May 19, 2013, The Day of Pentecost

May 19, 2013, The Day of Pentecost, Year C

The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

          Welcome to Whitsuntide!  Welcome to Pentecost!  Pentecost means “the 50^th Day.”  We inherited it from our Jewish ancestors, it was a festival held 50 days after the second day of Passover.  It is now celebrated as the harvest festival shavout, or Weeks.  That is what Luke is talking about in our passage from Acts.  In the Anglican communion, it is traditionally called Whitsunday, from old English meaning “White Sunday,” probably referring to the white robes traditionally worn by the catecumate at baptism. Traditionally Whitsuntide, the Vigil of Pentecost in particular, was a time for Baptisms, much like the Easter Vigil, principal feasts of our Lord.  

          Let’s step back a minute and see where we are in the world seasonally speaking.  We are at Pentecost right now.  But our church calendar starts back in December with____?  Advent.  Advent is a pensive season marked by the Marian blue (purple or violet is also allowed).  We are doing what?  Waiting.  Preparing.  And for what?  ___ For the incarnation of our Lord and Savior which comes precisely on the 25^th of December each year with its snow white vestments.  It is a fixed holiday, a solar holiday linked to a specific day followed by the brief season of Christmas.  We then move into the Epiphany, the time between the end of the 12 days of Christmas and the beginning of Lent.  Epiphany is a time of noticing, of the realization of the presence of God and the consequences of God’s definitive intersection with this world in the form of a person in 1^st century Palestine.  

As Epiphany concludes with the cupboard clearing feast of Shrove Tuesday or Mardi Gras to our more adventurous Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, we break out the royal purple, adorn ourselves with ashes, and commence with the deepest fasting season we have in our calendar, the Season of Lent.  In Lent we reflect on Jesus Christ, on the love he shows for humanity and how humanity repays that love.  And always, we are repenting, fasting, preparing for the death of Jesus Christ at our own human hands which we relive poignantly in the red and black of Holy week.  

But the blood and death of the passion are of course pushed aside, the old leaven of malice and hatred are replaced with the new unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. On the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox, a lunar holiday, we celebrate the glorious and moveable Feast of the Resurrection of Our Lord: Easter.  Decked in white we bask in the glory of God in Christ’s new presence with us in the wake of the resurrection.  Forty days after Easter we remember Christ’s Ascension into heaven where He sits at the right hand of the Father, and ten days later, the fiftieth day, we are right here, right now, Whitsunday, the remembrance of the particular entrance of the Holy Spirit in to the world, its alighting on the hearts, minds and bodies of Jesus Christ’s followers in a new way.  The Feast of Pentecost celebrates the consecration, the founding, the birthday if you will of the church.  And after the red of this day, we slip into the cool green of what season?  Ordinary time.  Ordinary time takes up half of the church calendar, from Pentecost all the way through to Christ the King Sunday, the end of the church year, gateway to yet another Advent when the glorious cycle starts all over again.

From purple to white to purple to white, a day of Red, then into the long green season.  From preparing and waiting to basking in a new incarnation of God, we then begin the long descent towards death, then reveling in the resurrection, we send Jesus off and straight away welcome the coming of the Holy Spirit into our midst, consecrating the Church.  And then, we enter ordinary time.  

The trajectory of the church year makes immanent sense.  The drama of God’s participation, intersection, interaction, presence… whatever words work for you, we learn, understand, take on, participate in, become the story, inhabit the story through the very arc of the drama of the story itself.  Here Robert Heinlein’s word grok is useful.  To grok is “to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes part of the observed.” The narrative, if we allow it, if we grok it, envelopes us, and we become it, or it becomes part and parcel of us and we of it.  It is marvelous, and we mark the movement of the seasons with colors, seasonal candles, prayers and music.  The liturgy can shift dramatically, like not saying confession in the Eastertide, or having different words welcome us to Mass, or banning the word Halleluiah in Lent.  But all of the drama, the story of our faith, the story of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, all we have done for the past six months, all of it, it culminates in today, and then flows across the weeks and months of Ordinary Time until we start the cycle again. Because today, Whitsunday, and the Ordinary Time that follows, that is were we are formed as the Church.  

Now by church, I mean church with the big “c”.  One holy catholic and apostolic church, of which we are but a tiny mote in a vast sea of Christian practice, life and service.  That is what today is about, Whitsunday, standing here on the precipice of Ordinary Time, the life and work of the church, the daily practice, life and service of 2 billion people gathered in faith.  From here, imprinted with story of Jesus Christ, groking it even, we move on to our great work.

What is it, the work we have been given to do as a church?  Why are we here?  What and how should we be working on as the body of Christ?  Knowing all we know, groking the life of Jesus Christ as the movement of our calendar has again dramatically taught us, how then shall we be church together?  This is a serious question.  We put a lot of time and effort into making this happen.  I’m expensive.  This building is expensive.  We all spend collectively hundreds of perishable hours each week on keeping this embassy of the Kingdom of God open.  So what are we, this tiny mote in the 2 billion strong sea of Christianity, what are we supposed to do in Ordinary Time, in real life? What is the purpose of the Church?_____

I am going to depart from our regular course here and put the manuscript aside.  What are we doing here, being church?  What does the idea of “The Body of Christ” mean?  Why are we in this together, in church, together?  because that is the key word in all of this, together.  And this is a word of particular importance as we discern together if I am to stay on as your rector.  Why are we all in church together?

Gracious Father, we pray for thy holy Catholic Church.  Fill it with all truth, in all truth with all peace.  Where it is corrupt, purify it; where it is in error, direct it; where in any thing it is amiss, reform it.  Where it is right, strengthen it; where it is in want, provide for it; where it is divided, reunite it; for the sake of Jesus Christ thy Son our Savior.  AMEN

May 12, 2013, 7th Sunday of Easter

7th Sunday of Easter, Year C

May 12, 2013

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          “Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me.”

          Do you all remember Robert Fulghum?  He is the author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.  He’s a Northwesterner.  I think he used to live in Portland, he is in Seattle now.  In a book he published back in 1995, he shared a prayer that he found, literally found: it has a rather ignoble genesis, it was taped inside the stall of a men’s room at a seminary in Berkeley.   We are told to pray ceaselessly...  It is a beautiful prayer that goes like this:

      God, I have a problem.

      I'm just a man and I'm feeling so alone.

      God, I know you have no name, but I need to call you something.

      God, I know you are not a man like me, but I need to think of you that way.

      God, I know you are everywhere, but I need to talk to you somewhere.

      God, I know you are eternal, but I need you now.

      God, forgive my limitations, and help me. Amen.

                                                (From Beginning to End, 1995)

          How do we meet God in Acts?  What an odd story.  A slave girl pimped out as a fortune teller by her owners annoys Paul with her insistence, “These men are slaves to the Most High God…”  to which Paul responds to with an exorcism.   Then beaten and thrown in prison at the behest of the wealthy owners who were now out a fortune teller, God knocks the prison down with an earthquake and so stills the hearts of Paul and Silas that they remain that the jailer might be saved in body and spirit.  

          The god we learn of in the Acts of the Apostles, particularly in this scene, is a very active god.  Visible and active.  Heaven and Earth move when this god wills it.  Hearts are changed, radically, in the hands of this god.  Stripped, “severely” beaten, thrown in stocks and chains in the inner most cell and what do they do?  Pray and sing hymns to God.  Then God frees their bonds in the miracle of an earthquake and Paul and Silas do not run off, but offer counsel and the sacraments to their tormenter right then, in real time.  It is a fantastic story.  Our God is a visible God.

          How do we meet God in Revelation?  Well, how do we meet the Alpha and the Omega?  How do we embrace the bright morning star that is Jesus Christ?  How do we meet this god?  With our arms wide and our hearts bared.  “Come,” says the Spirit and the bride.  “Let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’  And let everyone who is thirsty come.  Let anyone who wishes to take the water of life as a gift…” come.  The god revealed in St. John the Divine blows it all open, the first and the last, the beginning and the end, God is beyond comprehension yet is well within the experience of anyone with the eyes to see and the ears to hear.  Like the vastness of space, I can’t comprehend an infinite universe, but lying in a field in Jasper looking up into the stars these crystal clear nights recently, layer upon layer upon layer, depth into depth into depth…  we can’t comprehend the infinite but we can participate in it fully.  Our God is a mysterious God.

          How do we meet God in the Gospels?  Well in today’s selection from St. John’s Gospel, at least, we meet God the Son praying on our behalf to God the Father.  That is dynamic.  One face of God addressing another face of God for us.  The glory of God shared from Father to Son to the faithful and the faithful yet to come.  A god of knowing and being known, a loving god who calls us to love god and each other.  “I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”  Our God is an intimate, tender God, a loving God.

          Three little passages in the Bible.  At least three very different ideas about the nature of God, at least three very different ideas about how we can or will meet God, about how we can or should approach God.  And we hear these passages in a very particular way, we hear them, first off, read aloud.  We are hearing them together, as part of the common Anglican form of Christian sacramental worship.  And that is just our experience of God in Church.

          How do you experience God in relation to the tragedy in Savar, Bangladesh?  Do you feel the horror of it?  The raw display of greed and self interest that led to the death of over 1000 of the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people, that what, we might buy cheap clothes at Walmart or the Gap?  Where is God in this scene?  Or maybe the question is is God in that scene at all, or maybe God is actually brutally and fully present maybe most particularly in a time of great horror, terrible suffering?

          How do you experience God in relation to the death of a loved one?  Are you angry that they have been taken?  Are you at a loss for the hole left in your life?  Are you blessedly assured that she is in the arms of a loving God, that he is getting his justice now, finally?  All of these at once?

          Where is God in the wild scene at Occupy Medical on Sunday afternoons, or at the Dining Room on any given weeknight or at the Sunday Breakfast?  In the faces of the poor?  In the hands of the helpers?  Where is God in the world that such need is present, that such suffering could be to begin with?  How do we make sense of it all?

      God, I have a problem.

      I'm just a man and I'm feeling so alone.

      God, I know you have no name, but I need to call you something.

      God, I know you are not a man like me, but I need to think of you that way.

      God, I know you are everywhere, but I need to talk to you somewhere.

      God, I know you are eternal, but I need you now.

      God, forgive my limitations, and help me. Amen.

          As someone who lives rather deeply into my head, like a goodly number of us here, as someone who makes decisions based on whether something makes sense or not, whether there is some interior logic to a system, Christianity can be rather confounding.  Like so many of us getting so much from the profound teaching of the Dalai Lama, but we forget that he is the patriarch of a radically patriarchal feudal theocracy, the Lamas ruled Tibet with an iron fist before the Chinese threw them out.  Similarly, sometimes Christianity doesn’t make any sense.  The violence of the Psalter.  The scandalous lives of Abraham, Issac and Jacob.  The Divine and Royal Lordship of the Crucified God.  Simply the notion of God the Father, God as He can be confounding, alienating, oppressive or simply off putting to so many, it doesn’t make any sense God with a gender… but sometimes, sometimes we just feel so alone.  Sometimes we need to put a name to the nameless, we need to imagine a beam of light from the heavenly lighthouse.  Sometimes we need a friend, a divine friend, a friend in Jesus even if we don’t have any idea what that means or how to do it.  Sometimes we need to corral the infinite that we might find at least the hem of a robe to touch.  Always and everywhere means that, truly, right?  It includes right here and right now, right?

          My point, if there is a point to a sermon, that can get pretty dangerous, my point is that we need to forgive ourselves our humanness, our limitations, our prejudices. We need to forgive our need for order and sensibility.  We need to recognize our scar tissue, see where we have been damaged, broken, hurt, we need to acknowledge our blind spots, account for the gaps in our systems of understanding.  We need to recognize that very little about God makes sense.  What we must do is everything in our power to meet God and each other where we can and not just in the ways that make sense, in the times that are approved, with vocabulary that we have had handed down to us.  We should not walk away from traditions just out of hand, that is not the Anglican, the catholic (with a small “c”) way, but where the tried and true way fails us, where sense fails us, all we can do is ask God to forgive our limitations and help us.  And hope upon hope God will.  AMEN.

May 5, 2013, 6th Sunday of Easter

May 5, 2013, Year C, Easter 6

The Reverend Dr. Brent Was

          On this Rogation Sunday, I want to start with a poem of unlikely origin for this context, Mass.  It is Charles Bukowski’s a song with no end.  It goes:

when Whitman wrote, "I sing the body electric"

I know what he


meant

I know what he


wanted:

to be completely alive every moment


in spite of the inevitable.

we can't cheat death but we can make it


work so hard


that when it does take


us

it will have known a victory just as

perfect as

ours.

          I learned this poem on Friday morning from someone I met on Friday morning, someone who is very much thinking on issues of life and death as he struggles with a very aggressive form of cancer.  One of the deepest privileges of priesthood, and without a doubt the most humbling, is being invited into people’s lives in the thin spots, the shallow patches in the river of life: birth, marriage, divorce, pain and suffering, loss and grief, and of course sickness unto death.  Gladness, sorrow, and above all change, constant change.  And the realness of it all, joyful and otherwise, is sometimes overwhelming.  What overwhelms me is exactly what Charles Bukowski is talking about, our ability, our need, our God given responsibility to be completely alive in every moment in spite, in spite of the inevitable. 

          “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb…”  Sing it, sing it loud, St. John the Divine.  “On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit each month; the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”   O, God “the earth has brought forth her increase;” may you give us your blessing.  May we sing our bodies electric in spite of the inevitable.  May we sing the body of Mother Earth electric, may we sing the body of our Lord Jesus Christ electric in spite of the inevitable.  What we need to do is sing these things electric as if it is the song itself that is inevitable.

Rogation is an agrarian observance, handed down to us from our ancient ancestors in pagan Rome.  Being agrarian, being  agricultural means having to do with the very real systems of life and death that make human civilization possible.  Could there be a more strident call, a more definitive call to engage the inevitable?  Rogation is an occasion to sing our collective earth-bound bodies electric not just in spite of the inevitable, but because of it, for it, in celebration of it.  For as inevitable as death seems and of course is, life is just as inevitable, is just as pressing, just as looming, just as essential as death could ever hope to be.  Just look at the blackberries.  Life, the overwhelming aliveness of the world, is there a greater testament to God Almighty?  Do we need anything else to be convinced of the grandeur of the Divine?  The creation itself is at least a fifth gospel of our Lord. 

Right there in Revelation:  the river of the water of life, crystal clear, watering the trees of life, twelve kinds of fruit each month!  I’ve seen apple trees grafted to grow three or four varieties, and maybe a pear, but twelve, and twelve each month?  What an image of divine abundance.  And the leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations of the world?  An old friend of mine, a farmer, he always preached his produce as medicine, the best medicine money could buy: honest, pure, well loved food, a gift from God for the people of God, no doubt about it.  The inevitability of life is revealed in the processes of life itself.

My work, before I came to Resurrection, was agricultural.  I farmed and cared for the grounds of an Anglican monastery North of Boston.  I also thought and wrote about agriculture, about a holy agriculture and a theology to help ground the systems of life in a vocabulary of faith, in an understanding of the world that transcended understanding hay fields, the rows of potatoes and the secret life of turkeys and opened up, hopefully, an apprehension of the Great Economy.  Wendell Berry calls it that, the Great Economy.   It is the all encompassing economy, God’s economy where everything is accounted for, where nothing is ignored or externalized.  Because farming really is that, it is really about managing, massaging, manipulating, and at its best, cooperating with the infinitely complex systems and complexes of complex systems that enable life to happen.  People talk of God as love: sure, and I sometimes broaden it out a bit and try to understand God as relationship itself, as the ability to relate, as the substrate within which relationship occurs, the intersubjective space.  Witnessing, beginning to understand, participating in the ultra-complex relationships that are part and parcel of farming are a unique window to begin to understand God in God’s self. Hence, a project was born, “Helping the Land Help People Know God.” 

We started a small farm at the monastery, feeding 15 local families, the brothers, their retreat guests, and some food went out into the food security system.  We had mostly vegetables, but also grew grains, berries, eggs, turkeys and pigs.  And we had a nice sugar bush that produced 10 gallons of maple syrup each winter.  We used the chickens to weed the rows, grew grain to feed the chickens, spoiled food to feed the pigs and all of it fed the compost pile which came back to feed the soil and the green grass grew all around all around and the green grass grew all around.  Complex relationships. 

And all sorts of people crossed paths in those rows of tomatoes; toddlers and monks, grouchy old church ladies and bright-eyed young interns, bishops and crusty Yankees who had been farming the same land since 1600 something, and all somewhat choreographed by myself with all of my peculiarities.  In five years, I think the best day we had at the farm was when 100 kids from inner city Boston came out as part of a summer enrichment program run by the Diocese.  They picked raspberries, dug potatoes, petted the pig and all, and we culminated in a dramatic reading of Eric Carle’s Pancakes, Pancakes.  The kids threshed the wheat, milled the flower, made raspberry-maple compote, and flipped pancakes on a giant outdoor griddle as the story progressed: then we ate.  It was a good day.

And what did we all learn?  That raspberries are best when they are eaten warm right off the bramble on a hot July day.  That potatoes are absolute magic: dig your hands in the soil and a life giving apple of the earth emerges.  That it takes a lot of work to make flour, a lot, and that whatever you put into it all, into the system, is what you get back.  Garbage in, garbage out.  Poison in, unwholesome food out.  Love, attention, a dash of caring and ample heart water in, and the very essence of life will be returned to you encased in the three mil thick skin of a Pruden’s Purple tomato. We learned that God is great, and depending on where you encounter God, can be delicious. Most of all, we learned that the dynamic power of life, the force that through the green fuse drives the flower, that the majesty of God is revealed most convincingly in the indomitable, the inevitable pulse of life.  The pulse in your wrist, the pulse of sap up into the maple canopy, the pulse of that turkey whose life is be taken that others may live, other bodies being nourished by its body, the pulse of rain seeping into the ground, the pulse of the cucumbers growing up the trellis, the sunflowers bending to seek the sun, corn reaching into the sky.  The inevitability of being alive.  This is the lesson we need to remember, this is the essence of the gospel: life is a precious gift; be grateful and do what increases life.

Our victory comes in living the lives we have been given to live, and living them fully, electrically, even.  We do that by discerning the will of God and following it; discerning our own special place and purpose in life, and following that.  Our victory, our inevitable victory in the face of our equally inevitable death is living and loving, feasting and fasting, seeking, always seeking the spread of life and the life giving.  Eat real food.  Make good friends and beautiful things.  Laugh from the belly and cry from the gut.  Love recklessly, forgive with abandon, try to leave the world a better place than it was before you came here and go gentle into the good night.  Now that is the perfect victory of complete aliveness if there ever was one.  AMEN