Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C

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

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 21, 2013, Fourth Sunday of Easter

Year C, Easter 4

April 21, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

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

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

  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

         

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

Year C, Easter 3

April 14, 21013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 7, 2013, Second Sunday of Easter

Year C Easter

April 7, 2013

The Reverend Jo Miller

          Hallelujah! Christ is Risen! The Lord is risen indeed! Hallelujah! I will add that the risen Christ is here and now. Greetings on this 2nd Sunday of Easter which is known throughout the Christian Church as the lowest attendance day of the year. Almost always the priest takes a needed week off. By the very fact that the church has the lowest attendance on this Sunday and sometimes next Sunday the wise persons who devised our lectionary readings have given us the same readings every year for the 2nd and 3rd Sundays of Easter. Perhaps, they may have thought we will catch someone who has not heard these great readings of the risen Christ.

          Fr. Brent and Jessie gave us a wonderful backdrop last week to the enormous changes in world view that Jesus was ushering in. It is very difficult to change long held certainties. The changes Jesus spoke of were profoundly different from the Roman/Greek world and the Jewish understanding of God, life eternal, and faith. We struggle today with changing world views. I remember my first term at college I was told “You will need to wear a different set of glasses to see the bigger world.” Having come fresh off the farm I had no idea what these people meant. I did learn, however.

          Last week our Gospel reading ended with Mary Magdelene meeting Jesus at the tomb. She did not recognize him until he spoke her name. It is important to hear in our post resurrection stories that Jesus was not always recognized at first because he was the risen Christ. When Jesus said to Mary, “Do not hold on to me because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary went and announced to the disciples that she had see the Lord and shared what he had said. This week we pick up on the very next verse in the Gospel of John that in the evening of the first day the disciples were gathered together and the doors of the house were locked for fear of the Jews. I think they were generally just in fear their whole world was turned upside down.

          They did not know what to believe, whom to believe, or how to believe. All but the women and the beloved disciple had deserted Jesus in one way or another during the last few days. Perhaps they were huddled together sharing the events of the last week. Some may have sat silent knowing what they had done in fleeing from the garden when Jesus was taken away. They may have been sharing or holding tight in their heart's feelings of blame, regret, remorse, fear for sure of the Romans as well as the Jewish leaders. I wonder how they were looking at each other. How did Peter feel knowing he had denounced being with Jesus? We can know is they were humans with all the human emotions we have. I do not blame them, they were living in a hostile world.

          Fear is a primal emotion. It is what creates fight or flight. It is a basic human response. It is what helped early humans like the hunters and gatherers to live in frightful situations. It is still essential in many parts of the world and the United States.

          We should be able to relate in some way to the disciples who were locked away behind the door in fear.

          I have thought on this for a long time, every 2nd Sunday of Easter. Many sermons will focus on the “doubting Thomas”. But, I am going to say doubt is not all bad. It is also interesting that Thomas was not with the disciples to begin within the house. In the Gospel of Luke these men doubted the words of the women who said they saw the risen Christ. Luke wrote the apostles seemed to think the story an idle tale and they did not believe the women.

          For me this is less about scrutinizing doubt as it is looking at what we have locked away inside ourselves that we are afraid of opening up to the world. The risen Christ comes to them. He appears to them. The first words are, “Peace be with you.” He says it twice, “Peace be with you.” And then he says, “As the Father sent me so I send you.” He breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit, if you forgive sins they are forgiven, if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

          What do we do with these words of Jesus? What do they mean for us today? We lock away the things we have said or done that we may be ashamed of and there they stay locked inside us. We hold on to grudges tightly locked inside. We may have sworn never to forgive a person and so there it is locked inside. We may hold on to old regrets, hurts received from others, failures, things we said and did to hurt others. 

          Jesus appeared to people who denied him, abandoned him, who did not stand up for him in his greatest hour of need and with loving forgiveness says, “Peace be with you.” This does not sound like the son of a wrathful God who punishes the weak and disdainful. It was disdainful what Peter did in denying that he knew Jesus three times and yet there is the Spirit of the risen Christ saying Peace. He then sends them out to do the work he had given them to do.

          We receive this great act of grace every day of every week. Jesus says something very profound, “If you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven, if you retain the sins of any they are retained.” Forgiving ourselves and others frees us. When we hold on to what others may have done or what we have done, it stays in us. It is retained. This is an offering of freedom from the chains of the past and perhaps chains of the future. 

          This grace of forgiveness offered freely, the spirit of the risen Christ waits with open arms all we need to do is accept it. Sometimes it is helpful to go through the Rite of Reconciliation as a visceral way of unlocking those hidden doors for the one in whom we live and move and have our being is the one to whom our hearts are open, all our desires are known and from whom not one secret is hid. 

          These humans, these disciples of Jesus when given this understanding of grace, peace and forgiveness were able to begin their bold and life changing journey of turning their known world upside down. They were sent to do God’s work in the world so are we.

Good Friday, March 29, 2013

March 29, 2013, Good Friday

The Rev. Christine E. Reimers, Ph. D.

Readings:  Isaiah 52:13-53:12, Psalm 22, Hebrews 10:16-25, GOSPEL: John 18:1 – 19:42

Tonight is the ‘midnight’ of our Christian year – there is a great silence and absence of light in this night.   Our Lenten journey is preparation for this terrible night.  Tonight we are called to feel and acknowledge the depth to which God in Jesus Christ participates in the human story -- even to suffer torture and death on a cross – the instrument of Roman oppression, torture and execution.  The one we confess as fully God and fully man is suffering and dying.  The African American spiritual asks the question for us to meditate on in this terrible and sacred night:

“Were you there when they crucified my Lord. . .?” [Sung?]

As I have contemplated the challenge of being fully present to Jesus’ suffering and death, I recognized that this is not something that comes naturally to us, we humans try to avoid suffering.  So HOW are we enter into the meaning of Good Friday?  [PAUSE]  What do we know in our own lives about Good Friday?  WHERE have I, where have you, encountered Good Friday?  I invite us each to take time in a moment in silence to reflect on where YOU have encountered Good Friday?  By this I mean both times when you have supported someone experiencing great loss and pain and also those times when you have been in the midst of loss and pain yourself.  

[Pause] Where have you encountered Good Friday?  [Silence]

I’ll share with you a story from my experience of being with someone in her Good Friday place in life.  A woman I will call Grace came to me in, my ministry as a pastoral counselor, with a sense of deep fear and anxiety – so deep it was hard for her to get out of the house, to drive her car, to go to the grocery.  She feared getting lost, being in an accident, most of the activities of everyday life.  She talked and wept with me about her life – her long marriage to an abusive husband, her struggle to be faithful to God and her commitment made in her marital vows, raising 2 children – keeping them safe and teaching them respect for their father –despite her personal experiences with him.  She also shared wonderful stories of service to others – working with the deaf and many more stories of self-giving to community and church.  Then one day, just a year or so before I met her, she had a clear sense that she must leave her marriage and everything connected to it – that she would die there if she did not.  I can only begin to imagine how hard it was for her to turn and walk away from 40 years of faithfulness to her marriage, in spite of her spouse’s cruelty, faithfulness to her vows taken before God. 

However, leave she did.  She left her home of 40 years in another state and moved to  Richmond, VA, with a sister nearby for support.  However, her Good Friday was not the day she realized she must leave her marriage or die.  Her Good Friday was the year long struggle she’d been in by the time I met her with fear, anxiety and serious health problems.  Living alone for the first time in her life was terrifying; leaving the city she lived in for so long disorienting, and years of physical abuse had taken a terrible toll on her body.  With all that, her Good Friday was the loss of certainty about what God wanted her to do with her life.  Her Good Friday was accepting God’s unconditional love and trying not to look back and see her years in that marriage as ‘not hearing’ God; as somehow being ‘unfaithful’ in her certainty that it was God Will that she suffer and that her suffering would somehow be redemptive.  Her Good Friday – one I did not expected -- was that loss of certainty and re-learning how to experience a deep sense of God’s love and presence OUTSIDE a life defined by violence, fear and service to others. 

I felt very blessed to listen, to be witness to her story.  It was clear the best way to support Grace was to simply be present with her – a silent witness to both the reality of suffering and to hold hope – on her behalf – hope for her future and a new relationship with God. [PAUSE]  I believe I was called to figuratively walk with her on a spiritual journey through a scary and lonely time, as a person of faith who shared her desire to know God and Jesus Christ more deeply and to serve more truly.  I offered mostly silent companionship in her journey from a sense of certainty (in the context of suffering) to an unknown place of freedom, but much less certainty.  I prayed, when asked.  I encouraged her to tell her story – with as many troubling details as she needed to share.  I struggled to remain silent, in the face of her stories of abuse.  Sometimes I held her had.  She slowly developed a new sense of God’s presence in her life.  She developed new daily practices of prayer, scripture reading, listening for God’s guidance in daily life, and sought moments of joy in spiritual songs that lifted her out of her fear and depression.  One of the scary parts of this new faith journey was finding a new church where she felt safe and accepted; rather than staying in survival mode, withdrawn from other people and from a community of faith. Our conversation as faith-filled Christians was part of that journey back to community. Grace was grace to me and I to her.

What is your story of a Good Friday encounter? [PAUSE]   Was it sitting with someone in pain, despair and suffering, a silent witness – as it we hear in today’s Gospel?  Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.  Or is it your own Good Friday suffering where, hopefully you found someone present to you. 

That brings me to another question, HOW to move from silent bystanders to witnesses?  To be a witness, it seems to me, is first to ‘get involved’ in some way – emotionally, physically, even politically.  Sometimes being a ‘silent witness’ is the appropriate response – in many times of personal pain and loss.  There is also, as Brent spoke of last Sunday, the larger context of suffering and oppression where we are called to move beyond being bystanders and risk being witnesses to social injustice.  Ellie Wiesel, the famous Jewish novelist and Holocaust survivor speaks of the problem of just being silent in the larger context of human suffering and oppression:  I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

I suggest our call is first to face human suffering and discern how to respond.  To make faithful choices to be present and move from stunned, frightened, perhaps self-protective bystanders to be witnesses.  To be a ‘witness’ to violence and suffering may start with the simple act of listening or seeing.  It may also lead to action – literally giving testimony in a trial, or standing up and speaking for what you believe in a public setting, or, remaining silent (but not neutral) in a public way and sitting/standing/ praying side-by-side with those who are suffering or oppressed. 

This brings me back to tonight – Good Friday – and recalling those who John describes as the witnesses to Jesus’ suffering:  [John 19:25-27]: Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene.  They did not run away from the awful experience of the suffering of their friend and leader, their son or nephew.  However, it is the next verse that I found most touching.  It speaks to me about HOW we can find the courage to be witnesses to suffering:  “When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son,’ Then he said to the disciple, “here is your mother.”  And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.”  What struck me most is, even as he is suffering and dying, Jesus is concerned about those he loves.  He cares for his mother and friend and tells each to be family to the other.  I believe this is a very significant moment in the Passion Story – one I’ve frankly overlooked in the past.  While we are called, particularly today – Good Friday, to recognize the reality of suffering and to open ourselves up to being witnesses; we are also gifted by Jesus final words to his followers from the cross, with a call to be family for each other, to be a community who can make new relationships, who can bear witness to suffering and provide healing—sometimes even a greater measure of justice to those who have been victimized.  Suffering, regardless of its cause, is often a deeply lonely journey.  It is a spiritual and psychological truth that it makes a difference if you experience someone with you in these terrible times  Some folks are blessed with a clear sense of God’s presence in these times, but even Jesus cries from the cross ‘My God, my God why hath thou forsaken me.” 

To be witnesses, not passive complicit bystanders, to the reality that Good Friday is to acknowledge that every day, every night women, children and men suffer at the hands of other people for no reason.  In our Good Friday commemorate we can find our unique Christian witness that ‘enough is enough’ and God, in Jesus Christ, has entered fully into suffering and death for the purpose of breaking its power.  [PAUSE]  So. . .how do we go out tonight holding this irresolvable tension – Christ suffered and died to put an end to suffering and death and suffering and death continue?

 

 One answer, for me, is that we seek to create and receive new relationships, to be family to those who have none, to be friend to the friendless, to ‘give a witness to the truth – to ‘give a witness to the faith that is in us.”  One final image I would offer -- to be a witness to suffering requires that we ‘hold hope’ for something redemptive to occur beyond the suffering in front of us. I imagine this being like sheltering a single glowing ember and keeping it alive until the one who is in the midst of despair and overwhelming suffering can receive it back and rekindle their fire of hope.  So. . .let us go forth as witnesses willing to ‘get involved’ and to ‘hold hope’ – often in caring silence – for those we encounter who are suffering. AMEN.

March 31, 2013, The Resurrection of Our Lord, Easter Day

Year C, Easter

March 31, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

         

Hallelujah!  Christ is Risen!  The Lord is risen indeed! Hallelujah!

          It has been a deep Holy week, no?  Thank you to everyone.  It, like so many things is no more complicated than showing up.  

Sometimes I wish I, we could go through Holy Week without remembering that Easter was coming.  I was sitting there on Holy Saturday, the day when Christ is gone, descended to the dead, working on this sermon with Easter basket fixings in my office.  Through the darkness of this week, we do know what is coming.  No matter what He suffered, we know it was for a reason, that it was not futile, horrible yes, tragic and unfortunate and unconscionable perhaps, but not futile.  We, of course, expect the resurrection.

          But that was not where Jesus and His disciples were.  For them, it was tragically futile.  It could not have been worse, actually.  All was lost. Jesus was not only the practical and spiritual leader of the group, but He was the Messiah, the anointed one of God, the Son of God, even. They had staked their lives on Him, left their families, acted on faith… Then He was betrayed by one of their own, taken away in the dark of night.  His number 1, Peter, denied Him not once, not twice, but three times.  And He died.  Badly.  Condemned by a mob, humiliated, beaten, paraded through the streets and executed horribly by an army of occupation.  The apostles were scattered, fleeing North towards Galilee.  It was terrible.  It could not have been worse.  Well, it could not have been worse until even His body was taken, desecrated, probably, right.  That must have been her thought.  “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him,” said Mary.  From where we sit, we know that that is not the end of the story; the friends of Jesus did not know that.  They did not know about resurrection. 

Resurrection is a complicated idea.  It is not just new life springing from old, new life springing from death.  Resurrection is not about spring flowers, as fabulous as spring flowers are, a much as spring flowers do arise out of death, depending on your theology of compost.  Resurrection is being alive, passing into death, then being alive again.  Maybe it is not being alive in the same way, but it is definitely about an individual life that ends and then that same individual life restarting.  It is the same life being reignited.  That is what happened to Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior.  He passed through the doors of death and took away the sting of death; through the darkest days the brightest of lights should not, could not, was not extinguished, well, not for long, at least.       

The hows and the whys of all of this, the theories and theologies of atonement, we’re not talking about atonement today.  I don’t know how or why it took the death of an innocent young man to save us, but it did and we must be grateful.  What I am more concerned with is this gift of resurrection.

They were devastated.  They were terrified, fleeing, possibly expecting to be pursued.  She, Mary, went to take care of the body and even that was gone.  But then the angels came, and then another came, one she did not know, one she did not recognize.  In most of the appearance stories, Jesus is unrecognizable at first. And then outside the tomb, He called her, “Mary!”  He called her by name and she saw Him.  “Do not hold onto me…go to my brothers,” He said, “say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”  And she did.

Resurrection is complicated.  The bodily resurrection, the appearance accounts across the gospels… these are hard to understand from our modern perspective.  All I know about resurrection I know in faith.  That is the nature of it.  The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ happened: I have faith that that it true.  What I am less sure of is what form that the resurrected Son of God has taken.  Those who knew him best, who knew Joseph and Mary’s son, they didn’t recognize Him a day an a half after he died.  How recognizable could the body of Christ be to us thousands of years and more thousands of miles away?  Now that is a good question.

I keep finding myself dwelling in the trauma of the disciples.  How lost they were, devastated, vanquished by the principalities and powers of empire, of corrupt religion and government, devastated simply by evil.  How did resurrection happen there?

This concerns me because the way things are now.  We face burgeoning poverty, an economy on life support, wars and rumors of wars, the dysfunctional disaster that is our Congress, salinized soils and desalinizing and acidifying oceans, the driest quarter in history here following the worst droughts in history across this continent last year, not to mention the super-storm that engulfed the East coast and southern Thailand spending last spring under water.  Where the disciples faced a relatively microcosmic devastation of their community, we face a macrocosmic devastation of the world.  In this condition, how do we recognize resurrection when it happens?

The disciples, they had it bad, don’t get me wrong, Pax Romana was peaceful only for the citizens of Rome, never forget that.  Unforgettable suffering occurred under their Imperial sandals, and ecologically, the Mediterranean basin was deforested and deserts encroached, Rome collapsed in part because it outgrew its food-shed.  And for the apostles, after the Acts were recorded, everything went from bad to worse.  The Zealots pushed their lot with the Romans; and Israel, from the Temple on down ceased to exist as it had in history.  Their religion, society, civilization was crushed, scattered; it was the original Diaspora.  And this huddled, dysfunctional little group of dissenters, religious and social dissenters who knew that God loved everyone, in particular the least of these; who knew that God so loved the world that God would, could dare to participate in it under terms we can recognize, if not understand; who knew, who learned that death is not the only end of all stories… they held together.  They more than held together, they lived joyfully even as the beasts of the coliseum consumed them, they proclaimed the truth of Christ even as the falsehoods of the world retrenched themselves against them; the light of Christ burned in them even as they were martyred on the burning pyres of bigotry and malice.  How?  Why?  What can we, we who face dark days now and ahead, what do we have to learn from our ancestors and how?  It is all about resurrection.

The body of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ persists.  He lives.  We inhabit Him.  We are in Him in this very moment.  We are that body.  The resurrection of Jesus Christ persists in this world in us, the Body of Christ, the community gathered as Christ’s church.  Yes, it manifests in our sacramental heart, in the bread and wine that somehow, incomprehensibly change, are mysteriously inhabited God in God’s self.  But more importantly, Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior’s body, His being was resurrected into forms barely recognizable as Him.  That is the Church.  The church is as far from perfect as any human community, worse, largely, because we know better, or are supposed to know better.  We know better than to hate because of difference, we know better than to judge others, to exclude anyone, to idolize wealth and comfort and human achievement, we know better than to deny truth revealed in the myriad ways truth is revealed in different times and different places than our revelation of truth.  

But despite the horror the church has caused, that it causes, the resurrection of Jesus Christ continues in our hearts and minds, in our bodies in this gathering of human beings.  How?  All I can offer is the smug shrug of an Anglican priest.  I don’t know.  But the more I lean into the practice of this religion, the practice of Christianity, the more I can imagine what those disciples, what Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of our Lord, the more I can imagine how and why they kept going on; how and why the scattered disciples re-gathered and founded the church.  I can understand better how the desolating sacrilege unleashed by the Romans on Israel strengthened the faithful remnant, how suffering tremendous horror at the hands of an Imperial master laid the foundation of the Church on bedrock.  Jesus Christ was resurrected with and for his faithful friends and with and for the rest of us.  Jesus Christ was resurrected for us in the church and for the whole world.  Each time we gather here in the mystery of this hour, each time we gather around the table, gather to serve those who need us, gather to do the work that we have been given to do, each time we do that, the resurrection is remembered, it is reenacted, it happens again. And the harder it gets, the worse off you are, the more you suffer and witness suffering, the more you are broken and witness breaking, the more the darkness encroaches, the brighter the light and life of our resurrected God shines into the world.  Life, death, and life again.  Jesus Christ is the way, the truth and the life.  Jesus Christ is the resurrection, and by the grace of God, so are we.  Christ is Risen!  Halleluiah!  AMEN.

March 30, 2013, The Great Vigil of Easter

Year C, Easter Vigil

March 31, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

“How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and man is reconciled to God.”

          Welcome to the mystery of Easter.  It is totally fantastic, this story.  The capture, torture and execution of a messianic figure in a time and place rife with messianic figures, of a backwater religious and political radical in a time of religious and political radicalism…  Somehow that action, that horrible death ontologically, that means fundamentally, it ontologically changed the fabric of existence, changed humanity’s relationship with God and everything.  It is fantastic.  

          Without a doubt, the fantastic is why I am Christian.  I am Anglican because I think we remember it well, our rites and rituals are potent tolls for focusing human attention and intention, for conjuring holy remembrance, but I am a Christian for what we are remembering.  

What are we remembering?  The incarnation of our Lord.  What are we remembering?  The revelation and conduct of Jesus Christ’s earthly ministry: lifting up the lowly and casting down the mighty, freeing the needy from needless suffering.  What are we remembering?  The death, descent, and rising again in power of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  We remember these fantastic stories because they give us a glimpse, a vision of God active in this world, of God alive in this world, fully, and somehow, mysteriously, we remember a vision of the world as it is supposed to be.  And this is not imagination; this is cellular, soul-ular memory.  We know how it is supposed to be, our beings remember it.  We are made of dust that was there at the beginning.  That is the mystery.  Revel in our immersion in the mystery of this night, when earth and heaven are joined and we are reconciled to God.

          Immersion in mystery, in mystery enacted in the rites and rituals we practice tonight, rites and rituals that have been practiced for two thousand years much like this, that alone is a take away message.  It is an Anglican truism that praying shapes believing, and praying like this, together, by this flame, in this particular way that comes but once a year, that helps us believe.  But believe what?  It helps us believe that things aren’t always what they seem. It helps us believe that God’s ways are not our ways and that we are the ones that need to do the adjusting. It helps us realize that those adjustments that are needed are hard; for God does expect the impossible, God does demand what we can’t even begin to comprehend, God does require sacrifice and forgiveness, loving-kindness and humility solely on the basis of faith.  Faith that there is a way things are supposed to be, faith that the Kingdom of God is at hand and faith that in faith we can make real the Kingdom of God on earth, faith that in faith we can make it real in our life times, faith that in faith we can make it real in this very moment.  Great is the mystery of faith.

          Why is this mystery so critical?  Why is a cosmic humility that we don’t understand it all, that we can’t, why is that such an essential aspect of our approach to understanding ourselves and our relationships with God, our neighbors and everything?  Why is a bow to the unknowable the key to knowing anything?  

          Mostly, it is because it is the nature of reality.  We all float in a great sea of unknowing.  Our memories are fatefully flawed; any historian or expert on witnesses at trials will attest to that.  Our perception of what is happening right now is inconsistent at best:  someone right now is having a deep religious experience, someone else is learning something about themselves or maybe even God.  Someone else is bored, annoyed by my droning on, someone else is thinking about how cute Amelia is or the basketball game that she is missing or his high school boyfriend.  We have so few things in our collective existences that ground us, that anchor us to some modicum of common shared experience, we share so few reference points to connect us to the true nature of things.  Great is the mystery.

          The mystery of faith posits that even though we are all adrift in the fog, that even as mired as we all are in darkness, there is a way.  There is an eternal reference, a known point in existence that intersects with our realm, the realm of time and space.  That point, that reference point is Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  He is the light that shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.  Jesus Christ transcended life and death in the mystery of the Passion and Resurrection as He transcends the probable and possible in His eternal and actual presence in the hearts, minds and bodies of the faithful, and in His eternal and actual presence in the church and in her sacramental being.  How?  Why?  I am afraid that these are unanswerable questions to the point of being unaskable. 

          We are drawn to God in the light of Christ because we carry that light within.  We are not separate from God, we are not estranged from God, not really, it just seems that way.  If we had the eyes to see it, the ears to hear it, the tongue to taste it, the memory deep enough to hold it, we would see that the distance between us and God is a figment, a very massive and convincing figment, but a figment of our imagination.  That is the nature of sin:  distortion and distraction.  This is the atonement, the reconciliation of us and God that Jesus Christ offers.  Jesus removes that distance, closes that gap and reminds us of how it is supposed to be.  What do we need to remember?  That it is in God that we live and move and have our being.  That it is in Christ, the Morning Star that all of creation is enlightened.  That it is the Holy Spirit that moves across the abyss and fills our lungs with life.  

Tonight we remember welcoming the light of Christ into the world with the words of the Exsultet.  “How blessed is this night, when earth and heaven are joined and man is reconciled to God.” And when we rest into this deep mystery, this cloud of unknowing how and why it is the way it is, we have the chance to remember that there is nothing, nothing, nothing to worry about.  It all just is.  This is the Good News of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior with whom we commune this night.  Great is the mystery of faith.  Hallelujah!  

Let me end with this poem by Lynn Unger that Bryn up in the choir shared with me.

They thought they were safe

that spring night; when they daubed

the doorways with sacrificial blood.

To be sure, the angel of death

passed them over, but for what?

Forty years in the desert

without a home, without a bed,

following new laws to an unknown land.

Easier to have died in Egypt

or stayed there a slave, pretending

there was safety in the old familiar.

But the promise, from those first

naked days outside the garden,

is that there is no safety,

only the terrible blessing

of the journey. You were born

through a doorway marked in blood.

We are, all of us, passed over,

brushed in the night by terrible wings.

Ask that fierce presence,

whose imagination you hold.

God did not promise that we shall live,

but that we might, at last, glimpse the stars,

brilliant in the desert sky.

Great is the Mystery of Faith.  Christ is Risen! Happy Easter.  AMEN