February 24, 2013, 2nd Sunday in Lent

February 24, 2013

2nd Sunday in Lent Year C

Luke 13:31-35

Rev. Jo Miller

          Are you a little confused by today’s reading coming from chapter 13? I would not be surprised if you are. Two weeks ago we read of the Transfiguration found in Luke Chapter 9. Last week we had the scene from Luke 4 with the Temptations in the desert. Today our reading has Jesus well on his way to Jerusalem. Our church calendar may offer a rhythm to the church year but offers little rhythm to the readings of the Gospels. They can seem to jump around a bit. We have had the birth story, the Epiphany, the baptism but not in clear order.

          David Barr in his study book on the New Testament writes that Luke uses geography as his literary device but is not about the geography of the area. He says that the geography tells us about the incredible journey Jesus took to Jerusalem. He writes that the story of the journey is punctuated by prayer and the power of the Holy Spirit.

          We missed the baptism in Luke 3:21 that says; “Now when all the people had been baptized and when Jesus too had been baptized as he was praying, the heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit in bodily form like a dove came down upon him.

          In the readings from the 3rd Sunday after Epiphany in Luke 4:14 we read: Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee. Then last week we went to the first part of Luke 4 where we had the Temptation and heard again that Jesus was full of the Holy Spirit and was led into the wilderness. Jesus was on a Spiritual journey. It is not linear. Sometimes Jesus is going north, than he is going south, and sometimes there does not seem to be any progress north, south, east, or west. He runs into difficult people and helpful people and those who are just looking for an encouraging word of hope. Sometimes Jesus is happy and eating, having a good time and sometimes he gets a little upset with his disciples. Today we hear him grieving for Jerusalem. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! This section sounds as though God is speaking clearly through Jesus.

          What does a spiritual journey look like? Read the Gospels. I would say that almost every one of my books on Christianity or Buddhism is someone relaying their spiritual journey. Jesus’ spiritual journey was his life journey. Our spiritual journey is our life journey. Most of the time we walk through our life unconscious of this fact. Sometimes it hits us that there is something more, something deeper than work, family and play. There is. We are mind, body, and soul. Whether we know it or not, whether we believe it or not life is our journey and it is a spiritual one. Sometimes we are going full tilt ahead and other times slipping backwards or just on idle. Nevertheless we are still on our journey.

          Jesus had spiritual practices. He prayed often. We will read where he went away to a quiet place. When he left in the early morning to be alone. He went regularly to the synagogues for worship. He was with a close knit group of people whom he taught. He did not practice his faith in isolation. He was open to the movement and direction of the Holy Spirit. His disciples on the other hand, a lot like us. They did not know what it was all about for long time. But, they kept on working at it. Peter, I love Peter. Oh, how many times have Peter and I had our foot in our mouth. Jesus loved Peter anyway.  

          I’m not what you would call a doctrinally orthodox kind of person. I am more semi-Pelagian with a large dose of Celtic spirituality running through my veins. Just know that Augustine wouldn’t approve. Of course he wouldn’t approve of me being ordained either. In the 1980’s and 1990’s (a really long time ago) I was on a tough, going nowhere spiritual journey. In 1987 the band U2 (you know Bono’s band) came out with a song with the lyrics “I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.” That nailed it for me. I hadn’t found it until I returned to the Episcopal church with all its ancient creeds and prayers that reach back to the beginning centuries of the church and before. I don’t have to believe every word of the Creed to say it for I am joining my voice with all the voices of all the saints throughout the last two thousand years. Some of our prayers have been said nonstop for centuries. There is something very holy about the incense of prayers.  What does your journey smell like? How does it sound in your heart and mind and soul?  Who is on the journey with you? I suspect Jesus had a deep love for his Jewish faith. I suspect that their ancient prayers in the synagogues were very important to him. I strongly suspect that his love for his people was even stronger for what he was willing to do for them.  The spirit of the risen Christ, the Ground of our being, God of the Universe loves all the people. Loves us even when we are not aware. We are his people.

          Here we stand at the beginning of the second week of Lent and we are also looking toward Jerusalem. What do we take away with us today with this Gospel reading? I suggest the last line, listen: “And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say, ‘blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.’” Where else do we hear a portion of that line? We hear it every Sunday in our Eucharistic Prayer:  “Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest?

          Let me put a little twist on this. We are now the ones who come in the name

 of the Lord. You are blessed. You leave here blessed people. Blessed are the teachers, of whom we have many. Blessed are the doctors and nurses and caregivers when they leave here to do the work they are been given to do. Who else can we add to the list of Blessed people? Blessed are the cookie makers, the piece makers, the holy bread makers. Blessed are the singers, the musicians, the mothers and fathers, babies and children. When we leave here we are blessed and we go forth in the name of the Lord. This is an important part of our life journey our spiritual journey. We were never promised an easy journey only a blessed one.

February 17, 2013, First Sunday in Lent

Year C, Lent 1

February 17, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “…for forty days he was tempted by the devil.”

          Welcome to this Feast of Our Lord nestled in the midst of our annual Lenten season. I hope you have been pondering last week’s introduction to Lenten observances, searching your heart for ways to participate, practice and pray that draws you closer to God. I hope you are finding your own way into Lenten observance.

          The temptation of Jesus Christ is always the way we start Lent.   This story is found in the three synoptic Gospels, which are? ___  It is also found in several places in St. John’s narrative, and Paul holds it up too, in particular in his letter to the Hebrews.  Temptation is an important theme to consider as Christians.  Maybe more accurately, it is an important theme to consider as human beings.  

          Why is that? Well most importantly, we need to think about it because it is a constant presence in our lives.  Well, it is in mine.  We are constantly faced with choices.  Large ones, small ones and everything in between, and in our range of choices there are very often some choices that are better than others. By better, particularly in terms of the category “temptation,” what I mean mostly is that most choices favor one party over another.  The primary temptation is that me, my family, my kind will benefit at the expense of the other, the stranger, the enemy, the least of these. One over another; that is not the kingdom of God.  A subcategory of this temptation is pleasure.  Pleasure is a wonderful thing, I recommend it daily, but the pleasure that tempts, sinful pleasure, is pleasure that is not necessarily exploitive (though it often is), but it is also pleasure that defers or obscures its cost or dangers.  Drugs and alcohol, pornography and gambling provide pleasure, but it is a dystopic pleasure because the nature of the pleasure itself distracts us from its true cost to our bodies, our minds, our relationships with God and everything as well as possibly exploiting others.  When a choice stands to benefit ourselves or our side at the expense of others or if it’s hazards and costs are concealed or obfuscated, it is a temptation.  And temptation, very simply put is a test.  That is the Latin root of the word, and it is a very important test to pass, be it administered by God, like in the Garden, putting those two powerful Trees within arms reach, or by other forces, less noble forces that are extant in the shadows, in the darker corners of our beings and our world.

          Here again, the brilliance of the Gospels is revealed.  The three temptations Jesus faces: physical desires and needs as represented by hunger and the prod to make bread from stone, idolatry, in the form of worshiping the devil in exchange for the worldly excesses of kingship, and lastly, the tempting of faith itself, these represent the breadth of human temptation.  Let’s take a look.

          “We do not live by bread alone.”  This temptation illustrates the gamut of physical temptations that ensnare us.  Our relationships with our physical world are mightily disordered.  We eat when we are not hungry, drink when we are not thirsty, and we smoke when… well there really aren’t many discernible benefits of smoking, though medical marijuana is a probable exception.  And, of course we eat and drink things that are bad for us and for our world, and too often too much of it.  Our sexuality takes our minds and bodies places we ought not be, drawing us away from situations of proper sexual expression, which is defined by stability, love and commitment and not by who is doing what to whom and how.  As we said last week, God is not concerned with what we are doing but why.

          Our temporal lives, our lives lived in time and place and the time and place in which we live are extremely important in the economy of God.  That the Word became flesh and dwelt among us proves this, so I am not shunning the created world, it is precious to God and must be to us.  What I, more importantly, what Jesus is saying is that the temporal realm, time and place are important but there are other things that are important, too.  God is important.  Goodness and beauty are important.  Love is important, and not only in relation but as an ideal, as a Form.  God is important and God is not of the creation.  And, and for most of us, physical temptations, sensual ones, ones our bodies physically rub up against, interact with, consume, fellow created things, these are extremely distracting to us, creatures that we are. Sites of great sin and temptation to great sin.  “One does not live by bread (or sex or beer or French fries) alone.”  Well, at least not in Lent.

          Second, Jesus teaches, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only Him.”  The primary and overwhelming sin we face as human beings is idolatry: treating as God that which is not God.  This happens in the physical realm, our urges to consume, our desire for specific sensations, our ability to make choices.  We also do it in our relationships in the lordship we give to our ideas, our opinions our needs, and this leads us to terrible places, leads us to do terrible things to each other.  When we begin to value things, states, conditions over the well being of others, it is the same as choosing things over God. “Just as you did it to one of the least of these… you did to me.”  When we offer a disproportionate amount of our energy, time, love, intention and attention to things, to created things and not to God, we are we are being tempted with idolatry. Make no mistake, we’ve been warned. “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only Him.”

          Lastly, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”  What great writing we have here.  The devil takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the Temple, the center of the Jewish universe, and is cited Psalm 91 as God’s assurance that he will be saved.  We call it a leap of faith, right?  Radical obedience to what we discern as Gods will, that is not just the gold standard we aspire to as faithful Christians, it is kind of the basic Christian contract: when you know what God wants you to do, you have to do it.  And discerning God’s will is always an act of faith. Here Jesus is offered a literal leap of faith, but instead He goes back to the Torah, avoiding, as one scholar writes, the spiritual vertigo of this temptation and becomes, as Isaiah writes, he “who walks in darkness yet trusts in the name of the Lord.”  Our faith in God is pure, is right only when free from tests. The faith in Jesus Christ that we are called to cannot be confirmed by anything but faith itself. “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

          As I like to test all of my sermons, what does this have to do with our lives on the average Tuesday afternoon, or at least the average Tuesday afternoon of Lent?  Quite a lot, actually.  One of the points of Lent, the point of the participation, practice and prayer we are working on, is the cultivation of mindfulness, the building of awareness, the increase of our knowledge of our self, the world and of God.  As a famous dog once said, “Knowing is half the battle.”  We have to know ourselves in relation to the world if we are ever going to know ourselves in relation to the Word.  We have to have a clear and critical eye for our own weaknesses as well as our strengths; our own liabilities as well as our assets.  If we walk around ignorant of the very personal pitfalls that we all encounter, we are much more likely fall in.

          When I was at divinity school, we had a pastoral unit on clergy sexual misconduct, which started with the words, “I know no one in here will never do these things, but we have to go through it.”  The vast majority of clergy sexual misconduct is not preying upon children, but it is nominally consensual sex between adults, just adults that ought not be having sex.  Not usually illegal, but terribly unethical and immoral.  Priest-congregant, never ok.  But it happens a lot.  A lot.  Because priests or pastors are immoral?  Opportunists?  Scumbags?  Sometimes.  Mostly, though, it is because priests or pastors are unprepared to face intensely intimate situations that are part and parcel of ministry. If you do not know your weaknesses, your liabilities, the places you are most vulnerable, you are in grave risk.  My take home from that class was that I very well could find myself in a sticky situation and I have to be prepared for it now and not find myself horribly surprised in a confusing, real-time situation in which someone, mostly the other person, could get hurt.  We’re all human, right?  That’s the point.  We need to be prepared with self knowledge to face the world in which we live.  We need to know ourselves.  We need to know where we go astray, where we are liable to slip up.

          Jesus passed the test.  But then again, He is Jesus.  Which tests will you pass?  It is up to you.  Take time this Lent, the dark season of our year, take time in the darker corners of yourself.  Where are you at risk?  Where can you fall down?  Because we all can.  We all do.  In Jesus Christ, though, we can delve into the darkest; He is at hand.  AMEN  

February 10, 2013, Transfiguration of Our Lord

Transfiguration of Our Lord, Year C, Last Epiphany

February 10, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.”

          How has God changed you?

          Today is the Sunday of the Transfiguration, and today we remember that moment when Jesus was fantastically changed, transfigured, by the presence of God. A primary lesson of the Transfiguration is the knowledge that when approaching God, things change.  The changes we undergo are generally not as dramatic as the dazzling whiteness of the Transfiguration, or the radiance of Moses’ face shining from divine exposure on Mt. Sinai. It is usually more as Paul describes it, that the Holy Spirit moves us in our lives “from one degree of glory to another.”  We change incrementally, usually, in a series of plateaus much like evolution trends.  The key though, whether it is dramatic or subtle, encountering God in Christ with the Holy Spirit, things are going to be very different.

How has God changed you?

That is a serious question, because that is what this is all about, church, leaning towards, participating in the life of God.  It is about conversion, about growth, change, maturing in our individual and collective relationships with God in Christ with the Holy Spirit.  As we do that, we are going to change, we are going to be changed.  How does God change us?  What form do these changes take?  Obviously the changes we are talking about are usually not outward and visible changes like in our Scripture today, but rather are usually more inward and spiritual in nature.  Sure, there are the stories about stigmatas, the mysterious appearance of marks of the passion, but that does not happen very often.

How has God changed you?

God changes us in our relationships. Christianity is all about relationship.  The very doctrine of the Trinity in effect prefigures God as a relationship; three distinct persons of the same substance, right?  Distinct personalities each in relationship with each other and with all that was, and is and is to come; with everything. Han Urs von Balthasar, in his Theo-Drama, imagines God as a swirling ball of relationship, (think electron cloud) begetting, preceding, enveloping, participating in God’s self and radiating out into the creation.  We are changed by the cloud of relationships we are immersed in; God changes us in the constant invitation we receive to enter into ever deeper, more complex relationships.  We are called to relationship with God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit, in each Person and as God in toto.  We are called to relationship with each other, with fellow human beings, with the land upon which we live and the other creatures we share time and space with.  We are called to a particular relationship with members of this religious family, as we pray, serve, learn, eat and live together.  God changes us in the constellation of relationships we live within which manifests in the Christian virtues of caritas, the love of humanity, in compassion, generosity and loving-kindness.  This is how God changes us in relationship.

How has God changed you?

God changes us by changing the orientation of our beings.  By this I mean God changes who and what we are most concerned with, and in changing that, we have little choice but to undergo a profound change in our very being.  When our concerns transition from being primarily about ourselves to being primarily about others, we are changed.  When we become more oriented outwardly than inwardly, when move from concern for me to concern for we, when we begin to focus our intention and attention more on Thou than I, we are fundamentally changed.  By changing how our beings are oriented, what we are most concerned with, God cultivates empathetic joy, mindfulness, awareness of the world and our place in it.  God changes us by changing the orientation of our beings.

How has God changed you?

And God changes us through faith.  What is faith?  It is a belief or doctrine based, as Oxford reveals it, “on spiritual apprehension rather than proof.”  When we know with confidence that we are not alone, that God is with us, Emmanuel, that in the blessed assurance of Grace our salvation is assured, we are changed.  What social worker, priest or therapist doesn’t dream of a pill that causes trust.  Trust that you are held, that you are important, that the root of creation is desperately concerned with all of you, that not one hair on your head goes uncounted…  Feeling that, knowing that, that changes you.  The whole point of “attachment parenting,” a somewhat progressive parenting philosophy, is the rigorous imprinting of a loving relationship on the child.  Breast feeding is paramount in cultivating the steadfast love of mother and child.  So is baby wearing, co-sleeping, you know, family beds, trying as hard as possible to have one parent home full time.  God changes us in the same way, cultivating faith, trust that God is with us, with you.  The Hebrew language gifts us with the word hesed, steadfast love.  The unwavering love of God, “my rock in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold…”  (Ps. 18). God changes us with the gift of faith.

How has God changed you?

So how do we get God to change us?  Well obviously we can’t get God to do anything; there is the whole unmoved mover thing that Aristotle taught us a long time ago.  But while we can’t get God to change us, we can (and we must) create the conditions that put us in a posture to be changed by God.  The technical term is a posture of receptivity.  Like John the Baptist proclaimed, we must prepare the way of the Lord, but here, we must prepare the way for the Lord to enter our beings.  And we do this by participating in the Body of Christ, the church; by practicing our religion; and by praying our hearts out.

Participating in the Body of Christ means simply showing up.  In lending your voice to this Mass, by paying your pledge, volunteering at the breakfast, studying together, in participating in this little slice of the Beloved Community you are making clear a path to and for God.  Showing up is the primary means to invite God to change you, to change your life.  And you all here are showing up, and regularly, and not just on Sundays. Showing up, participating is a pre-requisite because as Christians, particularly as the Anglican variety of Christian, we understand that we cannot, we do not approach God alone.  Participation helps God change us.

Practice makes perfect.  Truly.  And for us, again as Anglicans, practice is paramount.  We practice by gathering at the table, feeding on Christ in our hearts by faith with thanksgiving.  We practice our religion in our mindfulness of the calendar: what feast was last Saturday?  (The Presentation) What two religious occasions occur this Wednesday?  (Ash Wednesday and the commemoration of Absalom Jones). What color might be appropriate to wear for the next six weeks at Mass?  (Purple).  We practice by cultivating a system of daily devotions.  Try saying a tiny silent prayer and crossing yourself before eating.  Read the Noonday office, it takes 7ish minutes. Observe Lent this year.  Give up a comfort or take on an ascetic practice for the 40 days we face beginning Wednesday. Make plans with me to make confession during Holy Week.  Practice makes perfect by making room for God in our lives.  Practice helps God change us.

And lastly, pray.  Pray as the Book of Common Prayer indicates.  Or pray ecstatically, with dance, with music or marathons.  Or pray the lists on the back of the bulletin.  Pray rosaries, pray the Jesus Prayer, learn centering prayer or vipassana.  Or use no form at all.  Just thinking about the folks in your life, focusing your consciousness on someone, lifting up intentions about them, that is prayer, it totally counts.  And it works.  Prayer is the tie that binds us to each other, to the church and ultimately, to God.  Prayer helps God change us.

Some of us have been utterly transformed by God.  Some of us are still waiting.  Some of us are just beginning to get a sense of, a glimmer of God in Christ on the periphery of our vision, we are learning that God can change us and how.  We are departing the joy of the Epiphany, the season in which we remember God’s light shining in the world.  On Wednesday, we begin our descent into the dark nights of our year, the 40 days of trudging with Christ to Jerusalem.  Participation.  Practice.  Prayer.  We have the resources.  From here, let us consider not so much how God has changed us, but how God will change us, starting in this very moment, the only place God ever is.  AMEN

February 3, 2013, Third Sunday after Epiphany

Year C, Epiphany III

February 3, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

“They got up, drove him out of town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.”  

Last week, we found Jesus reading from Isaiah in his home synagogue in Nazareth, thus declaring His earthly ministry… bringing good news to the poor, release to the captives, the jubilee.  Right?  We ended where this week begins, with the proclamation, “this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

So this week, he is still in the synagogue in Nazareth and you know what, they were quite impressed.  “They said, “Is this not Joseph’s son?”  The way Luke tells it, this statement is not sarcastic, not in the tone “who does he think he is?” but more “wow, this is Joseph’s son.”  Then, Jesus does something rather puzzling; he seems to try to tick everyone off.  He offers a Greek and Jewish witticism, “Doctor, cure yourself!”  He suggests that they will demand miraculous proof of his authority like in Capernaum, then he tells of Elijah and Elisha and how the grace of God was delivered through them not to good observant Jews, but to the Sidonese widow and the Syrian general Naaman, in turn the least of these and the Other (an enemy even).  If he had meant to anger everyone, Jesus was very successful, so successful that they took him to the brow of a nearby hill so they could throw him off a cliff.   (For anyone who missed it, He got away.)

The primary lesson of this Gospel passage is quite straight forward, it is about transgressing boundaries.  In the drama of the story, we see how challenging, how triggering, how frightening the Word of God can be, particularly in the Word’s constant and consistent imperative to include and embrace the other. Jesus did not just come for His own, YHWH, the God of Israel is revealed in Jesus Christ as being God for everyone always and everywhere.

For everyone, always and everywhere.  That covers a lot of territory.  How can anything be so universal?  Look at our world, how fragmented and conflicted if not combative it is.  And right here, even Jesus personally is able to anger his hometown so deeply with his theological commentary that they are ready to throw him over a cliff.  If Jesus can’t get others to agree with him, let alone not try to heave him over a cliff.  How doe we talk across difference?

 This has come up a couple of places very distinctly this past week, that has really got me thinking about how do we accept, or at least hear things we don’t agree with, believe in, think is right, whatever. No matter what we do, where we live (even South Eugene), no matter who we are, we will always be in relationship with those with whom we cannot agree on much with. We all have brothers-in-law, right?  How, in our ever more polarized society, from our ever more personalized information streams, from our evermore isolated lives and degraded communities, how do we encounter the other?

We are in the middle of a quite remarkable book study group, reading The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto by Tavis Smiley and Cornel West.  We have had a great conversation.  The book is pretty left of center and the authors are pretty unequivocal in their critique of mainstream American politics, Republican and Democrat.  I think it is very good; not perfect, mind you, but good, solid, offering unapologetic arguments about the rights and wrongs around poverty that we just don’t hear in our national debate like the word “poverty.”  When is the last time you heard that word in the news?

There are critiques of the book, too.  One person asked if the book got more “prescriptive” rather than “descriptive,” a polite way to ask if they ever stop complaining and make some recommendations.  Fair enough.  And then someone else lifted up their discomfort that the book is too much of a rant, too unequivocal that it will invariably alienate those who see it differently, making dialogue impossible.  True that.  I can’t imagine the response some of my old Marine buddies would have to this book.  

My response was that the word “Manifesto” is right there in the title and that while manifesto is not actually Latin for rant (I looked it up), it is pretty close.  Think Jefferson, Marx and Lenin, Solanas: the lines between rant and manifesto are blurry at best, and the point of these writers is to say what they know no matter the consequence.  Is that helpful?

Then closer to home, I went up to Portland on Friday to meet with the Bishop.  He’s well and says howdy.  (He thinks Resurrection is pretty cool; he appreciates our liturgy and our leadership in outreach efforts).  After the meeting, Mark, who road up with me, introduced me around Right to Dream Too (R2D2 for short).  R2D2 is a small lot on the corner of 4^th and Burnside.  The gate to Chinatown is their front yard if that helps place it.  On that plot of land live 50ish people in small tents, who have the common mission to provide a safe place to sleep.  They do that with a few large awnings where the tired can lay down and sleep without fear that they or their belongings will be harassed.  It is sobering to see 15 exhausted men sleeping side by side in the middle of the day.  Many sleep there during the day because it fills up at night; they stay awake, walking to stay warm, then come to sleep once the night sleepers are done and someone has taken the sleeping bags with a handful of donated quarters to the laundromat for the day shift.  It is an amazing place.  

The homeless helping the homeless.  This very basic thing, providing a safe place to sleep, you can’t imagine the ire they have raised in Portland.  The city is dead set against this rest area to the point that the city fines them over a thousand dollars a month because they re-zoned the land once the owner let them put up the camp.  The only reason it even exists is that the city shut down one of the land owner’s pornography shops, so as a counterpunch, he leased the land to R2D2 for this purpose, knowing it would be a thorn in the side of the powers that be.  In addition, the neighborhood association has been withering in its complaints and critiques, even though crime is down measurably and there is a lot less trash on the streets of Chinatown.  And the downtown business association’s private police force and certain members of the Portland Police Bureau regularly harass R2D2 members, their guests and even folks who help out with showers and the like.  They can’t even negotiate, because the city and the neighbors can’t/won’t sit at the table.

And then there is little old here.  From a conversation about assault weapons that arose on the listserve, to inevitable disagreements about endowments, music, how we do hospitality, what is going on in the parking lot, how or if to build an addition and if so, how we should raise the money for it.  We don’t have a culture of conflict here, but conflict, disagreement arises as good people find themselves believing that they are right while other good people think they are right.  The organ did this.  A previous bishop did, too.  As did clergy and some good people here did in the past, and around a variety of issues, sometimes important, sometimes not.  

   Jesus told his neighbors that God was for everyone and they tried to kill him.  Our national political debate won’t even let the word poverty be spoken, nor climate change.  Forget about constructive gun control or reasonable tax policy in this climate that needs changing.  The folks at Right to Dream Too believe that everyone needs a safe place to rest, and the city and their neighbors won’t sit at the table with them.  We’ve had conflict here that drove people from the church, all church, permanently.  

We’re not going to do away with conflict, it is part and parcel to existence.  Two positive ions in close proximity are in conflict, they repel each other; it is the nature of things.  So we must not fear the reactions.  What Jesus had to say needed to be said.  The ranting of Smiley and West needs to be done, it is true.  The embodied prayer of Right to Dream Too needs to be prayed, even the decision to add to this building or change our hospitality patterns, if they are made (and I am not saying they will be…)  we, all people of principle and faith need to do what our hearts tell us to do, when we glimpse truth, we need to proclaim it; when we sense the right, we have to respond; when the word of God manifests before us, we have to act. Sometimes our plans and expectations will be on the line.  Sometimes relationships lay in the balance.  Sometimes, sometimes lives depend on the right and true and good being expressed and acted upon.  Sometimes we need to wade into the fray with what we know.  But how do we know when to buckle down, when to make a stand, when to declare it Alamo time?  The test is that one word, that one simple that Paul so gallantly holds up for us: agape, love.  If it is done in love, honestly, authentically, truly in love, agape, kind of love, how could you be wrong?  And even if you are, if you are doing it in love, you will be forgiven.  AMEN

February 2, 2013, Candlemas

Candlemas

February 2, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “A light to enlighten the nations, and the glory of your people, Israel.”

          This is a humble holiday, the feast of the presentation.  Forty days after childbirth, the new mother is deemed fit to go through the rites of purification to become ritually clean again, and the child, assuming it is the first born male, is dedicated at the temple to the service of God in the memory of the Exodus out of Egypt.  The fact that women were thought to be unclean after childbirth and that only males, firstborn even, were the only ones to deserve such dedication antiquate this holiday, but there is a humble message that persists here that is in need of holding up.

          Simeon and Anna were prophets, minor prophets, but still people touched by the spirit and witnesses of the movement of God at the temple.  Simeon sees the child, holds him in his arms and declares, “Lord, you have now set your servant free according to your word; for these eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all people, a light for the revelation to the Gentiles and for glory to your people, Israel.”  Anna does not get so auspicious a quote as the nunc dimittis of Simeon, but she engages in conversation about the wonders of God and the redemption of Jerusalem in the young Jesus.

          Simeon and Anna were church folks.  Stalwarts.  Anna “never left the temple.”  She was their Helen Reed or Karen Jewett.  And Simeon was probably a pillar of the Temple congregation, dedicated to God, serious about his faith, the law and the prophets.  I can imagine that they both saw everything that went on there.  They were always there, watching, participating as they could…  Think of the thousands of boys dedicated each year, the many more thousands of mothers going through the purification rites, children invariably in tow; but this one family, this one child, stood out.

          Why were these two minor prophets so struck by Jesus?  They were the churchiest of the churchy, they had seen everything that could be seen in a religious community, so why this reaction?  Maybe it was because for the first time they saw all that God desired, and what that was, what God desired was this little child, a month old baby.  Yes, He was God, but that is not the point, the fully human baby Jesus was a baby like all others, but was perhaps not like any others not because He was different, but because he appeared different in the eyes and minds of those He encountered.  A miracle of the baby Jesus was not in him, but in how he resided in the hearts of his witnesses.

          In seeing this baby, they were filled with joy, with meaning, with satisfaction for their highest aspirations and deepest longings.  God crossed their paths definitively, though wordlessly; powerfully, but as an infant; unmistakable yet anonymous.  And this form of encounter with God, so humble, so close to the heart, so tender, it reveals God’s deep expectation of us, which is not to be perfect, or accomplished, not to be better than we can be or free from blemish, but we approach the fulfillment of God’s deepest desire for us when we simply are who God made us to be.  The pure humanity of a child held up before God by a mother, a first time mother at that, the pure human moment and the Holy reaction it arouses as told by Luke, reveals the simplicity of God’s desires for us.  Be who you were made to be.  That is, in the end, all that Jesus Christ did, and look where that took Him.  AMEN.