January 27, 2013, 3rd Sunday after Epiphany

Year C, Epiphany III

January 27, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  

          Just to be very, very clear, that cute girl I mentioned last week was Windy.  (Still is.)  More than one person checked in with me on that one.  

          The revelation of God’s will is desperately important stuff, it is a if not the most important activity of God’s church.  Look at the prominence it has, right here at the beginning of St. Luke’s narrative. What has happened so far in the story?  ___ The birth narratives of John and Jesus.  Then? ____  The baptism of Our Lord.  The call to ministry in the bodily descent of the Holy Spirit and God’s voice, “Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.”  Then? ____  The wilderness.  He is prepared for his Earthly ministry in the wilderness where he exfoliates his body, mind and spirit in the rigors of ascetic practice and Satanic temptation.  Then we are here, the revelation of his vocation at his childhood synagogue.  Jesus Christ is called, He is prepared, and His mission, His vocation is revealed.

          What is the vocation of the fully human Jesus Christ? “…to bring good news to the poor… proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” This is very clearly his vocation, but what dos it mean?

          “Bring good news to the poor.”  The Good News, the Gospel.  This means bring hope, right?  Hope to those in poverty, in need.  How do we bring hope?  Sometimes hope is delivered in the form of hamburger night at shelter week in a church basement.  Or the offer of 100 square feet of parking lot to place a Conestoga Hut.  Or a laundry basket full of linens and kitchen supplies from Home Starter Kits.  Sometimes good news to the poor is brought with an open ear, a non-judging conversation, a kind word.  Sometimes the good news to the poor is just that, the good news that God in Christ has not forsaken you, no matter how bad it seems, how lost you feel, how dark that night seems, there is light, there is laughter, there is abundance and God’s love does reign when we have the eyes to see it, the ears to hear it, and the heart to bear it.  This is good news to the poor and otherwise.

          “Proclaim release to the captives.”  King James reads,  “deliverance of the captives.”  Is this about emptying the jails?  If so, maybe Sheriff Turner is a bit of a prophet, no?  Perhaps this can be taken literally, that captives ought to be released, that captivity is not God’s will.  Jesus died in captivity, so did Paul.  From the lost souls languishing in Guantanamo, to the thousands rotting away on death rows, or in the intolerable conditions of prolonged solitary confinement, and in world-wide networks of slavery, of human trafficking and indentured servitude that are alive and well, even here in our fair city.  All just wrong, and everyone subject to these torturous conditions must be released.  And there are the broader captivities we all need release from; our enslavement to material things, to wealth and possessions; release from idolatry, the captivity of our attention and intentions on things other than God; the captivity of our whole selves by the demons of addiction.  Release and deliverance from captivity…

          “Recovery of sight to the blind.”  Jesus healed the blind.  Directly, physically.  Remember the first go around, and the people looked like trees, so Jesus tried again?  He also healed the spiritually blind, from that centurion on Golgotha to Saul cum Paul, and has kept healing the blind in heart, those mired in unbelief and the particular suffering of loneliness for the love of God.  Like John Newton expressed, “I once was lost and now am found, was blind but now I see.”

          “To let the oppressed go free.”  Jesus Christ liberates the oppressed. Little children and Samaritans; the unclean and untouchable, women and lepers…  Jesus worked and watched and wept with the most oppressed in a time of vast, imperial oppression. “In him there is no Greek or Jew, male or female,”  That is what Paul teaches, right?  And Jesus was present at Seneca Falls, Stonewall and Selma, too; that is what the president was getting at last week; that oppression in all of its forms is not of the Kingdom. Jesus preaches, practices, is liberation.

          “To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”  What does Jubilee mean?  _____ Right, every fifty years all debts are canceled, all indentured servants released (sorry, slaves).  Contracts are subject to review.  That is straight from Moses; prohibition of collecting interest, usury and other barriers to accumulating dynastic wealth passed from generation to generation.  A level playing field… we are all together in the eyes of God and our material lives should somehow reflect that…  that is what our Savior proclaims even though the good old time traditions of periodically canceling debt and forbidding interest and the sale of land have gone by the wayside, victims of those whose interests are not served by such practices of gospel justice.  

          “…to bring good news to the poor… proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”  This passage from Isaiah is a concise summation of the ministry of Our Lord as He dwelt among us. How clear, how purpose driven, accessible, even.  Any church or enlightened social service organization could be proud of that as a mission statement. You could preach this Gospel from a UU pulpit and not offend many. But then as he sat down, being just as God as He was human, Jesus proclaimed “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” That takes all of this somewhere else.

          “The heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament shows his handiwork…” says the psalmist.  “…Although they have no words or language, and their voices are not heard/their sound has gone out to all lands, and their message to the ends of the world.”  Metaphysically, this is the same as the scripture being fulfilled in your hearing.  God, in this case the aspect of God we recognize in the person of Jesus Christ; the simple fact of being, of being the Word, His incarnation into the world spiritually and physically is the proclamation and fulfillment of the prophecy Isaiah had made so many generations before.  When God, in love, intersected with the world so definitively in the person of Jesus, everything changed.  Us being here right now is a ripple of that change, but truly, the good news to the poor is brought in Jesus Christ.  The captives are released in Jesus Christ.  Sight is restored, the oppressed are freed and the jubilee is proclaimed in Jesus Christ.  Not only really really, in those Jesus personally fed, freed and healed; not only really, really in those fed, freed and healed by His followers over the past 2000 years up to and including us; but also really really in those fed, freed and healed by the eternal and actual presence, just the presence, just the reality of Jesus Christ in their hearts and minds and souls.  In our hearts and minds and souls.  When we feed on Him in our hearts in faith with thanksgiving, we hunger no longer.  When we are wrapped in his love, our souls shiver no longer. When we dwell in his body, we wander no longer.  Our captivity ends in the spacious love of Jesus Christ. 

          But this is why Marx was so dismissive of religion, that our eyes focused on a heavenly prize pulls our eyes from the very temporal sources of suffering.  If you are thinking about heaven you are not thinking about the means of production and who owns them.  Not so, I say.  When our spiritual poverty is satisfied in God, we fear none but God and we can demand what we need, even fight for it.   When the captivity of our souls is ended by Christ’s presence in our hearts, our hands are able to heave the doors of our prison cells clear off of their hinges.  When we can see again, we can lead others to the Promised Land.  When in our hearts we accept that all are created imago dei, in the image of God, and that none ought to have dominion over another, then the man’s boot can be thrown off our individual and collective necks post haste.   And when we really, really accept the proclamation of jubilee as being under the auspices of God, then we can begin to lay down the groundwork for a jubilee year this century. 

          The word of God exists.  It feeds and frees, heals and restores.  It exists in Scripture, in the spiritual memory of our Savior that we, as believers carry with us.  It exists in the work of our hands and souls, it lives in the courage to be, the strength to love, and power to forgive, it thrives in good will manifest our hearts and minds full of the knowledge and love of God.  It exists in what you do, and most importantly in who you are.  You in prayerful lives you can bring that same good news, proclaim the same release, the same healing and freedom and jubilee as Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior does.  In fact, that is our most basic responsibility as Christians and we do it by being who God made us to be. AMEN

January 20, 2013, 2nd Sunday after Epiphany

Year C, Epiphany 2

January 20, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          How do we say yes to God?  

          Let’s recap the past two weeks of the Epiphany season.  We have been talking about?______  Epiphanies.  What is an epiphany?______  The revelation of the will of God.  What is the will of God, how do we begin to recognize it?  _________  It is the way things are supposed to be, right?  We find the will of God by discerning, figuring out as best we can how the world, ourselves, our lives are supposed to be.  The Will of God can be revealed in what we gravitate towards, what we flee from and vise versa, for it is the fact of a reaction and less the nature of the reaction that most reveals God’s will.  We learn of God’s will through the mouths of others, and if we are really blessed, through the mouth of an angel.  

          But how do we say yes?  Let me tell you a story.  Back in the summer of 1998 I drove up to an old farmhouse tucked up in the hills north of Amherst, Massachusetts.  I was a year out of the Marines and just starting a high paying job in technical sales.  The house I went to had been owned by Mary Daly, about as radical a feminist theologian that has ever had tenure; pretty intense karma in that house.  I was there to see my best friend from high school.  Her life had taken her to a radical world in the hills of Western Mass.  Women’s studies, social work, farming… about as far from my white bread, ex-military, corporate operative world as could be imagined.  True, I had always thought that she was awfully cute, and that naturally forgives a lot of differences, but that day, I unwittingly stepped into a world I knew nothing about.

          From that first day, sitting on the threadbare couch on the front porch of that kooky seeming house, with those kooky seeming women and their kooky seeming dogs, my world exploded.  They used words like oppression.  Empire.  Feminist.  I heard them truly for the first time.  I heard the word violence.  I was professionally trained as a trainer of violence, but for the first time I began to understand that there were other perspectives on the world, that they way I saw things, the way I had been taught things, the world I thought I believed in and valued maybe wasn’t what it seemed, what I had been taught to look for.  I had felt called out of the Marines, but not for any just reason, any Godly reason, I just learned that I was not supposed to be there any more. 

My eyes began to open that very first day, but it was two years of hanging out on that porch, partly to look in on this girl I thought was cute, partly to answer some questions that kept coming up, things in the business world that did not add up.  And less and less did the world seem to be the world I had been taught about in my family of origin, my education, certainly my military and corporate work.  And I was scared to death.  What if these things I was learning were true?  What if things were not as I had learned them?  What if the world was a lot more like these crazy radical socialist feminists, some of them crazy radical socialist lesbian feminists living collectively, what if it was much more like that, what they experienced, what they described and taught me about?  And if that were the case, what was I doing?  What was I doing wasting my life on making money for myself and making even more money for the owners?  What was I doing contributing my life’s energy into the massive medical-industrial complex so mindlessly?  

          What was I doing?  I was busy being scared.  If I didn’t do that, be a corporate weenie, what would I do?  I couldn’t ski as much any more.  I wouldn’t have that gorgeous apartment in Northampton right next to Smith.  The bright red Audi?  And what would all my Marine friends, and my engineer friends from undergrad, what would they think?  What would my parents think?  I was terrified that what I was learning was true and I had no idea how to step out of the patterns that had defined my gentle upper middle class straight white male life theretofore.  So I did the sensible thing, I ran away from home.  I quit the job, bought a bicycle and went to Europe.  Two months later was Easter, I was in and Anglican parish in southern England, and found myself the subject of a second call which led me here.

          From actively working against the kingdom of God to trying to work for it...  We all have to say yes to God in our own way, what I have to share is my imperfect experience.  Here is what I have learned.

          First, we must realize that whatever you think you know about the world, that is not the only story.  I do not care how worldly and learned you might be, nor how sheltered and ignorant of things you are, there are categorically different ways of being in the world that are just as valid as yours, and might be better than yours.  The first step towards saying yes to God is a willingness to encounter the other; be it other people, other ideas and ideals, other ways of being, the other worldly. Encountering the other is the first step to following God. .  Try on some existential humility, it is the starting point to saying yes to God and if you don’t believe me, read the Gospels.

          Second, trust yourself.  Trust your senses.  Trust your ability to see right and wrong.  This cannot be over stated.  If with open eyes something seems wrong, or disjointed, discordant, false, whatever, it probably is.  When I learned how to direct jets dropping NAPALM, I had this little niggling feeling in the back of my mind that that was not the right thing to do.  But in the context I lived in, which at that point was the turret of a tank and I had people whose lives could be (in the short term) saved by that airstrike, it was complicated.  But we know when something doesn’t feel right.  Listen to it.  Like congress arguing if rich means $250k per year or $400k per year.  Like the fact that we have people living in the parking lot of our church.  Nothing about that is or seems right.  It is better than folks having nowhere safe to be, but it is obvious to anyone with open eyes that it is a horrid failure of our society that it has come to this.  Or the US or China blocking climate change agreements because it is bad for business, or the NRA and their pro-violence blather.  We know right from wrong, listen to that little niggle at the back of your brain.  Trust yourself and your sense of what makes sense; trust that you in fact do know what is a right and a good and joyful thing.  You do.

          Third, to say yes to God, you have to be in community.  Human beings did not evolve as or into solitary creatures.  Our true nature is communal and we have to live in community as our birthright and as our bounden duty to ourselves, each other and to God.  Obviously I could not have seen a different path on my own; very, very few of us can.  Surround yourself with people at least as healthy as yourself, and hopefully a bit smarter and a bit more principled than yourself.  That helps.  And when you are in community, be sure to carve out times of solitude.  The silence of solitude, occasional solitude in the midst of community life, this is essential to tuning your ear to God’s frequency, to having the constitution to follow God, to having the presence of mind to know where you are in relation to everything and everyone else, most notably God. 

          Next, fourth, be afraid.  Well, if you really are trying to say yes to God you will naturally be afraid, but for me, if I had known that it was OK to be afraid, that it was natural, that it was a sign that I was on the right track, things would have gone much smoother.  Think of Mary, sure she unreservedly said yes to the angel of the Lord, but do you think that made her any less scared?  With fear and trembling, right?  That is the natural and appropriate response to the will of God.  Knowing that makes doing what comes next much, much easier.

          And what comes next, what is last of all in this process of saying yes to God?  Have faith.  When we step off cliffs in the name of God, when we stretch out, make our best effort for something we know is right, what we are supposed to be doing, the results don’t matter.  Truly, truly, truly, it is impossible to fail while following the will of God, because it is never the end that matters, it is the work that matters.  It is the relationships we nurture, the love we spread, the compassion we offer, the empathy we experience that matters.  When our heart breaks in the face of the heartbreaking, we are following the will of God.  When our spirit soars, we are following the will of God.  When needs are satisfied, wounds are tended, joy is shielded, and friends are made and kept, the will of God is being realized.  In all of the stories of the saints of God, even the ones that ended really, really badly, no one ever expresses regret.  No one regrets following the will of God, no matter where it leads, if it is real, it is good, and you will know the difference.  It probably won’t be easy, God does not promise a rose garden, but have faith that you’ll know God’s will when you see it, and in following the will of God, all will be well, and all will be well and every kind of thing will be well.  AMEN

January 13, 2013, Baptism of Our Lord

Year C, Baptism of Our Lord

January 13, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

“You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

Now in the world of epiphanies, the voice of God booming down from heaven is the gold standard.  This even tops the star the magi followed.  That could have been misinterpreted, but a voice, that voice, following on the heels of the holy spirit’s dove-like bodily descent, that is burning bush and Ten Commandments clear.  That is what we are all looking for from God, right?  Such clarity, such undeniablity.  That’s what I look for, hope for, pray for.  We’d all know what God thought of us and what God expected of us if God just told us, right?

            Truly, it has been my experience that God does in fact call to us, constantly, repeatedly, relentlessly, even.  Not in these forms, voices from on high or stone tablets, if God communicates to you in that way you get in books like the Bible.  But in the course of our everyday lives, our everyday relationships, our everyday prayer, God does call us as clearly, if not as loudly as God called the prophets of old, or even his only son, the beloved, with whom he is well pleased.

            How does that happen?  How is God’s will revealed to us?  Sometime it is a feeling, an intuition.  “I am supposed to engage this person some how.”  “I need to take this class.”  “I am should check out this church, read this book, take this trip, take that path, work with these children.”  And these intuitions are often rewarded with feelings of consolation, of, “That felt right.  I am supposed to be here.”

                                    Sometimes God’s call comes in what we gravitate towards, what we enjoy, find attractive, areas in which we find ourselves talented.  Some of us are called by God in the desire for challenges, for greater responsibility, for answering heretofore unanswered questions.  Some of us are called by God through the beauty of music and art, gardens and growing things.  God calls us, sometimes, through our desires.  Our desire to write, teach, build, learn, cook, serve.  And there are other forms of desire God uses.  The call to the vocation of parent is at least reinforced by sexual attraction to our partner in baby making.  Have no doubt that that desire, the desire to embrace your love, whether it is to join in creating new life or deepening that ongoing relationship, have no doubt that this desire is rooted directly in God.  We are sometimes called in our desires.

Sometimes it is not so much an attractive option laid before us, an open door, beckoning, but sometimes it is all the other paths being blocked.  My call to ministry was of this sort.  The Marine Corps life wasn’t it, nor corporate management or technical sales, I just barely dodged the law school bullet… the clarity of my call to ministry was assisted in that other possibilities were falling by the wayside.  Sometimes God calls us by closing other doors.  

            Sometimes God calls us very directly through the mouths of others.  There was a great skit I saw about discerning a call to priesthood.  The scene is a young man is at coffee hour and someone asks, “Have you ever considered the priesthood?”  And he responds, “no, I haven’t heard the call.”  The action stops and someone holds up a sign, “This is God calling you.”  The scene changes, and another person says, “You’d make a great priest.”  “No, I haven’t been called.”  The action stops, the sign is help up, “This is God calling you.”  Others call us on God’s behalf.

            One way or another, the call of God, God’s will for us in the world some how manifests as how things are supposed to be.  What you are supposed to be doing, where are you supposed to be going, dedicating your life, or maybe just your afternoon to? God’s will is how things are supposed to be, and our discernment of that will is to learn our part in it all.  But that is the easy part, the discernment.  Recognizing where we are being led to or driven from, recognizing that it is from God; those things are teachable, we can learn, we can cultivate faith and understanding, enabling us to recognize God’s will for us and the world.  But saying yes to God, gaining the courage to say yes, or at least to stop saying no, now that is a lot more complicated.

            You see, following the will of God is serious business.  It can be minor, like whether to walk up the three flights of stairs at the medical office building or take the elevator.  (God prefers walking in nearly every case.)  Or the case of a personal sense of vocation, I mean my vocation matters nearly desperately to me, but in the big scheme of things…not so much.  But for some, following the will of God can lead to a different world.  Mary.  Paul.  Dietrich Bonheoffer.  Archbishop Tutu.  Albert Einstein.  What if he had given up on math, abandoned his vocation and stayed at the patent office?  Or of Martin Luther King had taken a faculty position at his alma mater Morehouse instead of a church in Atlanta?  Or if Gandhi, after his first beating at the hands of the police, went back to his law practice in South Africa and never looked up again?  Or what if your parents had stopped at two kids?  The world would be different.

            If the voice of God boomed out of the heavens on the heels of the Holy Spirit like during the Baptism, or if you were struck down blind with the words of Christ, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me,” in your ears, following the will of God doesn’t even seem to be a choice.  Even Mary’s proclamation, “Be it unto me according to thy word” in response to the angelic visitor might be a conceivable response to us run of the mill mortals.  But we can’t expect angles.  We can’t expect a spectacle.

            It is risky, saying yes to God, because each of us here, really in the end, we, each an every one of us, we are no different than Dietrich Bonheoffer or Mohandas Gandhi, we are the same, even as Mary and Paul.  They were just people, ordinary people who made the extraordinary commitment to saying yes to God; fully yes to God and they kept saying yes to God with everything they had ‘til what, they were martyred?  Their firstborn was crucified?  In the end, that is what we are talking about.  Leaning fully into God, living as God calls us to live really, really, really can mean giving up everything.  It will absolutely mean that things will be different, and how and what will be different, that is not up to us.  And most importantly, we all have it in us.  That is the miracle of faith, faith in Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior.

We all say yes to God in little and less little ways.  That little niggling feeling we get that edges us to better choices, “buy the local eggs”; “walk, don’t drive.” Or bigger ways, dedicating your life to serving others, not just making money for stock holders; sacrificing materially so that one of you can stay home full time with the kids.  But once we start saying yes to God, it is a rabbit hole.  As we grow in our faith we can lean over the edge knowing that God is calling us and knowing that God alone knows where it leads.  Paul stood on that precipice.  So did Mary, Bonhoeffer, King, and a man named Terry I met at Occupy.  All of them said yes, fully yes and everything changed.

This man Terry went down to the Occupy camp when it opened in late 2011 and he was transformed.  He was housed, works, went to school, is a veteran, and seeing the plight of people on the streets of our fair city, he was changed.  He found suffering in the faces of people he shared his life with.  He told the people he met, “I am not leaving the streets until you all have a place to go.”  They still don’t and he still hasn’t.  That is jumping into that rabbit hole headfirst.  And will his effort change the world?  Without a doubt, it already has as it always does when the call of God is recognized and followed.

            We all have that in us.  I don’t care how old you are, how young you are, how set in your ways, how little or how much you know, each of us is capable of embracing the will of God and changing the course of history.  What makes a saint is the willingness to follow God’s will wherever it calls.   

            How do we do this?  Is a candidacy for sainthood in your future?  We’re going to stretch this series out another over another week of the Epiphany season.  How do we say yes to God?  How do we stop saying no?  In God’s time all will be revealed. AMEN

January 6, 2013, Epiphany

Year C, Epiphany

January 6, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “For we observed His star at its rising, and we have come to pay him homage.”

          It is Epiphany, the wise men’s big day.  We know very little of these men except that they are from the East, that they were concerned about a star and that they carried gifts.  And of course that they were very keen to pay homage to the newborn King of the Jews.  Everything else about them is tradition or conjecture.  Even the part of there being three wise men is the product of tradition, not scripture.  There were three gifts but no indication of how many gift bearers there were. 

          Scholarship suggests that they were astrologers, and being astrologers from the east, it is very possible that they hailed from Babylon, a center of astrological sciences in antiquity.  Even with these informed guesses, it leaves us with a very important question: why did a party of Babylonian astrologers set out to pay homage and lavish gifts on a new born king six or seven kingdoms west of them?  They say that they observed his “star at its rising,” but what got them up off their cushions and onto a camel to undertake such a significant if not perilous pilgrimage?  How did they know to trust what had been revealed to them?  How did they know to say “Yes” to God?

          I have had two sort of epiphanies in my life, moments of clarity, or sudden insight, both having to do with my vocation, what I was supposed to be doing with my life.  The first happened while I was in the Marine Corps, while I was leading a platoon on a counter-narcotics mission in Ventura County, California.  We were finding pot fields in the national forest so the sheriffs could burn them down.  We were attached to a unit called Joint Task Force – 6, the irony of the name was lost on us at that time.  I was out on patrol with a team, and I was sitting with my feet dangling in a little stream when everything became quiet, calm.  I realized that this wasn’t preparation for something else.  This was my life, my real life happening and I looked around me, at the rifle by my side, the radio handset crackling on my shoulder, the camouflage paint smeared on my hand and I thought, “What am I doing here?”  We returned to our base the next week, I resigned my commission and three months later was a civilian again.

          The second came five years later in a small church in England on Easter morning.  After the Marines I entered the business world, which I found to be significantly more morally and ethically complicated than service in Marine Corps tank and infantry battalions.  There I was in that church and something happened. Again, things got calm, quiet-like, and watching the vicar deliver her Eastertide message I knew that that was what I was supposed to do.  It was much scarier having a to do revealed as opposed to my previous not to do, but it was so clear.  And I never looked back, which was totally weird, because I had no idea what it meant since I had not been a church-goer for fifteen years and even then I did not understand, appreciate or approve of things church.  I even refused to be confirmed.  But here we are, certainly a lesson of consolation to parents of the unwilling to be confirmed.

          But have you ever felt like that?  That all of a sudden you just knew what you are supposed to do?  That you just know what God wants of you or that you know just what God wants? Have you ever had an epiphany?

          I have spent a lot of time in thought and prayer on discernment, on how we facilitate the process of epiphanies, revelation, of understanding God’s will for us.  That is what we are talking about here, the will of God being revealed.   And to be clear, I do not liken the will of God to a conscious decision process anything like ours.  I do not understand the will of God to be some divine mind deciding things: things like some are saved, some are not; that good things happen to some, but not to others for any kind of human-like reason.  That just does not compute, it does not reflect the truth about how the world is, or the depth of existential mystery.  Terrible things happen that have nothing to do with what God wants or wills.   The will of God, as I understand it, is simply the way things are supposed to be.  Simple, but very difficult to discern, sometimes. 

          It is a funny thing, how God’s will is revealed, how epiphanies happen.  They happen to those who are seeking them, straining to discern a path, seekers.  They happen to the fervent, believers who are open to revelation, that are inclined to revelation, any revelation “just give me a sign.”  And they happen to the unawares, the innocent bystander who was just standing there, minding their own business and next thing you know, WHAM, God gives them a good slap on the back of the head.  Epiphanies happen.

          The Magi were seekers.  They studied the stars, searching for meaning by the best way they knew how.  And when that star was rising they knew what they were supposed to do, and they did it.  They followed that star, they paid their homage, gave their gifts.  The key is, they wanted to know God’s will and worked very hard to affect that knowing.  That is the definition of a seeker.

          Then there are the believers.  When I think of epiphanies of the fervent, my mind goes to Saul, the pre-Paul Saul, that is.  He was up to his neck in religion, zealously following the mission he felt called to.  He was already obedient to God, or what he thought was God.  So he was ripe for following directions, for following what he understood to be the will of God.  For believers, an epiphany can totally change the direction of their lives and work, but they are primed for it.  Struck down on the side of that road, Saul was already committed, he just changed direction and became Paul. Samuel, son of Hannah who revealed God’s will regarding Eli is of this sort.  His life was already dedicated to God and he was predisposed to epiphanies.

          Then there are those caught unawares, regular people whom had not particularly felt nor sought the will of God who for whatever reason got the call, the Will of God Almighty was revealed.  That is the nativity story.  Out of nowhere, the angel of the Lord revealed himself to Zechariah and then Elizabeth, to Mary and then Joseph, and everything changed.  Everything.  Sure, Zechariah was a priest but he did not expect what happened.  Who would?  The apostles were just mending their nets, minding their own business when out of Nazareth, almost literally out of nowhere, God comes walking along and reveals their vocation and the activity of the rest of their lives.  Francis of Assisi was a medieval dilettante who, with the help of the horror of war, had revealed to him a mission that is still ongoing. 

          What do these epiphany stories have in common?  The seeking, searching Magi, the zealous Paul, the innocent Zechariah, Mary and Francis?  Their lives were aligned in relation to God in very different ways, the will of God was revealed to them in very different ways, in completely different times and places and social locations, but there is a common thread. What is it? _____ They all said yes.  They all, in their own ways, some with trepidation, Samuel, some with every fiber of their soul, Mary, Paul, each of them, said yes to God.

          As Christians we can work for our whole lives seeking the revelation of the will of God.  We can be devoted practitioners of our religion in word and deed.  We can just sit around and live our lives without much special purpose and then, wham.  God gets you.  And wherever you are on this spectrum, seeker, devotee or bystander, you probably have as likely a chance to get a call from God, but recognizing it as such, and more importantly saying yes to God’s call, now that is a different story.  Recognizing God’s call is just the first step, saying yes is an order of magnitude, or two, harder.

          Saying yes to God, saying “Be it unto me according to thy word” kind of saying yes, that is a tall order; an extremely tall order that most of us are not up to.  Really, saying “yes” to God, a statement that will certainly change your life in ways you can never imagine, who can do that?  Who can risk everything being open like that?  Who can trust that much?  I certainly was not up to it as a bystander on that drug mission, or as a seeker in that little church, but God in Christ with the Holy Spirit meets us where we are.  Saying “Yes” to God is a high bar, a higher bar than most of us can clear, but then, maybe we don’t have to.  You see, as Simone Weil reveals to us, we don’t need to say “yes” to God, we just need to stop saying no.  Stop saying no to God.  This pairs beautifully with an epiphany.  This is the manifestation of God’s will for us and our world.  And how do we do this, how do we say yes or at least stop saying no to God?  Well, next week is the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord, a supreme example saying of Yes to God.  Come back next week and we’ll learn more together.  AMEN.

December 30, 2012, 1st Sunday after Christmas

December 30, 2012

Year C, 1st Christmas

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “No one has ever seen God.”

          Happy fifth day of Christmas!  I hope you have had good holidays. 

          There is a group here in Eugene called the Progressive Clergy Association.  We gather monthly for collegial support, to share information, to get speakers in to learn from and strengthen our collective and independent ministries.  It is good group and I have made friends there.  We met here the Thursday before Christmas and one of my friends, a very protestant fellow, was amazed that our greenery was still not up. “So, you are one of those churches, who hide the Christmas stuff until it is Christmas.  We have our tree up in the sanctuary December 1^st, and it is out of there the 26^th.” 

          I grew up in such a protestant parish.  We talked about Advent I guess, but we sang Christmas hymns.  I really never was taught about the Twelve Days of Christmas, the Holy Innocents, or certainly Epiphany. It was not even that it was Romish, it just wasn’t important.  The Christmas season began after Thanksgiving and everything went away by New Years.  And goodness, we never had church on Christmas morning, unless, woe unto us, Christmas fell on a Sunday, and then, my family never went.  But most emblematic were the Christmas decorations:  they went up when they went up and were stowed away when they were stowed away without much theological meaning making.  It was just how things were done.

          It reminds me of the story of the Christmas roast.  Some of you may have heard it before; I can’t remember the source.  In any case, there was woman, whom every Christmas made a big, beautiful roast for Christmas dinner as her mother before her had, and her mother before her had.  It was a lovely tradition. Well, one Christmas Eve as the woman and her teenage daughter were preparing the roast, she cut the end of the roast off, as her mom had taught her and her mom had taught her, and the daughter asked, “Why do you cut off the end of the roast?”  (I like to think that she added “It isn’t in the Joy of Cooking.”)  The woman answered, “I don’t know, my mom did it that way.  That’s just how we do it.”  

          Well, Christmas arrives, they had a lovely morning and sat down to a big family Christmas dinner.  Grandma was there, and once grace was said and the roast was sliced and was being passed, the grand daughter asked Grandma, “Why did you slice off the end of the roast?”

          “Oh, deary that’s simple, that’s the only way it would fit.”  You see, her mother, Great-grandmother, had a small oven and a small roasting pan that fit in the oven but wouldn’t hold a whole roast unless the end was trimmed off.  So three generations of fine homemakers continue to slice the end off the Christmas roast because 75 years ago the pan used to be too small and now it is just how things are done.  Heavens to Betsy, we churchy people have a lot to learn from this story.

          Right there in the prologue to the most definitive of the Gospels, The Gospel according to St. John, right after unequivocal pronouncements like “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, the Word was God;” and “What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people;” and “The law indeed was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ;” we then receive a very graceful and truthful statement:  “No on has ever seen God.” Even Moses only saw a burning bush.  Jacob wrestled with someone, but their countenance was not very clear.  The great mystics, Dame Julian amongst them, saw broken images of Jesus dancing on the wall, but never images of God in God’s self, yet, yet, we don’t put the greenery up here until it is actually Christmas.  In Advent we dress our altars and priests in Marian blue, not Lenten  purple thank you very much, and then no matter how late at night it is, we switch it all over to white when needed.  We institute the Lord’s Supper ONLY with six very specific sets of words contained in one single book, why?  Because that is just how we do it.

          One of the things that affected my conversion into catholic Christianity is the Prelude to Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H. 1833.”  He writes:

Strong Son of God, immortal Love,

         Whom we, that have not seen thy face,

         By faith, and faith alone, embrace,

Believing where we cannot prove…

Our little systems have their day;

         They have their day and cease to be:

         They are but broken lights of thee,

And thou, O Lord, art more than they…

          “They are but broken lights of thee…”  We have not seen God.  Obviously we are immersed in the handwork of God, creatures of the creation living this life as sentient witnesses of the Glory God Almighty, our Creator.  We are witnesses to the creative abundance of God, as we are witnesses of the movement of the Holy Spirit in acts of kindness and grace, empathy, compassion, occasions of beauty and power; of connection of relationship, of Love.  All of these are signs, sure signs of something larger, something greater, something almighty, truly divine, God from God, Light from Light, True God from True God, but “they are but broken lights of thee, and thou, O Lord, art more than they.”

          Are you familiar with Plato’s allegory of the cave in The Republic?  The allegory goes something like this:  we are like prisoners lined up against a wall in a cave.  The fire flickers and sends shadows up against the wall, and in our smallness, our ignorance, we take those shadows, the flickering, distorted, downright shadowy forms to be the real thing, to be the true image of reality. 

          It is like the Buddhist icon where the Buddha stands pointing to the moon, reminding us that the finger pointing upward is just indicating the path; but enlightenment, the true nature of things is found in the light (which as some have observed, moonlight itself is still just a reflection of the true source of light). 

          But when we are freed, which, according to Plato is by philosophy alone, we can begin to discern that the shadows are just that, broken lights flickering on a wall, not the true forms.  But when we step back, when we are freed from our shackles, when our minds are as open as our eyes we might how the light actually shines and see things as they truly are

Our little systems have their day;

         They have their day and cease to be:

         They are but broken lights of thee,

And thou, O Lord, art more than they…

          So what do Tennyson, Plato and the Buddha have to do with your life on the 30^th of December 2012, Christmas I, perched as we are on the edge of the fiscal cliff and looking forward to an early Lenten cycle?  Just about everything, I think.

          Just like that mother who dutifully fulfilled her traditional obligation in cutting the end off the roast for years for the simple reason that that is how it is done we, as Anglicans, are immersed in a whole cultural universe, a ritual life contained in a multi-year cycle partly connected to the rotation of the Earth around the Sun, partly connected to the rotation of the Moon around the Earth, partly connected to the Earth’s 23.4 degree tilt, partly connected to words and traditions that stretch back from the 1979 Prayer Book to pre-history with words like “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth…”

          Why do we constantly seek to see through the shadows to the true light when usually we are staring intently at the sign post and not the path before us?  And why do we always settle for “Broken lights of thee” and not the real deal? Because, as St. John reveals to us in his great revelation, “No one has ever seen God.”

          Why, then, do we do the things we do? Why do we worship as we worship?  Why do we conduct ourselves as we do, organize ourselves as we do, ordain ourselves to do all that we do knowing as little as we know?  It is simple AND proper: That is just how we do it.

          This is not ignorance, or vainglory.  It is not cynicism or futile grasping for some knowledge of a promised reality.  It is just how we do:  this is the essence of catholic religious life.  And yes, this religious life is in the face of overwhelming mystery, it is in the face of faint shadows cast upon the wall of a cave, and of feeble minds trying to comprehend the grace and truth of a father’s only son.  That is just how we do it; this is one of the keys to living together in unity, constancy and peace.  These are handrails that we erect, handrails to face us together (hopefully) in the direction of God.  And why?  Because long ago, Jesus told our spiritual ancestors what was in store.  “No one has ever seen God.  It is God the only Son, who is close to the fathers hear, who has made him known.”

Let knowledge grow from more to more,

         But more of reverence in us dwell;

         That mind and soul, according well,

May make one music as before,

But vaster. We are fools and slight;

         We mock thee when we do not fear:

         But help thy foolish ones to bear;

Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light…

Forgive these wild and wandering cries,

         Confusions of a wasted youth;

         Forgive them where they fail in truth,

And in thy wisdom make me wise.

          The true gift of the religious life is to be able with a clear and enlightened heart, to say “That’s just how we do it,” and that being a perfectly good answer.  Because I’d bet even money that the next year, knowing all that she knows, that woman will still cut off the end of her roast, because that is just how you do it. AMEN