she had to call a plumber, she had to shop for groceries and iron a shirt and before she knew it it was too late.
The next morning as the class came in the students placed their eggs in a wicker basket on Ms. Miller’s desk. After the math lesson it was time to open the eggs. In the first egg, she found a flower. “Oh yes, a flower! A flower is certainly a sign of new life.” Ms. Miller said. The next egg held a plastic butterfly. “We all know that a caterpillar changes and grows into a beautiful butterfly. Yes, that is a new life, too.” Next there was a rock with moss, which too showed life. Then Ms. Miller opened the fourth egg. She gasped. The egg was empty! It must be Jeremy’s egg. Obviously he hadn’t understood the assignment, just as she feared. She set the egg aside and reached for the next egg, not wanting to embarrass Jeremy or so she justified to herself.
Suddenly, Jeremy spoke up. “Ms. Miller, aren’t you going to talk about my egg?” Flustered, she replied, “But Jeremy—your egg is empty! He looked up at her and said, “Yes, but Jesus’ tomb was empty, too!”
Time stopped. When she could speak again, Ms. Miller asked him, “Do you now why the tomb was empty?” “Oh yes!” he answered, “Jesus was killed and put in there. Then God raised him up!”
Three months later, Jeremy died. Those who paid their respects at the service were surprised to see 19 eggs on top of his casket…all of them empty.
This day is the culmination and reconciliation of all things, of all things into something new. Darkness weaves into light and light dances with darkness. Life and death are married into a divine union and seen as part of eternity. We, who seek and yearn to be part of this union, hear the story of Resurrection that tells us to put our trust in that union, not the separateness we experience in this mortal body. On Easter, we are asked to let go of fear. On Easter, we are meant to see joy and hope in an empty tomb. On Easter, we are asked to not cling to death. On Easter, we are asked to believe that eternal life beyond biological life is at the heart of God and at the heart of our being. On Easter, we are asked to let go of what we think is the end, the final abyss, and surrender to the great tide of life.
We find this morning an empty tomb. It is not that death has escaped. It is that death is not the end; it is part of life in ways large and small each and every day. Death can be where we stop, encased in tombs, and where we linger, what we try to avoid or paradoxically what we embrace because we are so afraid. But the angels, the messengers say, Why do you look for the living among the dead? The one who showed you life, who embodied the wholeness of life, died a mortal death but has been raised. His life is greater than that death and it has been drawn into eternal life. He has broken the barrier between our biological life and our spiritual life. We are to see that one resides within the other, with the life of our spirit called ever forward.
Epicurius and the angels spoke the same language. Epicurius wrote: “Why are you afraid of death? Where you are death is not. Where death is, you are not. What is it that you fear?” Perhaps what we fear is not death but life, eternal life, a life that invites us ever to dissolve the self to join the great tide of life. Life, like death, is something we try to cling to, but in doing so we turn it into death. We make it our own possession, we reduce it to our wants and needs and body and thoughts. We segregate it out as something we have. We use it to try to control our world and others. In our fear we grab and cling and take advantage of others and try to bend them to our will and desires, rather than creating space to free their souls and ours to be a part of this eternal tide of life. And in so doing life becomes the mirror of death. Jeremy was seen through this lens, but he could see through a different one—the lens of life.
We cannot claim life, we cannot own it, we cannot see it as ours. It is something we are invited into, given a moment to share in. We can open to it and ride its waves aware that it does not belong to us, but rather that we belong to it. This is what Jesus the Christ reveals. He is raised by God, by that eternal life. He does not raise himself. He does not beat death into non-existence. Instead, he surrenders so fully to the current of life that he absorbs and passes through death, unafraid of it for he knows it is part of life and not that life is part of death. His body's death is but a key to revelation; he dies fully so that we can discover that eternal life encompasses and surpasses that bodily demise.
Death is but life waiting to emerge. The tomb is not a preserver of death; it is a womb that gives birth. The Easter egg is symbol of the womb, of new life. From early one, we understood this connection between the two. A womb holds for a while, nourishes, sustains and protects life and then lets it go, out into the world—from seamless life within greater life, to a new form a life that must seek it's place in that great stream until it is called home again into another tomb and another womb. And yet this truth remains: we can not grasp it; we can only surrender and open up to the coursing of life through our veins, through our hearts, through the wind, through the water, through the music of the stars, through the dance of sunlight, through the faces of others seen as part of our life not another life separate from ours. Such emptiness is not death; it is the requisite for life.
For our life is part of that eternal life of Christ. Death is but a place along the journey that calls us forward into life. We can put death first; we can give it the power to be the final solution and the answer, but that is not the revelation of the Resurrected One. That revelation is life—the new heaven and the new earth—the victory of life as love, as part of the great Lover and the Beloved.
As those who believe in the resurrection and the eternal life it reveals, we are called to enter fully into that life and that light. We are to rejoice with our whole being! We are part of life, eternal and always. Whatever in our world kills bodies, kills souls, reduces people to categories or names or something to be acted on by us, whatever stifles the song and dance of another, that is where death is. But we, we are called to see that and bring in life, by surrendering our own life to this great rhythm, this great joy, this great truth of God revealed this day by Jesus’ triumph over death. He gives us the gift; he rejoices to share this glorious hope with us. And we, we are to sing in this life, pray in this life and to dance, dance with joy and abandon and love for this life and in this life. For when the deepest truth is a life-giving love that enfolds and embraces all, dancing is what our hearts and our feet must do, holding in our hands an empty egg cracked open to life. So dance, this day, and every day, in thanksgiving for the love of God that dies and rises for us, to free us, to hold us, to call us ever more into union with the divinity at the heart of all things. Amen.
Easter Sunday
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Jeremy was born with what the world saw as a weak, limited body and a slow mind. Though he was 12 he was still in second grade, unable to grasp much. His teacher often became impatient with him and his classmates would get uncomfortable with his squirming. At times, though, he would suddenly speak clearly as if a spot of light had broken in to his mind. In exasperation, the teacher called in Jeremy’s parents one day for a consultation. Jeremy’s teacher spoke to them and said that their child really belonged in a special school. It wasn’t fair for him to distract the other children. Jeremy’s parents answered that there was no school like that nearby. It would be a terrible shock to Jeremy to make such a change and that they knew he liked the school.
After they left, Ms. Miller sat for a while staring out the window. The coldness of the snow outside seemed to penetrate her soul. She wanted to sympathize with Jeremy and his parents. He was their only child and he had a terminal illness, but still she felt it wasn’t right for him to remain in her class. He distracted her from teaching the 18 other students. He would never learn to read or write, so what was the point? As she followed her thoughts she become overwhelmed with guilt. Oh God, she thought, help me to be more patient with Jeremy and quit complaining. My problems are so small compared to theirs.
She did her best to live into her resolve, ignoring Jeremy’s blank looks. One day, he limped to her desk and said in a loud voice, “Ms. Miller, I love you.” She was surprised and stammered a thanks while the other children giggled and snickered.
Spring came, and the class was excited for the coming of Easter. Ms. Miller told them the story of Jesus and Easter, and then to emphasize the idea of new life springing forth, she gave each of the children a large plastic egg. “I want you to take these home and bring them back tomorrow with something inside that shows new life,” she said. “Do you understand?”
“Yes!” the children chimed, all except Jeremy. He just listened intently, his eyes never leaving her face. Had he understood what she had asked, she wondered? Perhaps she should call his parents and explain it to them to be on the safe side. But that night her sink backed up so she had to call a plumber, she had to shop for groceries and iron a shirt and before she knew it it was too late.
The next morning as the class came in the students placed their eggs in a wicker basket on Ms. Miller’s desk. After the math lesson it was time to open the eggs. In the first egg, she found a flower. “Oh yes, a flower! A flower is certainly a sign of new life.” Ms. Miller said. The next egg held a plastic butterfly. “We all know that a caterpillar changes and grows into a beautiful butterfly. Yes, that is a new life, too.” Next there was a rock with moss, which too showed life. Then Ms. Miller opened the fourth egg. She gasped. The egg was empty! It must be Jeremy’s egg. Obviously he hadn’t understood the assignment, just as she feared. She set the egg aside and reached for the next egg, not wanting to embarrass Jeremy or so she justified to herself.
Suddenly, Jeremy spoke up. “Ms. Miller, aren’t you going to talk about my egg?” Flustered, she replied, “But Jeremy—your egg is empty! He looked up at her and said, “Yes, but Jesus’ tomb was empty, too!”
Time stopped. When she could speak again, Ms. Miller asked him, “Do you now why the tomb was empty?” “Oh yes!” he answered, “Jesus was killed and put in there. Then God raised him up!”
Three months later, Jeremy died. Those who paid their respects at the service were surprised to see 19 eggs on top of his casket…all of them empty.
This day is the culmination and reconciliation of all things, of all things into something new. Darkness weaves into light and light dances with darkness. Life and death are married into a divine union and seen as part of eternity. We, who seek and yearn to be part of this union, hear the story of Resurrection that tells us to put our trust in that union, not the separateness we experience in this mortal body. On Easter, we are asked to let go of fear. On Easter, we are meant to see joy and hope in an empty tomb. On Easter, we are asked to not cling to death. On Easter, we are asked to believe that eternal life beyond biological life is at the heart of God and at the heart of our being. On Easter, we are asked to let go of what we think is the end, the final abyss, and surrender to the great tide of life.
We find this morning an empty tomb. It is not that death has escaped. It is that death is not the end; it is part of life in ways large and small each and every day. Death can be where we stop, encased in tombs, and where we linger, what we try to avoid or paradoxically what we embrace because we are so afraid. But the angels, the messengers say, Why do you look for the living among the dead? The one who showed you life, who embodied the wholeness of life, died a mortal death but has been raised. His life is greater than that death and it has been drawn into eternal life. He has broken the barrier between our biological life and our spiritual life. We are to see that one resides within the other, with the life of our spirit called ever forward.
Epicurius and the angels spoke the same language. Epicurius wrote: “Why are you afraid of death? Where you are death is not. Where death is, you are not. What is it that you fear?” Perhaps what we fear is not death but life, eternal life, a life that invites us ever to dissolve the self to join the great tide of life. Life, like death, is something we try to cling to, but in doing so we turn it into death. We make it our own possession, we reduce it to our wants and needs and body and thoughts. We segregate it out as something we have. We use it to try to control our world and others. In our fear we grab and cling and take advantage of others and try to bend them to our will and desires, rather than creating space to free their souls and ours to be a part of this eternal tide of life. And in so doing life becomes the mirror of death. Jeremy was seen through this lens, but he could see through a different one—the lens of life.
We cannot claim life, we cannot own it, we cannot see it as ours. It is something we are invited into, given a moment to share in. We can open to it and ride its waves aware that it does not belong to us, but rather that we belong to it. This is what Jesus the Christ reveals. He is raised by God, by that eternal life. He does not raise himself. He does not beat death into non-existence. Instead, he surrenders so fully to the current of life that he absorbs and passes through death, unafraid of it for he knows it is part of life and not that life is part of death. His body's death is but a key to revelation; he dies fully so that we can discover that eternal life encompasses and surpasses that bodily demise.
Death is but life waiting to emerge. The tomb is not a preserver of death; it is a womb that gives birth. The Easter egg is symbol of the womb, of new life. From early one, we understood this connection between the two. A womb holds for a while, nourishes, sustains and protects life and then lets it go, out into the world—from seamless life within greater life, to a new form a life that must seek it's place in that great stream until it is called home again into another tomb and another womb. And yet this truth remains: we can not grasp it; we can only surrender and open up to the coursing of life through our veins, through our hearts, through the wind, through the water, through the music of the stars, through the dance of sunlight, through the faces of others seen as part of our life not another life separate from ours. Such emptiness is not death; it is the requisite for life.
For our life is part of that eternal life of Christ. Death is but a place along the journey that calls us forward into life. We can put death first; we can give it the power to be the final solution and the answer, but that is not the revelation of the Resurrected One. That revelation is life—the new heaven and the new earth—the victory of life as love, as part of the great Lover and the Beloved.
As those who believe in the resurrection and the eternal life it reveals, we are called to enter fully into that life and that light. We are to rejoice with our whole being! We are part of life, eternal and always. Whatever in our world kills bodies, kills souls, reduces people to categories or names or something to be acted on by us, whatever stifles the song and dance of another, that is where death is. But we, we are called to see that and bring in life, by surrendering our own life to this great rhythm, this great joy, this great truth of God revealed this day by Jesus’ triumph over death. He gives us the gift; he rejoices to share this glorious hope with us. And we, we are to sing in this life, pray in this life and to dance, dance with joy and abandon and love for this life and in this life. For when the deepest truth is a life-giving love that enfolds and embraces all, dancing is what our hearts and our feet must do, holding in our hands an empty egg cracked open to life. So dance, this day, and every day, in thanksgiving for the love of God that dies and rises for us, to free us, to hold us, to call us ever more into union with the divinity at the heart of all things. Amen.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Easter Vigil, April 3, 2010
Easter Vigil, 2010
April 3, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
While we're asleep
The Paschal moon is shining
High above the trees
And high above the trees
Even while we are sleeping
Easter is growing
In the Paschal moon
Like a child in its mother.
(Anne Porter)
This night is the culmination of all things. Darkness weaves into light and light dances with darkness. Life and death are married into a divine union and seen as part of eternity. We, who seek and yearn to be part of this union, hear the story of Resurrection that tells us to put our trust in that union, not the separateness we experience in this mortal body. On Easter, we are asked to let go of fear. On Easter, we are asked to not cling to death. On Easter, we are asked to believe that eternal life beyond biological life is at the heart of God and at the heart of our being. On Easter, we are asked to let go of what we think is the end, the final abyss, and surrender to the great tide of life.
We find this night an empty tomb. It is not that death has escaped. It is that death is not the end; it is part of life in ways large and small each and every day. Death can be where we stop, encased in tombs, and where we linger, what we try to avoid or paradoxically what we embrace because we are so afraid. But the angel, the messenger says, do not be afraid. The one who showed you life, who embodied the wholeness of life, died a mortal death but has been raised. His life is greater than that death and it has been drawn into eternal life. He has broken the barrier between our biological life and our spiritual life. We are to see that one resides within the other, with the life of our spirit called ever forward.
Epicurius and the angel spoke the same language. Epicurius wrote: “Why are you afraid of death? Where you are death is not. Where death is, you are not. What is it that you fear?” Perhaps what we fear is not death but life, eternal life, a life that invites us ever to dissolve the self to join the great tide of life. Life, like death, is something we try to cling to, but in doing so we turn it into death. We make it our own possession, we reduce it to our wants and needs and body and thoughts. We segregate it out as something we have. We use it to try to control our world and others. In our fear we grab and cling and take advantage of others and try to bend them to our will and desires, rather than creating space to free their souls and ours to be a part of this eternal tide of life. And in so doing life becomes the mirror of death.
We cannot claim life, we can not own it, we can not see it as ours. It is something we are invited into, given a moment to share in. We can open to it and ride its waves aware that it does not belong to us, but rather that we belong to it. This is what Jesus the Christ reveals. He is raised by God, by that eternal life. He does not raise himself. He does not beat death into non-existence. Instead, he surrenders so fully to the current of life that he absorbs and passes through death, unafraid of it for he knows it is part of life and not that life is part of death. His body's death is but a key to revelation; he dies fully so that we can discover that eternal life encompasses and surpasses that bodily demise.
Death is but life waiting to emerge. The tomb is not a preserver of death; it is a womb that gives birth. A womb holds for a while, nourishes, sustains and protects life and then lets it go, out into the world—from seamless life within greater life, to a new form a life that must seek it's place in that great stream until it is called home again into another tomb and another womb. And yet this truth remains: we can not grasp it; we can only surrender and open up to the coursing of life through our veins, through our hearts, through the wind, through the water, through the music of the stars, through the dance of sunlight, through the faces of others seen as part of our life not another life separate from ours.
For our life is part of that eternal life of Christ. Death is but a place, a moment, along the journey that calls us forward into life. We can put death first; we can give it the power to be the final solution and the answer, but that is not the revelation of the Resurrected One. That revelation is life—the new heaven and the new earth—the victory of life as love, as part of the great Lover and the Beloved.
As those who believe in the resurrection and the eternal life it reveals, we are called to enter fully into that life and that light. We are to rejoice with our whole being! We are part of life, eternal and always. Whatever in our world kills bodies, kills souls, reduces people to categories or names or something to be acted on by us, whatever stifles the song and dance of another, that is where death is. But we, we are called to see that and bring in life, by surrendering our own life to this great rhythm, this great joy, this great truth of God revealed this day by Jesus’ triumph over death. He gives us the gift; he rejoices to share this glorious hope with us. And we, we are to sing in this life, pray in this life and to dance, dance with joy and abandon and love for this life and in this life. For when the deepest truth is a life-giving love that enfolds and embraces all, dancing is what our hearts and our feet must do. So dance, this day, and every day, in thanksgiving for the love of God that dies and rises for us, to free us, to hold us, to call us ever more into union with the divinity at the heart of all things. Alleluia!
April 3, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
While we're asleep
The Paschal moon is shining
High above the trees
And high above the trees
Even while we are sleeping
Easter is growing
In the Paschal moon
Like a child in its mother.
(Anne Porter)
This night is the culmination of all things. Darkness weaves into light and light dances with darkness. Life and death are married into a divine union and seen as part of eternity. We, who seek and yearn to be part of this union, hear the story of Resurrection that tells us to put our trust in that union, not the separateness we experience in this mortal body. On Easter, we are asked to let go of fear. On Easter, we are asked to not cling to death. On Easter, we are asked to believe that eternal life beyond biological life is at the heart of God and at the heart of our being. On Easter, we are asked to let go of what we think is the end, the final abyss, and surrender to the great tide of life.
We find this night an empty tomb. It is not that death has escaped. It is that death is not the end; it is part of life in ways large and small each and every day. Death can be where we stop, encased in tombs, and where we linger, what we try to avoid or paradoxically what we embrace because we are so afraid. But the angel, the messenger says, do not be afraid. The one who showed you life, who embodied the wholeness of life, died a mortal death but has been raised. His life is greater than that death and it has been drawn into eternal life. He has broken the barrier between our biological life and our spiritual life. We are to see that one resides within the other, with the life of our spirit called ever forward.
Epicurius and the angel spoke the same language. Epicurius wrote: “Why are you afraid of death? Where you are death is not. Where death is, you are not. What is it that you fear?” Perhaps what we fear is not death but life, eternal life, a life that invites us ever to dissolve the self to join the great tide of life. Life, like death, is something we try to cling to, but in doing so we turn it into death. We make it our own possession, we reduce it to our wants and needs and body and thoughts. We segregate it out as something we have. We use it to try to control our world and others. In our fear we grab and cling and take advantage of others and try to bend them to our will and desires, rather than creating space to free their souls and ours to be a part of this eternal tide of life. And in so doing life becomes the mirror of death.
We cannot claim life, we can not own it, we can not see it as ours. It is something we are invited into, given a moment to share in. We can open to it and ride its waves aware that it does not belong to us, but rather that we belong to it. This is what Jesus the Christ reveals. He is raised by God, by that eternal life. He does not raise himself. He does not beat death into non-existence. Instead, he surrenders so fully to the current of life that he absorbs and passes through death, unafraid of it for he knows it is part of life and not that life is part of death. His body's death is but a key to revelation; he dies fully so that we can discover that eternal life encompasses and surpasses that bodily demise.
Death is but life waiting to emerge. The tomb is not a preserver of death; it is a womb that gives birth. A womb holds for a while, nourishes, sustains and protects life and then lets it go, out into the world—from seamless life within greater life, to a new form a life that must seek it's place in that great stream until it is called home again into another tomb and another womb. And yet this truth remains: we can not grasp it; we can only surrender and open up to the coursing of life through our veins, through our hearts, through the wind, through the water, through the music of the stars, through the dance of sunlight, through the faces of others seen as part of our life not another life separate from ours.
For our life is part of that eternal life of Christ. Death is but a place, a moment, along the journey that calls us forward into life. We can put death first; we can give it the power to be the final solution and the answer, but that is not the revelation of the Resurrected One. That revelation is life—the new heaven and the new earth—the victory of life as love, as part of the great Lover and the Beloved.
As those who believe in the resurrection and the eternal life it reveals, we are called to enter fully into that life and that light. We are to rejoice with our whole being! We are part of life, eternal and always. Whatever in our world kills bodies, kills souls, reduces people to categories or names or something to be acted on by us, whatever stifles the song and dance of another, that is where death is. But we, we are called to see that and bring in life, by surrendering our own life to this great rhythm, this great joy, this great truth of God revealed this day by Jesus’ triumph over death. He gives us the gift; he rejoices to share this glorious hope with us. And we, we are to sing in this life, pray in this life and to dance, dance with joy and abandon and love for this life and in this life. For when the deepest truth is a life-giving love that enfolds and embraces all, dancing is what our hearts and our feet must do. So dance, this day, and every day, in thanksgiving for the love of God that dies and rises for us, to free us, to hold us, to call us ever more into union with the divinity at the heart of all things. Alleluia!
Good Friday, April 2, 2010
What does one say after hearing this story, this Passion of Jesus of Nazareth? Nothing can capture its depth and power. We are meant to be moved, taken deep inside, to ponder this story of pain and promise. So rather than offer some words in response I am going to leave us with a few questions to consider for the next few minutes in silence and into the day to come.
The cross is violence compressed into one powerful moment and symbol. Is the violence and death necessary? Does God require it or is it we humans who require it? Where is God in this?
Where is the story of the cross still alive today? What Calvaries are happening this very moment here in our own city and nation and around the world? How do we embrace it and why does Jesus ask us to?
Christians use the word atonement to describe what happened on the cross. What does atonement mean to you? What is atoned for? How does it save us? What might we discover if we think of it as Julian of Norwich and others did: at-one-ment?
The cross is violence compressed into one powerful moment and symbol. Is the violence and death necessary? Does God require it or is it we humans who require it? Where is God in this?
Where is the story of the cross still alive today? What Calvaries are happening this very moment here in our own city and nation and around the world? How do we embrace it and why does Jesus ask us to?
Christians use the word atonement to describe what happened on the cross. What does atonement mean to you? What is atoned for? How does it save us? What might we discover if we think of it as Julian of Norwich and others did: at-one-ment?
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
March 28, 2010, Palm Sunday
March 28, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 45:21-25, Ps. 72, Philippians 2:5-11, Luke 19:29-40
Palm Sunday, Year C
On the outskirts of Jerusalem
the donkey waited.
Not especially brave, or filled with understanding,
he stood and waited.
How horses, turned out in to the meadow,
leap with delight!
How doves, released from cages,
clatter away, splashed with sunlight!
But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited.
Then he let himself be led away.
Then he let the stranger mount.
Never had he seen such crowds!
And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen.
Still, he was what he had always been: small, dark,
obedient.
I hope, finally, he felt brave.
I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him,
as he lifted one dusty foot and stepped, as he had to,
forward.
The donkey—patient, trusting, not bold, not an eye-catcher like his relative the horse. What sort of heart does it take to follow not knowing exactly where you will be taken? Is it for good or for ill? What strength of soul does it take to have one's ordinariness invited into the birth of the extraordinary?
As he steadily climbs the Mount of Olives he sees a view new to his eyes. All Jerusalem in her pain and splendor spread out before him, the temple shining gold in the spring light, a vision of joy and hope. It is worth it for this, he thinks.
These are cloaks, the donkey thinks. But why cloaks, when I usually carry olives or bottles of wine or bundles of grain? It is a rare day when my passenger is a person. Who is it, if not my owner?
And then a gentle hand touches him and a forehead leans against his own with a voice offering thanks for the donkey's coming. The donkey looks into eyes that are fiery and passionate yet also kind and open. There is a tiredness behind them, not of the flesh but of the heart, when it knows the course is set and that the road ahead is arduous, but it is the only road to take. The donkey knows that road, and so he lifts his shoulders proudly and stands firm as this man seats himself upon his back. In all his donkey-ness he has been picked as he is to carry this man to something, something out of the ordinary... or maybe all too ordinary. In his heart the donkey knows this is no ordinary passenger, but someone of great hope, great love, great challenge. He has picked a donkey to ride into town, not a powerful horse bedecked in a saddle and bridle. He doesn't play to the worlds ideas of power and importance, but yet the donkey knows, he has a power and importance that is worth far more for it is of a different order. He knows this from the way this Galilean sits upon him and the way he guides him.
As they move forward, the donkey hears the people shouting, but it is the palms and the cloaks that he speaks to. They too are thinking their thoughts: how they make the path smooth, how they keep the dust from flying into the donkey and his rider's eyes, how they are able to do something other than their usual task.
But they all wonder, do the people see the new thing being done? Or is this merely a stepping stone towards a different version of the way things have always been done? Will the vision of God's equitable justice, of universal care, of healing prevail? Are they waiting to exchange the donkey, the branches and the cloaks for stallions, canopies of brocade and silk, guards and well-dressed attendants? Is the Mount of Olives to be exchanged for a palace and scribes and orders? Can they see the transformation being made alive before their very eyes, the unmasking of society's illusions? Or do they only look for reversal, for replacement?
The stones cry out, the palms rustle till their fronds fracture, the cloaks reweave their patterns, the donkey brays for them to notice, but is it all in vain?
For the donkey carries the Christ, the anointed one, not to political victory in terms of taking charge, of human-centered power, of killing and expelling the enemy, but to a victory that is to break that very cycle. The cycle is so strong; it is so a part of the life of civilization. Will his victory ever be embraced? For the donkey carries the Christ towards both his death and his life, toward good and ill, into the heart of paradox. He carries him into the cycle to go beyond it.
Caught up in their joy, the crowd is ready for a reversal of fortune. Use your power to bring the rich and powerful down and put us in their place! Let those who have been used and misused be vindicated and let those who used and misused experience our lot! But a reversal of fortune changes nothing; transforms nothing. And the Christ is serving the transformation where the user and used, the exploiter and the exploited, the wounder and the wounded, both find a new reality, a new kind of life that needs such ways no longer.
The man knows this, the donkey senses. And as nears the city the donkey hears his lament, the catch in his throat, and he feels the tears drop onto his dusty mane: “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.”
It must be done! The moment the transformation is defined and revealed must pass. For if not, the hope of it will be lost. And some will see it; some will understand; some will embrace it. It will begin a new thing, again, in the world. The hope of God will penetrate and shine forth to those who can see, those who long to see. The celebration of the crowd can not last. It will turn against the Christ; we know that this is so, for it is still so, but the hope is still there too, being spoken of in the trees, being heard in the footsteps of the donkey and the beggar and the humble ones, being shouted by the mountains and the river rocks. The path is carved by Christ, but do we finally love the one that rides so lightly on our backs? And when we lift our dusty foot and step, which way do we go?
Will I lay my cloak before you,
when they arrest you on olive mountain,
or pull it tighter around me,
fading into the ranks of the deserters;
will I shout
'Blessed is the one who comes
in the name of the Lord!
When they parade you
before the authorities,
or will I tell any one-and every one- around me
I never met you in my life;
will I lay my palm branches at your feet,
as they march you to Calvary,
or use them to put more stripes
on your bloody back;
will I run behind you
when they carry you to the tomb,
or turn away
as the ashes of my hopes
are rubbed into the
wounds in my heart?
And the donkey, well, he lifted one dusty foot and stepped, as he had to, forward.
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 45:21-25, Ps. 72, Philippians 2:5-11, Luke 19:29-40
Palm Sunday, Year C
On the outskirts of Jerusalem
the donkey waited.
Not especially brave, or filled with understanding,
he stood and waited.
How horses, turned out in to the meadow,
leap with delight!
How doves, released from cages,
clatter away, splashed with sunlight!
But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited.
Then he let himself be led away.
Then he let the stranger mount.
Never had he seen such crowds!
And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen.
Still, he was what he had always been: small, dark,
obedient.
I hope, finally, he felt brave.
I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him,
as he lifted one dusty foot and stepped, as he had to,
forward.
The donkey—patient, trusting, not bold, not an eye-catcher like his relative the horse. What sort of heart does it take to follow not knowing exactly where you will be taken? Is it for good or for ill? What strength of soul does it take to have one's ordinariness invited into the birth of the extraordinary?
As he steadily climbs the Mount of Olives he sees a view new to his eyes. All Jerusalem in her pain and splendor spread out before him, the temple shining gold in the spring light, a vision of joy and hope. It is worth it for this, he thinks.
These are cloaks, the donkey thinks. But why cloaks, when I usually carry olives or bottles of wine or bundles of grain? It is a rare day when my passenger is a person. Who is it, if not my owner?
And then a gentle hand touches him and a forehead leans against his own with a voice offering thanks for the donkey's coming. The donkey looks into eyes that are fiery and passionate yet also kind and open. There is a tiredness behind them, not of the flesh but of the heart, when it knows the course is set and that the road ahead is arduous, but it is the only road to take. The donkey knows that road, and so he lifts his shoulders proudly and stands firm as this man seats himself upon his back. In all his donkey-ness he has been picked as he is to carry this man to something, something out of the ordinary... or maybe all too ordinary. In his heart the donkey knows this is no ordinary passenger, but someone of great hope, great love, great challenge. He has picked a donkey to ride into town, not a powerful horse bedecked in a saddle and bridle. He doesn't play to the worlds ideas of power and importance, but yet the donkey knows, he has a power and importance that is worth far more for it is of a different order. He knows this from the way this Galilean sits upon him and the way he guides him.
As they move forward, the donkey hears the people shouting, but it is the palms and the cloaks that he speaks to. They too are thinking their thoughts: how they make the path smooth, how they keep the dust from flying into the donkey and his rider's eyes, how they are able to do something other than their usual task.
But they all wonder, do the people see the new thing being done? Or is this merely a stepping stone towards a different version of the way things have always been done? Will the vision of God's equitable justice, of universal care, of healing prevail? Are they waiting to exchange the donkey, the branches and the cloaks for stallions, canopies of brocade and silk, guards and well-dressed attendants? Is the Mount of Olives to be exchanged for a palace and scribes and orders? Can they see the transformation being made alive before their very eyes, the unmasking of society's illusions? Or do they only look for reversal, for replacement?
The stones cry out, the palms rustle till their fronds fracture, the cloaks reweave their patterns, the donkey brays for them to notice, but is it all in vain?
For the donkey carries the Christ, the anointed one, not to political victory in terms of taking charge, of human-centered power, of killing and expelling the enemy, but to a victory that is to break that very cycle. The cycle is so strong; it is so a part of the life of civilization. Will his victory ever be embraced? For the donkey carries the Christ towards both his death and his life, toward good and ill, into the heart of paradox. He carries him into the cycle to go beyond it.
Caught up in their joy, the crowd is ready for a reversal of fortune. Use your power to bring the rich and powerful down and put us in their place! Let those who have been used and misused be vindicated and let those who used and misused experience our lot! But a reversal of fortune changes nothing; transforms nothing. And the Christ is serving the transformation where the user and used, the exploiter and the exploited, the wounder and the wounded, both find a new reality, a new kind of life that needs such ways no longer.
The man knows this, the donkey senses. And as nears the city the donkey hears his lament, the catch in his throat, and he feels the tears drop onto his dusty mane: “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.”
It must be done! The moment the transformation is defined and revealed must pass. For if not, the hope of it will be lost. And some will see it; some will understand; some will embrace it. It will begin a new thing, again, in the world. The hope of God will penetrate and shine forth to those who can see, those who long to see. The celebration of the crowd can not last. It will turn against the Christ; we know that this is so, for it is still so, but the hope is still there too, being spoken of in the trees, being heard in the footsteps of the donkey and the beggar and the humble ones, being shouted by the mountains and the river rocks. The path is carved by Christ, but do we finally love the one that rides so lightly on our backs? And when we lift our dusty foot and step, which way do we go?
Will I lay my cloak before you,
when they arrest you on olive mountain,
or pull it tighter around me,
fading into the ranks of the deserters;
will I shout
'Blessed is the one who comes
in the name of the Lord!
When they parade you
before the authorities,
or will I tell any one-and every one- around me
I never met you in my life;
will I lay my palm branches at your feet,
as they march you to Calvary,
or use them to put more stripes
on your bloody back;
will I run behind you
when they carry you to the tomb,
or turn away
as the ashes of my hopes
are rubbed into the
wounds in my heart?
And the donkey, well, he lifted one dusty foot and stepped, as he had to, forward.
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