Church of the Resurrection, Eugene

February 5, 2012, 5th Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B

2012-02-06T09:48:00.000-08:00

The Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year B
February 5, 2012
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

“Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the Earth?”

I asked the following question of your new vestry at our meeting on Thursday: What is your favorite place in the world? It doesn’t have to be a certain place, a specific outcropping of rocks just south of Yachats, it doesn’t have to be a place at all, it could be imagined or more a state of mind, like being snuggled up by the fire with a little one reading a book. Let’s pause for a moment. What is your perfect place in the world?

My perfect place is walking with Willow through the fields at our old farm in the late afternoon sun, right before the mosquitoes come out. I walk up and down the rows, seeing what is ready, deciding what to make my family for dinner and harvesting it. I always pause in front of the chicken tractors just to keep them sharp. Otherwise I would weed here and there, take stock of things, tie up a tomato plant or two dozen, think about tomorrow’s tasks or maybe try to think about nothing at all. My perfect place is beautiful. It is a productive place; there is plenty to share. It keeps my attention. Gives opportunities for meaningful, creative work. It is quiet. I am alone but others, my family and community, the people who eat the food, they are on my mind and in my work. That is my vision of perfection, of the perfect place.

Everyone at our meeting shared a bit about our perfect places and there was amazing continuity. Common elements included being beautiful, quiet, being with companions, a place of welcome, of good food, being warm and dry though not necessarily in a warm and dry place, a place without clocks, and most, somehow, were set in the out-of-doors, in non-human engineered settings, except the idea of a café in Paris, but that is understandable; God loves cafés in Paris.

Then I was a little sneaky. Well, not sneaky, but religious.

Religion is at its best when it forces us to look at something from a different perspective. Jesus is constantly doing that. I asked everyone what that perfect place had to do with the Kingdom of God. And it worked. Everyone guffawed a bit. None of us had spoken of notions of justice, or inclusion, or Eucharist, or angels and archangels or any of the company of heaven, or really anything to do with church at all, now that I think of it; well, nothing about what we generally consider to be churchy. Hmmm? We describe our perfect place as one thing, and it is genuine, but then putting our thoughts, desires and imaginations in the context of something like the Kingdom of God, perfection takes on a different character. It is funny that our visions of the perfect place did not look like church as we know it. In reality, though, and my take home from the exercise is that for most of us, our vision of the perfect place did not look like the church as it is right now…

“Have you not known? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the Earth?”

I led this exercise to begin what will be a long process of discernment here in this community. What we are discerning is no less than the Will of God Almighty. What does God want of us? Who does God want us to be? How does God want us to serve? What is the best use of the resources we have concentrated through grace and hard work? What is our mission? What is our vocation? This began with the leadership core of the parish, the vestry, we started on Saturday at our retreat. Listening here, right now, your participation in the revelation of our vocation commences. We need prayer for our work as leaders, we need prayer for your own vision, and once you get the shadowy first revelations of a vision, we need meditation and reflection on them. We need deep thinking and study and conversation. We need each other. And God in Christ with the Holy Spirit.

“Have you not known? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the Earth? It is he who sits above the circle of the Earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.” I am not concerned or worried that none of us had overtly churchy visions of the perfect place. Jesus surely spent time in “religious” places, he wore the title Rabbi. Like last week, our Gospel reveals Jesus teaching and casting out demons in the synagogue. But the whole of Capernaum gathered outside of Simon and Andrew’s house for healing. And when he prayed, he went off to a quiet, deserted place as he was want to do. God is everywhere. Church, religion is useful in that it helps us on our journey to union with God. The prayers, the rituals, the words, even our Holy and Blessed Sacraments are useful only in that they help us grow more deep in our relationship with God and neighbor. And we are all so broken that we have a long, long time before things church, things religious are obsolete. That our vision of the perfect place did not match church is OK, it is like imagining an ordained ministry, we usually hope it is not like seminary; or a vocation in the law hopefully will not resemble law school. Our eyes were, I believe, set on perfection, were set on the kingdom of God, it is just that the pedagogical tool that the church is was transparent. The church, even this Church, is a means, not an end. The Kingdom of God is the end.

Really, I am pretty confident that the Kingdom of God looks, or, at least feels more like a quiet walk on a misty Oregon beach with the love of our life than a Sunday morning at Mass. And don’t get me wrong, I love Mass. And I am also confident that a sizeable proportion of us, of humankind, we need to go to Mass or its equivalent a whole bunch of times before we are able to really see, to really even begin to feel let alone have revealed to us that the Kingdom that is sitting right in front of us.

What filled me with hope in our exercise was that all of our notions of perfection had something to do with the way things are in their natural state. Our visions did not require changes in the world. The world seemed perfect when we were the changed ones. It was the same landscape we always see, it was the same path we always walk, but in the absence of chatter, in the absence of distraction, of clocks; the world became different, it became perfect in our mind’s eye. The perfection of the world is obvious when that stagnating cloud of sin is blown out to sea, when our distance from God is closed, when we live authentically in righteous, generous community. When we live the words we are saying together right now in this Mass.

This is our God: “God counts the numbers of the stars and calls them by their names…covers the heavens with clouds and prepares rain for the Earth; God makes grass to grow upon the mountains and green plants to serve humankind. God provides food for flocks and herds and for the young ravens when they cry.” God is good.

Isaiah reminds us that God is in fact good. Look around, what is lasting, what endures? The princes? The rulers of the earth? No. Scarcely are they planted “when God blows upon them, and they wither.” The psalmist reminds us that God is not “Impressed with the strength of a horse, has no pleasure in the strength of a man…”

What is God impressed with, whom does God favor? “God gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless,” God stands with “those who wait.” “The LORD has pleasure in those who fear him, in those who await his gracious favor.”

I asked the questions about a perfect place because we as Christians have the mission to help realize, to help reveal the Kingdom of God. So we need to imagine what the Kingdom looks like, feels like, tastes like, so that we can begin our work together. If your perfect place involved silence and peace, being free from fear and want, full of beauty and not a single clock anywhere, how can the Church, how can THIS church work make that happen? For your sake, for our sake, for the sake of the world, may our prayer and our work ever please Thee, O LORD. AMEN

January 29, 2012, The 4th Sunday after the Epiphany

2012-01-30T09:54:00.000-08:00

January 29, 2012
Year B, Epiphany
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

“Just then there was in their synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, ‘What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?’”

Unclean spirits. Demons, even. That is what they mean by unclean spirits; demons. At times in the gospel record these kinds of spirits or demons accounted for mental illness; a supernatural explanation for a very natural occurrence. Jesus would miraculously drive the spirits out, saving the person in part by restoring them to ritual purity. Ritual purity was a big deal, because if you were not ritually pure, you could not go to temple to offer sacrifice; meaning that if you were not ritually pure your access to God was limited, or even non-existent. Mental illness made one impure, as did leprosy (which included skin maladies beyond actual leprosy, any kind of skin eruption, actually, like eczema or acne, hives). An even more common cause of ritual impurity was the pandemic of menstruation. Jesus said that this was ridiculous and did what he could to convince people that God loved them no matter what was going on with their bodies.

At other times, though, the demons of the Gospels represent a much broader problem in humanity: Sin. In many ways, the demons can be looked at as sin personified; that is sin that takes on some of the qualities of a person, a human. They take on personalities, have voices, some times. In our stories of the Evil One-the Accuser-Satan, sin is so profound that it takes on human or human-like form, such when Jesus was in the wilderness and was tempted, “Turn these stones into bread…”

One of the greatest questions in religion and philosophy is how do we know what we know, or more specifically, how do we know that what we know is true or at least accurate. We take the world in through our senses and our imagination, and we process that through our analytical mind and our emotional, feeling self, and it can be really, really hard to know if what we think we see is really what we see, or means what we think it means. This is called Epistemology, the study of the nature of knowledge. As religious people, as people motivated by the life of the spirit, it is important that we understand how we come to understand. For those of us who want to follow the will of God, it is of critical importance that we recognize what is of God and what is not of God. So what does this have to do with demons? Whenever we find ourselves in the more complicated, sensitive corners of our lives, or when we are dealing with really, really important things, like what is right and wrong, like discerning the will of God, like, to be or not to be, demons flock like seagulls folowing a fishing boat.

There are three demons in particular that plague humanity, that really disrupt our ability to be the children of God that we are. They are in so many ways the lesser angels of our nature, and together, they conspire to distort our understanding, our ability to understand the true nature of things, of God, of the world, of ourselves. The first is known as Greed, the second Hatred, and third is goes by Delusion, who also is know as Ignorance. These three demons are formidable foes, but as we will see, we have a new teaching, a new teacher “– with authority. He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”

Greed, variously known as Hunger, Craving, Thirst, Lust, Jealousy; this demon embodies the realm of consuming, grasping, clinging feelings. He is a ball of fear: fear of change, fear of not having enough, of lack. Avarice, gluttony… seeing the world through the eyes of Greed, we are deceived, and we attach too deep a meaning to things. The things we desire can appear to provide us with real satisfaction, and we can begin to desire things that we think will provide us with wholeness. And it is not just things, it is conditions that we attach to. We are never content with anything or anyone. Greed attaches profound importance to looking outside of ourselves for meaning and satisfaction; dangerous stuff with the fleeting, impermanent nature of things. It is craving, and craving is such a horrible feeling. No one behaves well is his grasp, because we feel like we are always grasping, clinging to the world outside of us. He leads us to believe there is no peace without holding onto that x.

Hatred is another demon we all face. Where Greed leads us to clutch onto the world, Hatred embodies the whole array of feelings that lead us push things away, to avoid, to not deal. This pernicious fellow is usually manifest as an aversion, avoidance of things unpleasant, uncomfortable. Of course we all want to avoid unpleasantness, but we fall under the spell of Hatred, of Aversion when we stop going into the garage because it is too cluttered, or we avoid certain subjects with our spouse because it is always just too much. He leads us to keep the world at distance, eschewing intimacy and honesty, always assuming the worst about others and their intentions, always assuming that a conflict is immanent, and then often complicating matters through pathological conflict avoidance. Hatred has us when we keep the world and ourselves, even, at arms length.

Lastly is Delusion. Delusion infects our ability to truly perceive the world and our place in it. When we do not see cause and effect, we seek happiness in things that cannot provide it and we grow bitter with disappointment and frustration when trying the same thing over and over again never produces different results. How scary, living in a world thinking it is one thing when really it is something else. Like believing that you are alone, that you are talentless or ugly or not worth anyone’s time or effort. That you deserve your lot. Especially when you are down, Delusion jumps up and down on your chest saying, “if you hadn’t been so lazy/stupid/gullible… if you weren’t such a bad person…” Delusion screams so loudly that sometimes we cannot tell what is what, or which way is up. You all know Neibuhr’s Serenity Prayer, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.” Delusion does its best to confound wisdom; in his grip you cannot know the difference.

Some things we cling to, some things we push away, some things we just do not rightly understand. Greed, Hatred, Delusion. These are the most common demons in our midst. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, he conflated these demonic forces under one label, Disordered Attachments. It is that self-world barrier, how things travel, communicate from me or you to you or me. From the outer to the inner, from the generative posture into the world to the receptive posture into yourself. Any time that barrier is traversed, there is the risk that we might have it wrong, that those demons might get a hand in the mix. The demons are opportunistic. When there is an opening, when we open oursleved to the world, as we must, they come. We must remain vigilant.

We must remain vigilant because the demons are wiley. They deceive us, they conceal themselves within us with great skill and tenacity and they become part of us. We spoke once about the committee in our heads, the voices we hear? These demons can really convince us that they are we. Dangerous. Thank God we are not alone. We haven’t been alone for a very long time. The people in the synagogue were astonished by the authority by which Jesus taught, but they did not recognize Him for who He was. The demon knew. “Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.”

You know the saying sunshine is the best disinfectant? Demons, particularly Greed, Hatred and Delusion, are immanently susceptible to sunlight. Mindfulness is the spiritual equivalent to sunlight. Mindfulness is holy noticing, holy paying attention. It is the sum total of some a process, a process grounded in meditation and prayer that allows us to take stock of our selves, to notice the subtle and not so subtle changes we all go through in the course of a lifetime, or a season of life, or for some of us, any given week. We spoke in Advent of Evelyn Underhill’s notion of prayer and _____? Mortification. Attending to God and dealing with ourselves. That is mindfulness. And how do we learn to do this? What resources do we have as Christians? Well, we have one who teaches with authority, the Holy one of God. We have His church and her traditions and scripture and community. We have each other.

How are we cultivating mindfulness? We have a new Bible study going on before church. We have an on going adult education program that needs more people. We have Sunday School. In Lent some of us will be closely reading a book of Evelyn Underhill’s. Morning prayer is up and running on Fridays. I am here to help with your prayer lives, not only corporately, like I am doing right now, but individually. Give me a call, let’s talk about prayer, about your prayer. We are going to be having monthly potlucks on the third Sunday. Demons hate potlucks. They hate strong community, too.

Demons… Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ has power over them. Greed, Hatred, Delusion. These are just a few of them, the most common, the most persistent. If we are to be the servants of god that we need to be, to be the friends to each other we need to be, we need to get the demons off our collective backs. As Zechariah reminds us, “In the tender compassion of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death, and guide our feet in the way of peace.” AMEN

January 15, 2012, Second Sunday after the Epiphany

2012-01-30T09:50:00.000-08:00

January 15, 2012
Year B Epiphany 2 (MLK)
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

“It is a well known fact that no social institution can survive when it has outlived its usefulness. This capitalism has done. It has failed to meet the needs of the masses.” Who said that? (And no, it was not Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry). Seriously, it does not matter to me if you are Republican or Democrat, I happen to be neither, don’t ask anything more, but I am getting a kick out of Mr. Perry and Mr. Gingrich talking about “vulture capitalism” not because of their party affiliation but because major, main stream politicians are using the word “capitalism,” and in a disparaging way. For so long the parameters of the debate has been shifting rightward, and here it is shifting radically left and in a presidential primary race. God Bless America. God bless Occupy; this is their work.

But who said that, that capitalism has outlived its usefulness? Martin Luther King, Jr.. I am guessing that that is not one of the quotes we would find in our average high school history book, is it? No. We are taught about the King that led a movement to introduce black people into the fold of full citizenship, and he did it non-violently. His legacy and civil canonization are ensured in this work alone. He changed the face of the world. His work directly made possible our current President’s presidency; and whatever your opinions about our current president, the fact that we as a people could and did elect a black man to that office is something that makes this country better. But this is not all that Dr. King did. And actually, he was martyred precisely when he started getting involved in the other aspects of his work. What was he doing in Memphis when he was assassinated? That’s right, he was there working with the sanitation workers, a largely but certainly not completely black union who were striking for what we would now call a living wage. He became a real threat to the standing order not in the movement towards civil liberties for black folks, but when he started seeing and teaching that poor American folks, both black and white, had a lot more in common with poor folks around the world then they had with the economic elites in their home countries. He really scared the powers that be when he pointed out that the subaltern, the oppressed here shared common cause with the oppressed peasants in Viet Nam they were being sent into battle against. King’s story parallels Archbishop Oscar Romero in that when Romero moved from speaking theologically about love to direct appeals to the soldiers to stop killing their?” countrymen, he too was martyred. But, capitalism has outlived its useful life. Recalling the voice of a great philosopher, “Them’s fightin’ words.

To celebrate the life and witness of The Rev. Dr. King, I want to look closely at a line from one of his sermons that really got into me, and is revealing not only about his work, but is revealing about the nature of our world. He preached, “The greatest problem facing modern man (sic.) is that the means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live.”

Ends and means is a major theme in King’s work. He was an ardent critic not only of Soviet style communism, but of pure Marxists thought because of its moral relativism. King advocated a Christian socialism, which ensured the just distribution of wealth and privilege and was rooted in accountability to God and neighbor. To Marx, the ends do justify the means so long as the ends are proper. The very essence of the non-violence King ascribed to and enforced within the civil rights movement is that hate can never be overcome by hate, but by love alone; that victory, even, is not the goal, but justice and reconciliation.

So he writes, “the means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live.” Let’s start with the ends. What are “the spiritual ends for which we live?” _____ It is the beloved community. The reign of God, the Kingdom of God. It is Emmanuel, God with Us. It is justice rolling down like waters and peace like an ever flowing stream. What have we been talking about week in, week out? ____ Our raison d’eter? The great commandment. Loving God and loving neighbor. Exactly. These are our spiritual ends. It is loving our enemy, not as they are but as they might be. I read an article that said it is not that King would advocate loving George Wallace for who and what he was in that time, but loving George Wallace for the God given potential he had to be different, to be better, to be more how God desires us all to be. Humans, the temporal world itself, we are not a product but a process, we are fluid, flowing beings, never static. Loving a process is much like s “mother’s love for her (sometimes) wayward child.” These are the ends. The same ends that we strive for here at Resurrection.

“The means by which we live have outdistanced the spiritual ends for which we live.” Let’s break down the means part. What are the means by which we live? _____
It is everything we are part of. Our politics; how we organize ourselves. Our economy; how we organize things. Our ecology: the complex community in which we live. Our culture: how we make meaning of the world. Our religion: how we endeavor to engage ultimate Reality. Everything that it takes to live as individuals and societies are the means.

So how do these means, these very temporal aspects of our existence outdistance our spiritual ends?_____ Let’s go through it by the numbers. Our politics: the means trump the ends when we value our ideas, our partisans, our candidates over the good of the whole. Wanting the government to sit in deadlock or wanting leadership to fail because it benefits one party over another in electoral politics is an example. The plague of money in politics is another, where some voices are get more attention than others because of what, money? Come on. Fools. We the people cannot govern ourselves, we cannot strive for justice in this climate. The means have outdistanced the ends.

Our economy: when the structures of the economy, the legal framework benefits one group over another, the ends and means are askew. When there is sufficient wealth for everyone to have enough but it is distributed in a way that some have more than they could possibly ever use and others don’t even have what they need, this is sin upon sin upon sin.

Our ecology: when we trade material wealth (which is generally reserved for the few), when we trade that for the health of our air, rivers, soils, and oceans, we are adrift. When we prefer, by law and opinion, cattle over wolves, cheap food over healthy farms, paper over old growth forests, fossil fuels over a future, profits over people; we have let the means trump the ends.

In our culture, the ends are bested by means when we value appearance over substance, when choose distraction and entertainment over beauty. Our culture is bankrupt when the means of delivery are so important that everything contained within is reduced to being “content.” And in our religion the means we live by outdistance the ends we live for when we spend more on evangelism than mission, when we value our denomination over a relationship with God, when our ideas exclude, our doctrines diminish, and our practices, our communities alienate. Remember, Dr. King said that 11:00 on Sunday morning is the most segregated hour of the week…
What is comes down to, these ends and means being out of balance, is that it is all interrelated. He preached, “Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.” Dr. King’s vision of the world, its interconnectedness, the interrelatedness of the non-human and human world, the seen and the unseen, the sacred and the profane, the secular and the religious, it is nothing but organic; it is whole, like an organism.

I know that my story is coming out in drips and drabs, but here’s another piece. before we moved to Eugene, I farmed. Windy and I had a little farm in Western Massachusetts for a couple of years, then after a hiatus in Cambridge, we moved to a monastery where I started a small farm for the brothers. We grew 100 kinds of vegetables, some small grains, flowers and kept chickens, turkeys and pigs. It was great. In farming you get an intimate education in the interrelatedness of things. What you do anywhere on the farm, be it an adjustment you try to make in the soil, a redirection of water flow, or a change in how livestock rotates, reverberations throughout the system happen. Sometimes they are subtle reverberations, like a bit more purslane seems to come up after the chickens went through, and sometimes they are more clear, like when I laid perf-pipe to drain the puddle in front of the trash cans and then the road washed away…

What Martin Luther King, Jr. lived, preached and died for; what Jesus Christ lived, preached and died for was the truth that how we live, matters. How we love, Matters. How we pray and worship, how we eat and throw things away, what we do and who we are, the very quality of our lives and the world in which we live, all of these things matter. They matter to those we share the world with, neighbor and neighborhood; and these things matter to God. You matter to God. And for this, and with and for Brother Martin, we give thanks. AMEN

January 1, 2012, Holy Name of Jesus, Year B

2012-01-30T09:49:00.000-08:00

Holy Name of Jesus, Year B
January 1, 2012
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

Does anyone recognize the Greek word kenosis? It means something like “self-emptying.”

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not take equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of slave being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself, and became obedient to the point of death, even death on the Cross. Therefore God also Highly exalted him and gave him a name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee shall bend, in Heaven and on earth and under earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the Glory of the Father.”

Is anyone familiar with this passage? It is amongst the very best that Paul left us with. “…though he was in the form of God, did not take equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of slave being born in human likeness.” Does anyone want to make a stab at what it means?
Paul did not write these words. They actually constitute a hymn that had been used in ceremonies from probably the very first years after Jesus was executed. Remember, Paul was writing long before any of the Gospel writers, at least fifty years before Mark, which was the first of them. But here he is, commending to the folks in Philipi a hymn that he had learned somewhere in his travels.

All good religion is dependent on some balance between the known and the unknowable. The thought, the felt and the wondered upon. The forgotten and the as-of-yet-unrevealed. The seen, the unseen, the imagined and the not even considered. What this little hymn does is bring to the fore the paradox of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior. It teaches us that He is fully God and fully human, and (maybe even most importantly) that that matters. It matters because we can learn from Him. We can practice this. We can walk the path that our God laid before us. You can let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.

So what is this mind? How might it be in us? What is Kenosis?

Since at least the fourth century with Cyril of Alexandria through Sarah Coakley who is writing today, kenosis has been a hot topic. Initially the conversation was about how much of the divine-side of Christ’s nature was suppressed, emptied, so that the fully human side of Christ could live. The gospel record shows Jesus in dismay and anger and hope… things rather impossible for an omniscient/omnipotent God-man. Some of those divine powers had to be dealt with.

Think of our story… our God became incarnate and was born of a most humble and unlikely family. And here, in this realm, he walked around not smiting evil doers, not changing the world with a snap of his Divine fingers, he did yell at some folks, he did cause a ruckus or two, but mostly he did three things: he taught; he healed; and he fed. Poor people, mostly. Humble activities. “He emptied Himself, taking the form of slave… He humbled himself and became obedient, to the point of death, even death on the cross.” No triumphant King of Kings here. He rode to his death on a donkey into Jerusalem in a piece of legendary political lampoon that Abby Hoffman would have appreciated.

In modernity, though, the discussion of kenosis has taken on a much more interesting tenor. A more subversive tenor. Because if Jesus Christ teaches us one thing besides loving God and neighbor, it is that every one of His followers has a religious responsibility to subvert the powers and principalities of the world. What all this kenosis, this self emptying, this humbling to the point of death teaches is that the our greatest power is found in our vulnerability. We, these meek and fragile creatures with intensely limited abilities, we are powerful precisely in our humility. I think of Gandhi and the salt marches. Did you see the scene in the Ben Kingsley movie Gandhi, where rank upon rank of men walked into the swinging clubs of British imperial police. It was said that the British Empire broke on the heads of those martyrs. I think of the people just 35 years later walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge to Selma. And the dogs and the fire hoses. I think of that lone young man standing before the tank in Tianamen Square in 1989. Or Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian man who sparked the Arab Spring with his self-immolation.

It is everyday going to off to a job that you do not like, but that you need to support your family. It is getting up in the middle of the night with the sick child. Maybe it is getting up night after night after night with a child that will not get better. The nursing back to health, or gently accompanying our parents to their deaths. I know that the most powerful thing I have ever done had nothing to do with the tanks I used to command, the tractors I farmed with, or the people I ordered about in industry, no, the most powerful thing I have done in my life is filling the supporting role I had in the conception, gestation, birthing and now raising of two little girls. Humble work. And powerful. In it, the world will be changed. It already is happening.

Keep in mind, and I think this is what Paul was relaying, true power has very little to do with what we do. True power lays in who we are. Rosa Parks was a 42 year old, black church lady when she finally had had enough. She did not “do” anything. What she did was stop being what she was expected to be. She was expected to be compliant. She had not a lick of power in the conventional sense, but her being who she truly was, what God made her to be, powerful. So powerful that Montgomery, that this nation was changed forever.

What kenosis means is that true power, the power of God is manifest in those who most give it up to God. To those who most realize that it is not about them. It is not about me. Or my little community, my concerns, my nation. It is about God and God’s will. It is about conforming to the true nature of things. True power manifests in those who most fully submit to God. God is always on the side of the conventionally powerless, because physical power, the power to destroy, to kill, the power to make others do what you want them to do, it is nothing. It is not important. It pales in the face of the power of love, the power of creativity and friendship, imagination, the power of healing, and nurturing. It pales in the face of the power of hugs. “He emptied himself, taking the form of slave, being born in human likeness.”The greatest power in the world is the power to be.

Submission is part of kenosis. This is troubling, particularly for the oppressed, particularly for children, particularly for women, who do not need any more religiously sanctioned reasons to submit to anything or anyone. But a gift that current theologians like Sarah Coakley have given the world is tying the notion of kenosis to lives of practice. She writes that “we can only be properly empowered if we cease to set the agenda, if we make space for ‘God to be God’”. Remember, not being the one in charge is not shameful because truly, not one of us, not one human is actually in charge, preached by a person at least nominally in charge, mind you. And the more and more we think we are in charge, or worse, act like it, the further and further from God, from moral power, from true power, we are.

Here is how prayer can change the world. When we approach God, we need to put ourselves aside, put our needs and fears and comfort aside, our personalities, our histories, our lives aside, and meet God on God’s terms. This is kenosis, this is emptying ourselves. Bowing before the Lord is an experience shared by kings and serfs; priests and people; the CEO and the person who launders his shirts. The 99 and the 1 percent hold equal individual power in the economy of God, though the 99% generally have a leg up in the humility race. And therefore are more powerful, truly.

The one insight I ever had in meditation was along these lines. After a week of 16 hour days in the meditation hall, a question came to me. We were in silence, I had not heard my voice the whole week, and it occurred to me, that voice in our heads, the one that is us, the “me” voice, well the question that came to me was, “Whose voice is that?” In the kenosis of rigorous prayer, the emptying into silence, what I always assumed to be me was revealed to be yet another construct, another idea and not the true nature of things. We all have a chorus in our head, and we cannot really get on to God until we tame some of those voices, until we empty ourselves, until we find a way to really submit to Almighty God’s self. “And every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the Glory of the Father.” AMEN

Christmas Eve, Year B, December 24, 2011

2012-01-30T09:46:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve, December 24, 2011, Year B
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

Merry Christmas, everyone! This week Hannah Maeve and I were reading A Child’s Christmas in Wales, by that drunken genius Dylan Thomas. It is a beautifully written vision of all the Christmas comings and goings as seen through the eyes of a ten-year-old boy. Of course the telling paid some attention to the presents he received over the years. There were the useful presents and the useless presents. “Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies… a false nose and a tram-conductor’s cap… never a catapult; once by mistake that no one could explain a little hatchet…” and, among other things, “a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound.” Those were in the useless column. Amongst useful gifts were “engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, mittens made for giant sloths… blinding tam-o’-shanters like patchwork tea cozies…” and most importantly, for me the real take away from the whole story was the last gift mentioned; over the years the boy had received a host of books, including “books that told me everything about the wasp, except why.”

“Do not be afraid; for see – I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people: to you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign for you: you will find a child wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger…” and the heavenly host sang out, “Glory to God in the Highest Heaven, and on Earth, peace, good will to all.”

What does it mean that Christ, our God was born to us on the floor of a barn? There is of course the tragic side to the story: there is noting edifying about being born into poverty, being born outside in the cold, far from home. There is another, maybe even more disconcerting side to the story: this birth, the birth of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, the Wonderful Counselor, Prince of Peace, Superstar even, this birth was so ordinary. We say that we hate tragedy but what we really hate is the ordinary. Jesus was born exactly like all of us were born or were supposed to have been born. Jesus was wrapped as babies were wrapped and was laid in a safe place on clean straw while his mother attended to the things mothers have to attend to after child birth. What does this mean to us that this is our story of God?

What does it mean that the angels announced the birth of the savior not to Kings and Queens, not to Priests and high officials but to shepherds on some God-forsaken hillside watching their sheep, shivering in the cold. The shepherds were likely slaves, and were certainly very, very low in Jewish society. What does it mean to us that people like that were the first to get the very best news the whole world had ever gotten, and from Angles?

What does it mean? Well, partially it means that that hill was not so God-forsaken. No hill is, actually. Otherwise, in the nether regions of theology we describe what it means in terms of Mystery. Great is the mystery of faith. Why did it happen this way? Mystery. Why are we who we are? Mystery. Why wasps? Mystery.

Wendell Berry once had a conversation with a friend about rain. They watched a tree during a rain storm, and his friend commented that the course the rain drop took from the sky, dripping its way through the canopy and the branches down to the earth and back into the water cycle was random. The path was random. Berry disagreed. He said that to know something was random you must have an infinite set of data points, because there just might be a pattern if you could see it all. The better explanation is that the rain drop emerges from mystery, travels for a while where it can be observed and experienced, and flows back into mystery. Into God. Sounds a little like our lives, no?

Blaming it all on mystery does not absolve us from the responsibility of dealing with the world, with root causes, daily tasks, and relationships both casual and intimate, but it necessitates that we deal with these things and that we approach the world from a posture of radical humility. Ours is a radically humble religion. We do not know as much as we would like to, or usually supposed that we know. Our God and Savior was born in the modern day equivalent of a truck stop, or maybe out back behind a Motel 6 off of a freeway near Flint, Michigan to folks about two steps away from living in their car. Our God tells that the first will be last and the last will be first. Our God tells us that we are accountable to God and to each other for what we do and how we do it, and why. And our God tells us that we are loved no matter what. It means that we do not know what happens when we die but that we do not need to worry, world without end.

What does this embracing of mystery mean to us on our average Tuesday morning? It means do not trust your assumptions or preconceived notions. It means that when you think you know who someone is by what they appear to be, you are bound to be wrong. It means that God and God’s Church offer many more questions than answers because answers are ends of roads, questions are forks. It means that we must consider what it really means to be comfortable; we must consider what the difference is between what we dream of, what we want and what we need. It means that when it comes to love, reckless abandon is always appropriate. So is smiling. So are good dogs, and kittens, whether good or bad if you can even tell the difference.

Tonight we celebrate the birthday of Jesus Christ, the mysterious incarnation of Emmanuel, God With Us. Some of us spend a lot of time gathering around this table in our weekly celebration of His life and work and death and Resurrection. Some of us get here a lot less frequently. But whether we are here often or nearly never; whether we believe a whole lot, just a little or almost even not at all; no worries, no fear, all are welcome at this humble table. God in Christ is just glad that you are here. May God bless you and all that you love. And Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night. AMEN

3rd Sunday after the Epiphany, January 22, 2012

2012-01-23T12:24:00.000-08:00

Year B Epiphany 3
January 22, 2012
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

“Follow me and I will make you fish for people.” This text is about discipleship and evangelism. In a progressive church community like ours, besides talking about race or money (our money, not money in the abstract), about the most uncomfortable subject we encounter in church is evangelism.

Usually we look at this reading from the perspective of the called, of Simon and Andrew and James and John. Why did they follow? Why so immediately? Would I have left my dad in such a lurch? Would I have followed at all? Good questions.

I am wondering, though, about something else. I am wondering about Jesus in this story. Why did He want these men to follow Him? And more so, He wanted them to follow Him to learn how to get more followers. He was training the trainers. What was the big deal? And why so immediately, why the rush?

So, help me here. Why was Jesus out evangelizing? And yes, it was because his dad told him to. But why else?

Jesus knew that He had something of immense value that needed to be shared. He had good news; very, very good news. The Word, a radically new understanding of God was manifest and had to get out there, out here. And so, He spent his short public life telling everyone He could, everything that He knew about this very Good News. And what good news did He have? That God loves us, no questions asked, and we are responsible for reflecting that love back unto God and out into the world to the best of our ability. That is it. Oh, and the addendum that the more you love that radically the more you will be reviled, persecuted, even dismissed as a religious wacko, which of course requires that you love even that much more and so on and so on until in the end all you have is love, ceaselessly.

So in a bit, we are going to head downstairs and do our political duty as Episcopalians. We are going to attend to the business of this church; electing our leaders, electing our representatives to the Diocesan Convention, which conducts the business of the Diocese. We are going to review what we did this past year and, at least fiscally speaking, what the coming year has in store. Pretty exciting. We’l get back to this.

Why is evangelism such a touchy subject in progressive churches?
(don’t want to impose, have some doubts, embarrassed – don’t want to be “one of them”)

Ok, I am going to be completely honest here (not that I am not already honest but I want to draw attention to this). I have always been hesitant about evangelism. Where I am from it is very impolite to talk about faith, particularly about Christian faith, and your own faith and church and all of that. But as I have gone down the rabbit hole of religious devotion and life, that reticence has faded. (And not just because my livelihood depends on it, either.)

What has changed for me? I am getting, finally, an inkling, a whiff, a taste of how good, how really, really good the Good News is. This stuff will change your life. It is changing mine, constantly. And when we, when I find something that good, it is like the prelude last week, how can I keep from singing? (well, for everyone’s sake I won’t be singing too, too much, just enough, though.) Really, if what we find here is as good as it can be, as good as it needs to be, as good as the good news we proclaim actually is, how will we not be like Jesus on that beach? We will need to tell others, “follow me, or at least come with me this Sunday. I know some really cool people.”

So we are going downstairs in a bit. And like some other things that we do around here, we are going to do it a little differently this year. We will sit around tables, having a meal that everyone made in their homes to share. We will study the Bible together, if briefly. We’ll conduct all the business we need to conduct, but I m hoping that we will do it, maybe a little more religiously? Maybe a bit more reflective of the absolutely fabulous thing that we have here? We have some of the very best news ever told, we have some beautiful people gathered around it, we have concentrated some resources here that provide a brilliant base of operations for mission in this neighborhood, in this city, really, into the whole world… wherever the Spirit sees fit to lead us.

I think I remember like two sermons I have ever heard. One of them, preached by an eminent old Unitarian, used a New Yorker cartoon as the text. It was in two frames. The first had a bearded man walking down the street with a placard saying, “I’m a fool for Jesus.” In the second frame, the man is passing by and we see the back of the sign, “Whose fool are you?”

I think of that beach, and those young men and Jesus and all the rashness, the immediacy of it all and that little pragmatist in me says, fools. How foolish, I would never… I wouldn’t ask anyone to do that. I am not that confident. Then I remember the Good News; lights in the darkness, Word made flesh, people healed, thousands fed, resurrection and life everlasting… Whose fool am I? Jesus’. Fisher of men? How can I refuse. Why? Because we have something That Good. It has immense value, and not only to us, that is the least of it, but it has immense value to the world.

I asked a couple of weeks ago if we are going to do this, this whole church thing. What I mean is that if I am part of this community, we are going to become fishers of men. We are going to grow. In numbers? I am sure that will happen. If you build it they will come. But numbers, just help get me to full time, that is my only concern about numbers. But growth, I am ultimately concerned in growth. That we grow closer to God in Christ and each other. That we grow the breadth and scope of our collective and private religious practice. That we grow the breadth and scope of our ministry to those who need help in body, mind and/or spirit. That we grow our children into the men and women they were born to be. That we grow in our ability to love and be loved. That is the pearl of great price that we have inherited. It is going to take effort, risks, it will mean appearing foolish at times, it will require being actually foolish at times, but that is the deal. So, are we going to do this?

AMEN

The Baptism of Our Lord, January 8, 2012

2012-01-23T10:43:00.000-08:00

The Baptism of Our Lord Year B
January 8, 2012
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

“I have baptized you with water; but He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit…”

Today we remember the Baptism of our Lord. I love Baptisms. For babies, you are just holding this little person and they are being welcomed into this big, ancient, global family. There is so much nurture in that action, there is such a village. And for bigger folks, it is like wow. What a commitment. You have been moved by God in Christ with the Holy Spirit to do something very radical, very counter-cultural (at least out here in Oregon, progressive Christian Baptism is very alternative, even edgy).

I am guessing that most everyone here has been baptized. It did not have to be an Episcopal baptism, any form or tradition counts, so to speak, so long as it was done in the name of the Triune God. And if you were not baptized, no worries, you are still welcome to share in the Feast at God’s table, we should probably talk about it, but certainly everyone is welcome. Historically this was NOT the case. Everyone worshiped together, the Baptized and those in training, the catechumen, up until the Eucharist, then the un-Baptized had to leave. The transition in our worship from the liturgy of the word to the liturgy of the table reflects this ancient polity. And the catechumate was rigorous; like three year long rigorous. Can you imagine how powerful that first communion would have been, years of study and work. There is certainly something to be said for the high commitment church where it takes dedication, hard work, where there are high expectations to fully participate. We really are not supposed to have an open table, but I believe it is better to err on the side of inclusion. But this is not a small deal, and we have to ask ourselves, what does Baptism mean?

Well, what does Baptism mean? And let us look to the source of all that is good and holy, the BCP. Where would we look? Exactly, the Catechism. Someone look to page 858. What is Holy Baptism? And then two lines down, what is the inward and spiritual grace in Baptism? Someone else…

Adopted as children; inheritors of the Kingdom of God. Union with Christ in his death and resurrection, birth into God’s family, the church… these are very good things, and true things, but something very, very important is missing, particularly in this post-Christian age. Inheritors of the church? Yes that it generous, but this vision of baptism feels sort of like inheriting a crazy uncle’s slowly sinking yacht. This vision of Baptism is inward looking, and if there is anything that the history of Christian hegemony in the West teaches, it is that this is a terrible religion when it is inward looking. Christianity, the Church is just plain dangerous when it is more concerned with itself than with the world. All religions are

Baptism is fantastic. (And don’t get me wrong, the Church is fantastic, too). Baptism is powerful. It is important. It is one of the two sacraments that Christ Himself instituted. How do we bring it back to holy relevance in a world where membership in this club does not mean a whole lot? Particularly as we learn more and more that being Christian is a great privilege, and that it is as great a privilege to be Jewish, or Muslim, or Hindu or whatever. The privilege comes in being a person of faith in a community of faith, not in which lineage we find ourselves. So why is baptism into the church important? As I will say time and time again, it is all about mission. And what is mission? It is what God is up to in the world, and our job, our sole job as Christians is to discern what God is up to in the world and figure out what to do about that.

I understand baptism much like I understand ordination. It is like an ordination into “Das Priestertum aller Gläubigen.” The Priesthood of all believers. I see it in SAT terms: priests are to the laity as the baptized are to the world. And what is ordination but a commissioning for mission. It is being set aside by a community for certain purposes. Priests are set aside for specific service and leadership roles and are responsible for certain sacramental obligations. Deacons proclaim the Gospel, both in church and in the world, with words and with action. And the rest of us, the Baptized? What is our responsibility? What are we set aside for?

We are set aside to live a Gospel life, a life directed by our experience of God in Christ. We are set aside to love God with everything we’ve got and love our neighbor as ourselves. That is it. That is the reason for being Christian, receiving in baptism the commission to follow the great commandment. And practically, what does that look like? What are we supposed to do? What is Great Commandment living? We are supposed to live with intention. We are supposed to live with purpose. To live an examined life. To strive to do meaningful work. To leave the world better than we find it. To pick up after ourselves, and others if they forget, or can’t, or won’t. to turn the other cheek. To share our wealth, not only with the church to support this work, but also with causes we believe in, with our neighbors in the form of taxes. We should treat people as they actually deserve to be treated, that is as a child of God. We are supposed to consume less, and choose the local thing, that shirt or tomato or bottle of wine, and to buy it from a neighbor. We are supposed to take care of our bodies and our minds. We are supposed to pray, and study scripture, and have our faith as a guiding force in our lives.

We are supposed to be the people that we know we are supposed to be. That is why we come to church, to be reminded that being good takes work. It is not always the easy or natural path. We come to church to start over again, weekly, comforted and forgiven, and strengthened and renewed, to take on a one day at a time kind of life. The only reason we do what we do here; the fellowship, the friendship here at Resurrection; the fun we have, the easy laughs, the good food… the feeling of home here is valuable in that it helps us do the work in the world that we have been given to do; to love God and neighbor more than it seems possible, or wise.

Are we going to do this? We’ve had our first season together, the Advent-Christmastide, I am getting to know you all individually and collectively. As I wrote in my newsletter article, we are doing a lot of things, and well, and goodness, we are just scratching the surface. We’ve got a lot to learn together; about God and our relationship to God, about discernment and mission, about our Holy Scripture and our history, about how to organize ourselves for mission, how to invite others to join us in this work, in short, how to to act justly, love mercy and to walk humbly with our God. This is what you got signed up for in Baptism. Are we together in this? Are we going to build up an outpost of the Kingdom together? Are we ready to fulfill our vows? Really?

I am going to give one of my hero’s the last words. Whatever I am talking about, this poem is pretty much what I mean. This is the “Manifesto of the Mad Farmer’s Liberation Front” by Wendell Berry.

Love the quick profit, the annual raise, 
vacation with pay. Want more 
of everything ready-made. Be afraid 
to know your neighbors and to die. 
And you will have a window in your head. 
Not even your future will be a mystery 
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card 
and shut away in a little drawer. 
When they want you to buy something 
they will call you. When they want you 
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something 
that won't compute. Love the Lord. 
Love the world. Work for nothing. 
Take all that you have and be poor. 
Love someone who does not deserve it. 
Denounce the government and embrace
 the flag. Hope to live in that free 
republic for which it stands. 
Give your approval to all you cannot 
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man 
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers. 
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias. 
Say that your main crop is the forest 
that you did not plant, 
that you will not live to harvest. 
Say that the leaves are harvested 
when they have rotted into the mold. 
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees 
every thousand years. 
Listen to carrion - put your ear 
close, and hear the faint chattering 
of the songs that are to come. 
Expect the end of the world. Laugh. 
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful 
though you have considered all the facts. 
So long as women do not go cheap 
for power, please women more than men. 
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy 
a woman satisfied to bear a child? 
Will this disturb the sleep 
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields. 
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head 
in her lap. Swear allegiance 
to what is nighest your thoughts. 
As soon as the generals and the politicos 
can predict the motions of your mind, 
lose it. Leave it as a sign 
to mark the false trail, the way 
you didn't go. Be like the fox 
who makes more tracks than necessary, 
some in the wrong direction. 
Practice resurrection.

AMEN

Fourth Sunday in Advent, December 18, 2011

2011-12-19T11:16:00.000-08:00

Fourth Sunday in Advent, Year B, December 18, 2011
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

Let us try something different. Take a look at that extra sheet of paper you have. It is a prayer called the Angelus. It is a great prayer. Use it. Let’s just say the Hail Mary together.
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

Anyone who grew up low church Episcopalian or from other more Protestant orientation, you feel funny saying the Hail Mary? Stick with it; it feels good eventually.

“My Soul Proclaims the greatness of the Lord, my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for He has looked with favor on his lowly servant. From this day on all generations will call me Blessed: the Almighty has done great things for me and Holy is His name.” The Magnificat. It is a canticle, which is an excerpt from Scripture to be used ritually. The Magnificat is drawn from St. Luke’s gospel. Mary is reflecting on what happened in today’s reading, becoming miraculously pregnant under the shadow of God, the Holy Spirit. Quite a reaction for a thirteen year old. That is how old Mary probably was. Girls, young women, married directly after puberty back then.

It is such a striking statement, not only in the gracefulness of it, but that it comes from the lips that it comes from. Mary was very, very low in the social hierarchy of her day. She was a she. She was very young. She was poor. And worse than being just poor, she was landless and was betrothed to a landless tekon, carpenter, probably better translated as a framer, making posts and beams, door frames and the like. She lived in the boondocks of Galilee, a backwater province of a poor kingdom in the Empire. She wasn’t a slave or a gentile, which was good for her, but she was way far down the pecking order. She would have had no reasonable expectation to have a voice or an identity, let alone one that “From this day on all generations will call me blessed.”

The story of the incarnation of Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior, the Person of God that became flesh and dwelt among us, or as I heard a local pastor say, that became flesh and Occupied, it is the story of unimaginable power and glory and honor arising from a place that society does not value. Doesn’t even usually notice. The powers that be, the patriarchy or kyriearchy tells us in so many ways that womb of a girl, particularly a poor girl, bears no good fruit, no fruit worth investing any effort or love into. That that fruit could be called Blessed never crossed anyone’s mind.

But here, in this brave little girl, a girl who did not ask for this task, did not ask to take on this burden, did not ask to take on the mantle of bearing, raising, loving, nurturing, a son, the Son of God and her also witnessing His torture and death, holding His dead body, burying Him… she did not ask for that and yet she did it. She rejoiced in it, AND she wept over it, AND she walked countless miles with Him in his life and work. And as soon as she was no longer perplexed by the messenger, her soul proclaimed the greatness of the Lord for it!

In thinking about Mary and the Magnificat and the Angelus, I was reminded of a talk by Eve Ensler that Windy shared with me recently. Eve Ensler wrote the Vagina Monologues. It is one of the TED talks, recorded in India in 2009. It is called “Embrace your inner girl”. It is on line. Watch it.

Ensler posits that we, all of us, men, women, boys, girls, all have this little part of ourselves, a cluster of cells that she calls girl cells. Our inner girl. These girl cells are where we carry compassion. Empathy. Our passionate self; openness, balance and relationship. It is intuition. It is Sophia. Wisdom. It is vulnerability and the understanding that vulnerability is our greatest strength. It is taking things personally. And it is, in her words, emotions, which “…have inherent logic, which lead to radical, appropriate saving action.”

Are these traits that are valued by our society? Do over achievers get kudos for their vulnerability? No. We are told that vulnerability is weakness. Is compassion something we put on a resume? No, compassion hampers our judgment. Do our political or business leaders brag about being emotional people? No, emotions cloud our thinking. They certainly were not teaching us about our inner girl when I was a young Marine Corps lieutenant at Quantico. You cannot build empire on empathy. You cannot concentrate wealth or exploit natural resources guided by our intuition. Resistance to structural adjustments is not suppressed by right relationship. Therefore these traits, the girl cells, are suppressed. And violently.

The suppression of our girl self means that we cannot feel what is going on. Good feelings, bad ones or indifferent, when the compassion, joy, emotionality, and relationality that Ensler calls our inner girl is squashed, we do not have the radical saving response in the world that that we need. Our girl self does not dig strip mines or do clear cuts; it farms organically. It does not pollute rivers or the air; but works cooperatively. It doesn’t force people into slavery or figure out how little someone can be paid; but makes sure everyone has enough. It does not hit or slap or punch or cut or shoot anyone, ever. It does not touch when not invited, particularly not children, or women, or anyone less physically capable than yourself, ever.

I am not down on men. I rather enjoy being one, we talked about that a few weeks ago. But for me, one of the signs that my inner life is in order is when tears come to my eyes easily. That is kind of girly. When I encounter something sad, or particularly beautiful… “This American Life”, on NPR. If I am a weepy mess, but not depressed after hearing that radio show, things are good. When I feel that I can ask for help, and I do it, that is me as a better person. When I can share that something is hard for me to do, or, God forbid, that I do not know something… when I do that I am being a better person, I am more the girl that I need to be. Really, I am that much more like Mary.

The Magnificat, the testimony of Mary reflects this inner girl. She is the essence of the inner girl that Ensler speaks of. The proud are scattered; the mighty cast down; and, the rich are sent away empty, sure but the greatest strength of God is God’s mercy. God’s mercy raises up the lowly. God’s mercy feeds the hungry. God’s mercy keeps promises. Mary witnesses not God Triumphant, but God the servant, God the Savior. A tender, loving God. God was alive in her 13 year old, probably malnourished body. Her intuition made this possible. She birthed Our God into the world in the form of a tiny baby boy born on the floor of a barn to parents too poor to afford a room. Her compassion made this possible. Her girl self rings through the ages. Her relationships made this possible. All generations have called her blessed. Her girlhood made this possible. And for that baby, that epitome of dependence and vulnerability, for Him, for our God, all of our souls proclaim the greatness of the Lord, our spirits rejoice in God our savior. AMEN

Third Sunday in Advent, December 11, 2011

2011-12-19T11:14:00.000-08:00

Third Sunday in Advent, Year B, December 11, 2011
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

Windy and I spent time in Thailand some years ago. I was working on a book for a Thai dissident and Windy was expanding her massage education and learning about Thai culture. There was a major election going on for the Governor of Bangkok, a very powerful political position in the country. One of the candidates was named Chewit, and his claim to fame was that he was the brothel king of Bangkok. No small feat. Well, his campaign slogan was “It is not how good you are, it is how good you want to be.”

“A light Shines in the Darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him.”

So last week we heard tell of the man in the powder blue windbreaker with the words “Jesus Saves: Repent and Believe” written on the back. We talked about John the Baptist, too. We talked about sin, because if we do not have a good sense of sin, then the whole idea of repentance is moot. And we had some homework over this past week, we were supposed to think and pray on the things that get in the way of our relationship with God and Neighbor; things that distract us, that pull us away from being the person we are meant to be, that we are capable of being. Any report back on sin?

Jesus Saves: Repent and Believe.

Everyone knows that we have the sacrament of confession in the Episcopal church, right? Does anyone know the official name of that sacrament? The Reconciliation of a Penitent. Reconciliation. Have we all heard of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa? Could someone explain what it was? -----
Right. The point of reconciliation is that the relationship that was broken, was damaged, was violated, is restored, and that the conditions that allowed for such breaking of relationships no longer exist. Having the opportunity to tell your story, the whole truth; having to listen to the stories of others with no rebuttal, no punishment… this process saved South Africa from turning into Zimbabwe. Truth and Reconciliation brings light to the darkness. It shines truth on horror. It holds everyone accountable to everyone else not by force or threats of force, but with the desire to get on with living the lives we have been given. It is this process that can save us, too.

Now I am not saying that I am clearing my Fridays from here on out to hear confessions. I am willing to, but when it comes to the rite of reconciliation I proscribe it in the spirit of Queen Elizabeth, “All may, some should, none must.” What I am saying, though, what I am saying with as much spiritual force as I can express, we all must repent. We all must do whatever it takes, every day of our lives, to pull the logs from our eyes, to cut off that offending hand, to reconcile our beings and our lives with God in Christ. And we must try day in, day out, to create the conditions so that we may thrive in the blessed lives that God Almighty has graced us with. This is the only purpose of being Christian. John the Baptist cries in the wilderness across the ages. Jesus Saves: Repent and Believe.

Repentance is setting ourselves right. It is realigning ourselves with the trajectory that God has set our lives on. Paul Tillich said that the arc of the universe is long and it bends towards justice. The constellation of relationships you live within, that is the arc of your life and it is long and it bends towards God. Repentance is the process we use to reconcile our lives with this arc. It is the primary work of the faithful, because if our relationship with God and/or our neighbors is left untended, we are of little use in fulfilling God’s mission to the world.

I can see that you are all following me theoretically. Notions of reconciliation just begs for good theology, and I do love my theology. However, theology is about religion, it is about God… what we need to approach a life reconciled with God and Neighbor, to be the human beings we are meant to be, to go beyond Chewit, and to be as good as we want to be… that takes actual religion. It takes practice, it takes instruction from those who have followed before us on the road upwards and inwards into Reality. How do we repent?

It is very simple. Paul gave us our prescription this morning. “Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” That about sums it up. You want the keys to the kingdom? You want to see God face to face and know that that face is God’s? You want to live a life characterized by truth and reconciliation? then listen to Paul: Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. Give thanks in all circumstances. If you do that, you will be saved. Any questions?

Prayer is the answer. To what? Everything, but most importantly, to repenting. To reconciling our relationship with God and everything. Well, it is not just prayer, but I need to introduce this next word delicately: mortification. I bet you haven’t heard that in church for a while. Prayer and Mortification… these practices are the root of the spiritual life, the ancients in our church tell us this time and time again. Evelyn Underhill, the great Anglican writer and mystic who died in 1941 has a lot to say on this matter. Underhill’s direction to prayer and mortification is not a call to return to horsehair shirts and kneeling on dried peas. By prayer she means attending to God. By mortification she means dealing with ourselves. She writes that prayer is, “…first turning to Reality, and then getting our tangled, half-real psychic lives – so tightly coiled about ourselves and our own interests – into harmony with the great movement of Reality. Mortification means killing the very roots of self-love; pride and possessiveness, anger and violence, ambition and greed in all their disguises, however respectable those disguises may be.”

In prayer, we face ourselves towards God and… we do all sorts of things. Some of us seek silence. The deep, inner silence of apophatic prayer, like that taught by the great Carmelite masters, Theresa of Avila and John of the Cross, and the modern Centering Prayer movement. Vipassana meditation of Southeast Asia is an apophatic prayer form. Hindu Transcendental Meditation is, too. Some of us find the cadence and imagery of the rosary to be meaningful. Some practice intercessions, praying for others, this is the metta meditations of Loving Kindness of Mahayana Buddhism. Others of us rejoice in chant, alone or in Taize forms of worship, or find stillness in the journey in and out of a labyrinth. There are other physical prayer forms like yoga, tai chi and chi kung. And if you do not know where to start, pick up your BCP in the morning and turn to page 80. Saying Morning Prayer is a superlative form of prayer, a communal spoken form of prayer, and when the words “us” and “we” come up in the service, remember that countless others around the world are saying the very same words.

Prayer is all about holy habits. Having a little corner to yourself, twenty minutes of your own in the morning, the wherewithal to remember to do the rosary on the little bumps on your steering wheel, or to say the Jesus prayer when you are standing in line at the grocery store. (Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. That is an ancient prayer. Say that unceasingly, and you will be called the child of God.) The other thing about prayer is that it is extremely hard to do by yourself. We need direction, instruction, encouragement. This is a goal of mine here at Resurrection: to build a practicing church. Let’s be observant Christians together. We have started saying morning prayer on Fridays. Keep your eyes open for some more opportunities to learn to pray well together.

Then there is Mortification… dealing with yourself… Mortification is all about building healthy habits and we do that by grace alone, because attending to ourselves, making better, healthier decisions for ourselves, it is not easy. Windy and I have dropped coffee from our lives. Wine, too, but for special occasions. No fun, but, but, better. Our life is better (crankier in the morning, but better). We stick to it by grace, as Flannery O’Connor wrote that “all human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” By grace we find the strength to live better than we might, certainly better than we want to. Eat better, develop some disciplines around food like Mark Bitman’s vegan before 6 idea of eating meat only at dinner. Exercise more, or at all. See a therapist. See a dentist. A doctor. Get enough rest. Try to learn how to do something new. Start being the person you want to be. This is mortification of the highest spiritual order. It is dealing with your own nature, with the express purpose of growing closer, to aligning our lives and our beings with the arc of God.

Repentance is all about returning to God. It is all about coming with a contrite heart and a plan to do things differently. This is the definition of reconciliation. Our sin hurts us more than it hurts other, largely. Sin is usually some form of breaking our own hearts. And that breaks God’s heart. Join me, please, in turning back to God in these coming years we will be working together. Let us work on praying together, and better. Let us learn mortification, dealing with ourselves, our bodies and our souls. Let us rejoice always, pray ceaselessly, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. AMEN.

December 4, 2011, The Second Sunday in Advent

2011-12-05T09:35:00.000-08:00

December 4, 2011, The Second Sunday in Advent, Year B
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

Windy and I grew up North of Boston, home to, among other things, the Topsfield Fair. It is the oldest county fair in the nation, this coming year is its bicentennial. It is great: rabbits, horse shows, fired dough, real honest to goodness carneys and consistently the place where the world’s largest pumpkins are shown, and did I mention the fried dough? The record is something like 1650 lbs.. The last thing I did in Massachusetts before leaving was go to the opening night of the fair with Win and the girls. The fair looms large in the North Shore’s imagination.

Back in high school, I was on my way into the fair and there was a man standing near one of the entrances. This man looms large in my imagination. He was wearing a powder-blue jacket like old men used to wear, and he had a holder, one of those old cigarette girl holders full of pamphlets, religious tracts. Written on the back of his jacket in black magic marker were the words “Jesus Saves: Repent and Believe”.

“See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way; the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’ John the Baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins….”

That man in the powder-blue jacket was a voice crying in the wilderness. He looms large in my imagination much like John the Baptist does, probably because he was doing the same thing John was doing; being a religious wacko, going where he was not expected or particularly welcomed, dressing oddly, in general someone you do not want to have over for dinner. Mostly, though, both of these men, they spoke with conviction about repentance, the need to repent… No one, well, at least very few of us in Anglican/Episcopalian circles like to talk about repentance; I think because it begs us to be so repentant! No, actually I think we do not talk about repentance with any conviction because we too often do not talk with any conviction about sin. And let’s face it, the entire reason for the Christ Event, for the coming of God in the form of a human being is the whole problem of sin. “Lamb of God who….” The thing is, if we do not understand sin, then we cannot understand repentance. And if we cannot understand repentance, then we miss the point of John the Baptist and the guy in the blue wind breaker which means we miss the depth and breadth of the ministry of Jesus Christ whom they herald and if we miss that we might as well skip Christmas… so as not to be a grinch, let’s save Christmas and talk about sin. Sound good?

What is sin?

Ok, let’s try this on for size: Everyone pick up a BCP and turn to page 843. “An Outline of the Faith,” (Turn the page) “commonly called the Catechism.” Turn to page 848. Would someone read the answer to What is sin? “Sin is the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” How does that sound? Sounds reasonable. Sin thought of this way could even be forgiveable, no? The catechism is not policy, it is not something we need to accept word for word, it is a point of departure for prayer and learning about our faith. And in it is a pretty good starting point.

Sin: “the seeking of our own will instead of the will of God, thus distorting our relationship with God, with other people, and with all creation.” Another way to say it is that sin is anything that gets in the way of right relationship with God and Neighbor. What this really means is that the sin we need to talk about in church, what John the Baptist got all excited about, what God is ultimately concerned with, is not so much a law forbidding specific actions or behaviors, but a recognition that some things we do and think are disordered, they prevent us from seeing others for who they really are, for seeing our selves for who we really are, for feeling the true consequences of our own action and inaction, that lays road blocks between us and God, the true nature of things. Sin is that which prevents us from being what we are supposed to be. When it comes to sin it is not so much about doing as it is about being.

Drinking too much is sinful not because of the drinking, but because of the drunkenness. It is the too much part that is sinful, and for some of us, one Drink is too much, it treads into the world of sin. Ever tried to pray drunk? Be a good friend drunk? No. Being gluttonous, hording material things, be it food, possesions, money, anything beyond what we need is sinful because, first, having too much means others can not have enough (neighbor) and second, whenever humans get too concerned with things we are not concerned enough with God. Anything that gets in the way you being your best self, is sinful.

Take sex. (Really, how can we talk about sin without talking about sex?) Sex is not a sin. It something that people do, and joyfully. Men, women, transgendered, in whatever combination, it does not matter to God who is having sex, or even how, so long as it is done in mutual love between adults. Sex becomes sinful, becomes adultery or worse when sex is used mindlessly or carelessly, exploitively, violently, in any way that anyone is harmed, and that includes harming yourself. Unsafe sex is a sin because it can cause harm. You can die from it. One of my closest friends is going to die because they had unsafe sex; once. Sex before you are physically or emotionally ready for it can be devastating. It is not the action that tells us if something is sinful, it is the result of the action. And yes, we are culpable, responsible for knowing this difference. We are beautiful, wonderful creatures, and we are very fragile creatures. We break easily. We are horribly distractible. We constantly get confused and treat things more importantly than they should be treated. Idolatry, treating as God that which is not God, this is our primary individual sin.

More conservative theologies of sin focus a lot of energy on the individual nature of sin. In the choices and actions that you, and you and I take; that is where the big break in relationship with God comes. We are certainly sinful creatures, but the big sin, to be a big, big sinner requires group effort. Reinhold Neibuhr’s Moral Man, Immoral Society teaches us that individually our sins are small, and primarily hurt ourselves, but collectively, joined together in sin as a society, that is how the Holocaust happened. That is how 6 million people have been killed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo so far. 6 million and counting. That is how between 2009 and 2010 the homeless census in Eugene increased by 47%. That is how we have children living in campers in church parking lots, and who are glad for it. This is the result of what we call structural sin. Structural sin occurs when whole societies and cultures take on traits that prevent right relationship with God and neighbor. Structural sin the plight of women in Saudi Arabia, and many, most other places. Structural sin is the oppression of indigenous peoples in every corner of the world. Structural sin is the blatant and latent racism and continued segregation of our nation, he says to a vastly white congregation. That 1% can control wealth beyond imagining and hold all the keys to Caesar’s kingdom while student loan subsidies are being slashed by $18 billion, Social Security, Medicare and Medicade are on the chopping block. I have a 67 year old mentally retarded aunt on Mass Health, the equivalent of OHP, and her dental care was just eliminated. Sin. And she cannot get glasses any more. Sin. And in the worst employment climate in two generations, unemployment benefits are not being extended… When a society forgets its least of these… there is some sin of biblical proportion.

And original sin… we cannot forget that, but I don’t know. I take the apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to represent the archtype of loneliness. The apple had the power to delude us into thinking that we are separate, even different from God and from each other. We are not. I heard this story about the author Madeline D’Engle and I think it is largely true. I heard it in a sermon, so you never can tell, poetic liscense and all. Some friends of hers had a 4 year old and a new baby. One day the 4 year old went into her baby sister’s room and the parents overheard her saying, “Please, tell me something about God, I think I am forgetting.” Is that what growing up means? Putting on original sin?

We have homework this week. This coming week I want you all to think about sin. I want you to think about the things you encounter in your life that pull your eyes away from the prize that is God. Think about what prevents you from being happy. Whatever is preventing inner happiness is sinful. I want you to pay attention to the things that get in the way of you being a peaceful family, that derail your efforts to be a patient friend, a good husband or wife or partner, or parent or grand parent. Think about the things that keep you from being the clear reflection of God Almighty, the imago dei that you are in spades. Next Sunday we will get back to John and the man in the powder-blue jacket. We’ll get on with repentance. The answer to our prayers. The reason for this and every season. And until then, no sinning. AMEN.

November 27, 2011, First Sunday in Advent

2011-11-28T12:31:00.000-08:00

Year B, Advent 1 November 27, 2011
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

Sometimes things are not what they seem.

The end of the Church year, lectionary wise, is kind of brutal. Weeping and gnashing of teeth in the parable of the talents; the goats cast into eternal hell fires… and now this week, Advent 1, the first Sunday of the church calendar, the re-creation of the endless cycle of time we live in begins with Mark’s Apocalyptic discourse. “The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give its light…” Rough. It reminds us that Christianity, or at least Christian scripture, is not for the faint of heart.

What does the word apocalypse mean? Total destruction. Yes. Mark was written in some ugly times, somewhere between 64 (the persecution of Christians by Nero because of the burning of Rome) and 70 (the desolating sacrilege of the temple). What else does it mean? Revelation of the future, hence the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine is more commonly referred to as The Book of Revelation.

“Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down….” Thus says the Prophet Isaiah apocalyptically. So here is another Bible quiz. The heavens were torn open in the Biblical record when? Clue, it happened twice, both times apocalyptically; one representing the total destruction meaning of apocalypse, the other referring to the revelation of the future nature of the world. The first was in the beginning, in Genesis. The dome of the heavens was torn apart and what poured into the world? Water. The flood. When was the second time? The Baptism of our Lord. “And the heavens were torn open and the Spirit of the LORD descended like a dove upon Him.” “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down….” Sometimes things are not what they seem.

We are just starting Advent. This is my favorite season of the Church year. It is the season of creation, of waiting for the new creation in the incarnation of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Holiday wise, it does not get any better than this. Let’s put Advent, the season of creation in perspective with the larger Christian story, even the largest Christian story, our cosmology, our understanding of the universe.

To do this, we have to go back, way, way back to the rivers of Babylon where we sat down and remembered Zion. Israel was taken in bondage to Babylon in the 6th century BCE. As fate would have it, Hebrew writing and scholarship was coming of age in the time of the Babylonian captivity. It was the Axial Age, the couple hundred-year span of human history when the consciousness of our species collectively increased exponentially. Plato and Aristotle were running around in Greece. Confucious in China, Siddhartha Gautama (The Buddha) in South Asia, and it was the time when the books of Moses were first put to papyrus. The priestly scholars who began to write down the developing Jewish mythology of creation were scholarly enough to have become familiar with the Babylonian mythology of creation. This came in the form of an epic poem called the Enuma Elish. The Babylonians were going through an evolution too, and their creation narrative reflects this. Since Pre-history, we were all in the Goddess culture, worshipping the divine Earth Mother in Her curvaceous gorgeousness. Cycles of stars and moon and seasons reflected the dark watery mysteries of maternal fertility.

The Enuma Elish describes the “evolution” of Babylonian cosmology, from the centrality of an amorphous watery, maternal goddess Tiamat, in whose immense body was contained the universe, to the dominance of a young, angry storm God Marduke. Marduke got into a fight with Tiamat’s consort and killed him. Tiamat was enraged and the two fought. Marduke raised his sword and cleaved Tiamat in two. He separated the two halves and made them like a dome, and inside that dome, a more understandable life happened, one sheltered from the Chaos of Mystery. It was a decidedly feminine Mystery. “God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, separating the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.” That is our story; that the world we know is a contained by a dome cleaved from the Body of the Goddess to hold back the soup of infinite Mystery and Chaos. That is our story and it is Babylonian. Sometimes things are not what they seem.

The dome of heaven was torn apart by God first as a redux, to reboot. Things got off to a bad start and the destructive apocalyptic nature of reality was released and the Earth was purified with the Mystery of Water of Great Depth. The dome of the heavens, this thing constructed to keep the true nature of things walled out was torn open a second time when God revealed God’s self to us in the form of Jesus Christ, God’s only begotten Son, God from God, light from light, True God from True God. And he was here, walking around, being human. Being our salvation.

What I am saying is that this dome of the heavens is a myth, a powerful and pervasive myth, but one not true. This is what Christ reveals. There was the old covenant, then there was version 2.0. 2.0, Jesus Christ, shows us that there is no dome; that the heavens and earth are not separate, that dualities are not real. The Incarnation of Jesus shows us that being can be understood in terms much broader than what we can see and feel and hear, that all equations do not have to balance in a way we rationally expect them to. Look with eyes wide open into the eyes of a baby or the eyes of anyone you deeply love… nothing computes there. Nothing adds up, but it is the most real and truthful thing I have ever experienced, looking into the windows of someone’s soul.

Thinking inside the dome we dread the unknown. Thinking inside the dome we value only the seen, not the unseen; but God created that, too. Thinking inside the dome we fear the greatest gift God gave in the Creation act: Mystery. Mystery this is the true nature of things and we cannot continue to live with the mystery of God and the world walled off behind bad religious mythology. We need to say to the myth of the dome what Glinda said when the Wicked Witch threatened her and Dorothy, “Rubbish, you have no power here.” O! that we were in Munchinland with Glinda. The constraints of the dome are powerful enemies, but only if we let them be.

The theologian Paul Santmire writes that the church happens under a hole in the heavens. It is like right above us, it happens each time we gather. The heavens are torn apart and the power and the glory of God is revealed in the people, in us gathered around this table in the actions we are about to take together. Church happens under a hole in the heavens where Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior is revealed to us. In Advent we are again practicing waiting for His arrival, cloaked in flesh, an infant child born in poverty, into a world of empire and violence and despair and the indelible knowledge and hope that God loves us absolutely, unconditionally and eternally, time and time again no matter what. That is the story we as Christians hold up for the sake of the world. Sometimes things are not what they seem. And sometimes that is great. AMEN.

Christ the King, November 20, 2011

2011-11-21T10:46:00.000-08:00

Christ the King, November 20, 2011
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

Windy and I lived in Portland nine years ago. I was interning in a church up there. Every one remembers what happened in March/April 2003, right? Right. Remember the mess up to Portland? It was really living up to George HW’s moniker “Little Beruit.” It was my first introduction to Eugene as I heard at one protest, “The Eugene anarchists are here, they’re the worst! (meaning best)” It was pretty exciting.

Folks from the church I was working in were quite active in protesting the downward spiral towards war, and one nasty, cold, rainy night, like only nights down by the waterfront in Portland can be, we were part of a big candle light vigil. We were somewhat huddled against each other, backs to the wind, trying to keep warm and keep our candles lit. From a far I bet we looked like a glowing cluster of yaks. We were standing there in silence, praying, and a presumably homeless, decidedly drunk man pushed his way into the circle. He sat down, looking around. “What is everyone doing?” He had a loud, disagreeable voice. “Why does everyone have candles? I don’t have a candle.” And he started singing, kind of. I have never seen that many church folks look so mortified at once. Well, a young pastor there walked over to this man, handed him a candle, and helped him light it. The man said thanks and sat there quietly for the remaining 20 minutes of the vigil. I do not know if he had any idea what we were doing there, but he sat quietly and kept that beautiful, warm little flame safe a top his candle. As we walked away, he kept sitting there, doing a better job of keeping his candle lit that we all did.

“I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me… Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these…you did it to me.”

Does anyone recognize the term “preferential option for the poor”? What does it mean? It means that God prefers the poor, God is on the side of the poor. Does anyone know where it comes from? It comes from the world of liberation theology. It means that God, that Jesus Christ is most potently and palpably present with the weakest, the most at risk, the most broken and poverty stricken. The face of our savior is most clearly witnessed in the faces of the most beaten down by our world, by our community, lets face it, if not locally then certainly globally, by us. “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these you did it to me.”

Gustavo Gutiérrez was a Dominican priest who grew up in the slums of Lima, Peru, as difficult a city as there is in South America. And Gutiérrez grew up in the middle of it. He wrote A Theology of Liberation in 1971. The term “Preferential option for the poor” arises in this groundbreaking book. He lived in the world that most humans throughout history have known as a reality: a world of squalor, of sickness, of violence, of cold nights and dirty water and of really not knowing if you can feed your children today. That was certainly the condition of Jesus’ Galilee. And this little mestizo priest wrote, “I desire that the hunger for God may remain, that the hunger for bread may be satisfied… Hunger for God, yes; hunger for bread, no.” Of course tidings of great joy have also coursed through humans engaged in suffering and survival; it is not all terrible all of the time. This is what Gutiérrez and his contemporaries saw in the slums of Lima and San Salvador, and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. In the midst of body, mind and spirit bending poverty, joy happens. Love happens. Life happens. Christ happens. In fact, Christ happens most in the places of deepest suffering. That is one of the paradoxes, the great mysteries of our faith. Can you imagine anything more liberating? The more miserable you are, the sicker you are, the more depressed you are the more our God is there with you.

This follows in Christ’s teaching that he came not for the righteous, but the sinners, not the well, but the sick. God goes where God is most needed. And where is that? Where there is the most need. Where there is the most brokenness. Where there is the most pain and heartbreak. In the darkest nights, in the hardest places, in the most desolate lives, we will find our Savior and our salvation.
So if you haven’t noticed, I am male. I am awfully white. I happen to be straight, and married and with healthy children. I grew up loved and safe, and have kept up the habit of being well fed. I was afforded the privilege of way too much elite education. In short, I have to be careful about being too self-righteous because when we are talking about the least of these, I am pretty sure what side of the equation I am on. I am in the 99%, which I am certain God prefers, but I, many of us maybe in this place, are not among the least in the kingdom.

Does this mean that God is not with me, is not with us in our relative comfort and wealth and privilege? No. God so loved the world that not only were we given the only begotten Son, but we each were also, each of us given life. Full, loved, blessed life. This is a sign that you are loved by God unconditionally. You are. But the preferential option for the poor, the idea that God in Christ gravitates to the places of most suffering teaches us that God is most present not in our shiny, happy places, the places we like to lead with, that we bring out on first dates, but God is most present in our hurt. Our broken bits. In the sores we carry on our bodies and in our hearts. God is sort of like a holy T-cell, rushing to the broken part because that is where God is most needed.

By this rule it would mean that God is most present in me when I am feeling most cranky. So, let’s say at 5:00 most mornings I am most bursting with God? Well, sort of. How does this work? Some years back I knew someone who was going through a really hard time. Her marriage was complicated. She had young children. She was depressed and everything was stressful. She felt incompetent, she felt like a lousy mom. That must be a terrible feeling. I don’t think I would have known how bad things were going for her, or how badly she felt, but she told me some of the things she had been feeling, and doing and not doing with her kids, quite literally to the least of these, you know what, it was like she was held in the arms of a host of angels. Telling me some pretty ugly things, opening herself up to God and the world made what conventional wisdom says to be an ugly thing, a lousy mom, it turned it, it turned her into a beautiful thing, a child of God as hurt and broken as can be, AND who needs, and wants the light of Christ to shine in her. And it did. Brilliantly.

There is an old rabbinic teaching that tells us that God sits atop our hearts and it is not until they are broken that the Word trickles in. This is the heart of liberation theology. God is most present where God is most needed. When we accept our brokenness, our ugliness, our distance from God not as some punishment or mark of the evil one but as another opening for God to enter; the kingdom is that much closer to us. With the eyes of our hearts enlightened, may we know the hope to which we are called. AMEN

November 13, 2011, 22nd Sunday after Pentecost

2011-11-21T10:44:00.000-08:00

November 13, 2011, 22nd Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

The parable of the talents. This is a hard scripture to hold on to. It was hard to write on. Sometimes a sermon just flows. Sometimes it feels like the Holy Spirit is just dancing with my finger tips on the keyboard. Sometimes it feels more like I keep stepping on them like so many toes.

It is a hard story to hear. To the two who did well, who invested wisely and brought their master 100% returns, they were welcomed into the master’s joy. Who does not want to be welcomed into someone’s joy? But the one who was scared, “you reap where you did not sow, gathered where you did not scatter”, who buried the talent in the field, he was to be thrown into the outer darkness, where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth.

A preacher I knew used to have a good way to talk to someone who said “I do not believe in God.” The preacher would say, “Describe the God you don’t believe in and I’ll bet, I do not believe in that God either.” To be clear, I do not believe in, nor have I experienced in my life a God that casts anyone into any kind of outer darkness. I have, though, known more than a few people who have been cast out by their fellow humans, and those who cast themselves into some pretty horrible places all by them selves.

This is a hard scripture because there is noting neat or tidy about it. It is not pretty. And worse yet, it describes a lot of people’s experience of the world. Fearfulness. Enslavement to all sorts of things. The arbitrary nature of good fortune. I mean why did one slave have five talents, another two and the last one to begin with? Sometimes there are clear answers for why some have and some have-not: structural racism; cycles of generational poverty; the insidiousness of domestic violence and sexual abuse; the heavy burden of mental and physical illness. Addiction. And then sometimes… not so much, we do not have clear answers. We do not have a theological category for bad luck. Nothing tidy in this parable.

Here is the context. Matthew was writing not too long after 70 CE. Who knows what happed in 70 in Matthew’s neighborhood? Right, the destruction of the Temple by the Roman imperial legions. It would be like Wall Street, Washington DC and every major religious group’s national headquarters were simultaneously destroyed by an occupying army. It was a desolating sacrilege.

Even in this time of utter fragmentation of a society, there were those who clung to the temple cult. The Judiasm of Deuteronomy, where YHWH demanded blood offerings in a specific place, the Temple in Jerusalem. It was folly. The Temple was not going to be rebuilt. This was the beginning of the Diaspora. It had been a precious thing, this cult, but its leaders were fearfully protecting their tradition, hiding it under a bushel; burying it in a field.

At the same time, in that season of desolating sacrilege, even in that dark time there was a tiny sect of people who followed the Way. It was the Way of a messianic peasant dissident who had been executed by the Romans at the behest of the collaborators who led the Temple and the government. Their Way was an immanently optimistic way. Their leader, Jesus, martyred 40 years prior, had risen from the dead and was expected to return. Expected any day. Any day. For 40 years, the followers of this way, a way not even calling itself Christian yet, expected His return any day. And they knew that they had something really good. Really, really Good. Good news about a God that was available, freely offered to everyone, not just Jews like themselves, but to everyone, starting with the Greek speaking peoples Paul carried the Word to. And the folks Matthew was writing for worked hard, really, really hard to spread this word and build the lives they knew they had to live and they fully expected that any day now, any day now Jesus the Annointed One of God would return and the age would come to an end. And, not but, and, they kept on working and living and praying and having families, and telling everyone they could that God loved them and that to truly experience the love of God required us to love God fully and love our neighbor as our self.

The slave with five talents and the one with two, they knew they had something of value and they did with it what the master expected. The exploitive nature of these relationships, all the great Marxist critique of the nature of capital that this story seems to beg for is not the point. Do not get me wrong, Marxist critiques of the nature of capital are generally complimentary to a Christian worldview. The point, however, is that the slave who had one talent, one nugget of great value, he squandered the gift he had been given. If he had truly valued that which he had been entrusted with, he would have done something with it. He didn’t. His fear guided him. He wasted the opportunity he had been given and then the master is back and then came the whole outer darkness thing… bad choice.

So what does this mean for us? Well, in a way it means for us the same it meant for Matthew’s people. Of course, the Great Recession and the slow motion collapse of European economies we are not at the level of desolating sacrilege. But the Church is in decline. The way we have understood and practiced our faith and how we have lived as a religious community, like assuming a time when most folks went to church on Sundays, that we have enough money to do what we want, that churches grow… that time is over. We are entering the post-Christian century, and to my mind, this is a very good thing, the best thing that could happen to the church. Our anscestors left us a beautiful church of great value, but for too long, for the past fifty years probably, we have been hiding this beautiful thing in a hole, fearful of fate, of not succeeding, of losing something we are incredibly attached to. And the bugaboo looming on the fringes of our perception, that cruel master with the power to banish into the outer darkness, that is not a vengeful God, it is the cold hard drumbeat of progress, of evolution, of change… so many of us have been fearful of the church’s decline that we have hunkered down. Faced inboard. Steadied ourselves against the onslaught. Buried our talent in the ground.

What Jesus Christ demands of us and with loving kindness empowers us to do is to let that light we hold shine in the darkness. Our own inner light of God needs to shine in the world in the face of adversity. In the face of lay offs and sickness and heart break and death, when we can remember that God abides in us, always and everywhere no matter how dark the night seems, our light shines brighter even bright enough for others to find there way by.

And together, in the face of an institution in decline, when we together witness into the world the light of Christ, practicing living in the Kingdom of God by living like we are in the Kingdom of God… you know, being kind, sharing, taking care of each other and the world around us, living with eyes wide open AND not being cowered by fear… this is The Way; it needs to be Our Way. That is our pearl of great price sowed widely, and watch it will return 30 and 60 and even 100 fold. Those kind of returns would make the most greedy capitalist happy; imagine how happy our humble Lord Jesus Christ will be with our diligence? A light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it. AMEN

All Saint's Day, November 6, 2011

2011-11-21T10:41:00.000-08:00

All Saint’s Nov 6, 2011
The Rev. Dr. Brent Was

Ok, so my family and I just moved to Eugene two weeks ago. We moved from North of Boston, not too, too far from where Patti and Doug moved from. Today was my first day as the Priest in Charge at Church of the Resurrection down in South Eugene. So I am very new to town, but I have already figured out enough to know that the way to endear myself to Oregonians is probably not to preach on the wonders of Los Angeles, California. That’s accurate, right? I want to make sure I have the pulse of the community before I get started in my ministry here...

Has anyone here been to the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in LA? I do not know anything about architecture; I generally prefer a meadow to a building any day; but some years ago I was at a conference down there and we were introduced to this cathedral. It opened in 2002, and replaced the former cathedral which was destroyed in the ’94 Northridge quake. From day one in the planning of this building, it was going to be different. The building, and all of the major systems and furnishings were to be designed to last for 500 years. I was amazed by that. What do we do now that could possibly last for 500 years? Have you ever thought in that kind of time frame? 500 years… The design of this building apparently pushed the envelope of seismic design, the whole building floats in some way over this 100 foot deep trench. It has passive air circulation that cools it with no moving parts, and instead of stained glass it has windows consisting of the largest amount of alabaster ever used in a construction project. And it is beautiful, it is a post-modern mission style, concrete instead of adobe… it is just fantastic.

It did not go with out controversy, primarily over the $189 million price tag that many said could have been used to feed the poor. (Judas said something like that once, too, no?) It is a fair critique, but then again, 500 years from now, it will be the only building still standing that was intended to still be standing. Who but the church could do this? Who but the church can think in terms of 500 years?

I bring up the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels on this All Saint’s Day because of something I saw inside of that church when I visited. All along the side walls, maybe 20 feet tall and as long as the walls (the sanctuary is 333 feet long -1 foot longer that St. Patrick’s in New York) there are these tapestries made by John Nava. It is s cycle of 25 tapestries and is called “The Communion of Saints”. So first off, remember, these tapestries were commissioned to last 500 years. And to describe these tapestries, I need to describe the process, because this piece of art is the epitome of the process and the medium being the message, and the message is All Saints.

The over all effect of the work is that the walls of the church are lined with 200, maybe people, 20 foot tall people lining the walls, all looking directly toward the altar, all this energy in this crowd facing forward in this immense and amazing building in the heart of LA. So that is the effect, how it was arrived at is the magic.

So Nava started by taking photographs of 200ish of his friends’ faces. The weaving happened on these very special digital looms in Beligum, so the images are really from the photographs. Then he asked 200ish people how they prayed. Like, how they held their hands, what posture they were in. Hands folded. Arms out. Lotus position…how they prayed. So he portrayed the bodies in all of those various postures; then he costumed the figures in the dress of the period from an historical saint. Each figure represented an actual saint, and each figure had a label at the bottom. So the head and hands of his friend Bill became St. Thomas Aquinas and was clothed as Thomas would have been clothed. St. Matthew is there, a few of the Johns, I’ll assume that your John was there, folks from Springfield, you don’t leave out the guys that write the Apocalypses, Blood of the Lamb and all. Woe be it on the one who forgets the one who wrote about the Blood of the Lamb and the Beasts. Mary of course is there. And mixed in are some children and something like six anonymous saints. We all have met that kind of person before, the anonymous saints.

The process of making that art, this gorgeous tapestry that will hang for 500 years in a holy place. We are in it together. We are not alone. It takes a crowd to approach God. The message is the process and the medium.

I did not participate in a Mass there. But I sat in the pews for a good long time with the other conference goers, a collection of academics gathered for an annual meeting of the Society of Buddhist – Christian Studies. A pretty interesting group of folks to go to church with. It was not Mass, but I could imagine having Mass there. The effect was so deep. You really were surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, a legion that went before us, that is still with us, that continues to lead us, that we are part of and will become part of…The Communion of Saints. How many times have we said that line, “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints…” Everyone says that every morning when you say Morning Prayer, right? I had never gotten the meaning of that line from the Apostles Creed ‘til I sat there, really surrounded by that polyglot of saints from across time and space.

And look at us here. Our little slice of the communion of saints in this place at this time are gathered here’ we are from different parishes, from different cities, from different backgrounds, with different futures with different gifts and problems. But we are gathered here together, praying together, being a communion of saints. Now none of us have plans to be here in 500 years; at least not realistic plans of that, but here we are, Maybe this gathering will last 500 years. Not this actual gathering…

October 23, 2011, 19th Sunday after Pentecost, Year A

2011-10-28T11:22:00.001-07:00

The 19th Sunday after Pentecost, OCTOBER 23, 2011
MATTHEW 22:34-46; LEVITICUS 19:1-2,15-18
The Rev. Doug Hale

In your mind, what is the one most important thing about the Christian faith? If someone asked you to explain the Christian faith, what is the one thing that you would want to make certain that you told them?

What is the most important thing in your faith? What theme seems to come up for you over and over again when you are thinking about the implications of your faith? Some people might say: the forgiveness of sins, love, living a good life. What would you say?

The question asked of Jesus in our Gospel passage this morning is a similar question. “Which commandment in the law is the greatest?” What is core? What is your focus? Never mind that the question is asked to test Jesus, to try to trip him up. Jesus treats it as a legitimate question.

Jesus begins with quoting what is called the “Shema.” He refers to words that would have been on the lips of Jews every day, repeated as part of their daily prayer:
“Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone.
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
and with all your soul, and with all your might.” (Deut. 6:4-5)
The beginning for Jesus is the core of our spiritual life. It is our relationship with God.

Jesus doesn't stop with this. He has a second part to his answer. This part of his answer comes directly from our reading from Leviticus. (Lev. 19:9-18) There are a series of commands about how to treat other people that end with, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

In this day in which we live, where some advocate that enlightened self-interest is the way that will guide our economy forward, it is important to hear these words of scripture in another way. Love your neighbor, NOT JUST yourself. When we are making decisions about actions we will take, we need to take into account how our decisions will effect other people.

The flip side of this command is that we love others AS WE LOVE OURSELVES. Many people have been told from the beginning of their lives that they are worthless, but we are told here that not only are other people worth loving, but that we too are worth loving. God wants us to come to know that we are indeed worth much, that we are loved. It is from our love of God and for ourselves
that we find the ability to love others.

It is important to note that in our Leviticus text, the command to “love your neighbor as yourself” ends with “I am the Lord.” In fact, all of the commands in this section end with “I am the Lord.” “Do this BECAUSE I am your God.” Our desire to love God is to be the motivation for loving ourselves and others. The moral life is not just a system of values, it is rooted in our relationship with God. It is rooted in the person of God. If we are to lead moral lives then we need to cultivate our relationship with God. Our relationship with God is to lead us into loving ourselves and our neighbors.

Jesus has a third part to his answer. “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Today, there is a lot of talk about the ethic of love, that we should love one another. But often times it gets spoken about in such general terms that we don’t get around to talking about specific ways to love or to talking about specific actions, to talking about what love requires of us.

But Jesus tells us that we need to hang some specific commandments upon these greatest but general commandments. For instance, the 10 Commandments begin with “I am the Lord your God.” Sound familiar? And then we are given 10 specific ways to show our love for God and for our
neighbors.

The passage from Leviticus is a collection of fairly concrete and practical commands. They include such things as specific ways to care for the poor and direction on how to treat the disabled fairly. The reality is that in Scripture we are given a lot of specific direction about how we are to live our lives. Ancient Rabbis came up with 1226 commandments, prohibitions and precepts in scripture
that are there to guide our lives. That should be enough to keep us busy in applying them for years to come.

They are there for us if we are willing to open the Scriptures and read them and take them to heart. Some will be easy because we are already doing them. Some will be challenging and cause us to change our lives. Some will be clear and directly apply to our lives. Some will take some thought about how they apply to the different circumstances in our lives.

Jesus' answers point us in the direction we need to be going with our lives. It must begin with our devotion to God. Our lives need to be centered in God.

It then takes into account how God views us as valuable and then directs that outward to help us see the value of the people around us.

And finally, we are given a lot of direction in Scripture about how to love God, love ourselves and love one another. If we limit ourselves to what we might hear from sermons on Sunday morning, then we will miss out on a lot of what Scripture has to offer us in guidance. It is there for us to read for ourselves. Considering how it might be applied might be a good source of conversation during Coffee Hour rather than talking about the weather.

Fr. Doug Hale

October 16, 2011, 18th Sunday after Pentecost

2011-10-20T09:35:00.000-07:00

OCTOBER 16, 2011, 18TH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST, Year A
ISAIAH 45:1-7; MATTHEW 22:15-22
THE REV. DOUG HALE

So... How many of you were stunned by the reading from Isaiah?

Well, if you were a Jew during the exile in Babylon, you probably would have been stunned. Isaiah was presenting a radical proposal. He presents a foreign king, Cyrus, with the title used only for Jewish kings up to that time: Messiah, God's anointed, God's chosen one. Then they are told that Cyrus will be God's instrument for good for the people of Israel.

This would be like Jerry Falwell saying that God has chosen and empowered President Obama as an instrument for the good of Republicans, or for Jesse Jackson to proclaim that President Bush did the work of God for the Democrats.

Isaiah's message was a radically different view of God from most of his contemporaries. In his day, the common perspective was that each nation state or group of people had their own god. Marduk was the god of the Babylonians. Yahweh was the god of the Israelites.

But at the end of our passage, God declares, “I am Yahweh, and there is no other. I form light and create darkness, I make weal and create woe; I Yahweh do all these things.”

It is this God of all creation that is not limited to using Israelite kings to do the good that needs to be done for the people of Israel.

Now, if we skip forward to Jesus' day, we see that Isaiah's message has not gotten through yet. The Pharisees seek to entrap Jesus with a question: “Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?” The question is presented by representatives of the Pharisees and the Herodians. The Pharisees were probably sympathetic to the Zealots who wanted to throw off the Roman occupation of their country. The Herodians were comfortable with the arrangement of local Jewish leaders under the wider Roman rule.

If Jesus said “Yes, pay the tax,” the Herodians would have given him a thumbs-up and the Pharisees would have given him a thumbs-down. If he had said, “No, don't pay the tax,” the responses would have been the reverse. He could not please both.

But Jesus asks to see the specific coin used for the payment of the tax to the Roman emperor. “Whose head and whose title is this?” he asked. The answer was obvious. The image of Tiberius was on the coin along with the inscription, “of Tiberius Caesar.” The coin belongs to Caesar, so give it back to him. The Herodians were ready with the thumbs-up.

But then Jesus said, “Give to God the things that are God's.” Well, doesn't everything belong to God? Suddenly, no one knew what to do with their hands. The question was who do we owe the money to, Caesar or God? Jesus' answer was “Yes.”

The question to Jesus reflected the same issue that Isaiah had addressed centuries before. Isaiah's prophecy recognized that their were no easy answers to this issue.

Cyrus might be an instrument of God, but he doesn't know it. In fact, on an inscription we still have today, he credited his successes to Marduk. But, God says to Cyrus that he has been given these successes “so that you may know that it is I, the Lord, the God of Israel, who call you by your name.” Cyrus is a work in progress for God, but a work nonetheless.

Isaiah helps us see that what Jesus was getting at is that whether or not Tiberius knows it, he belongs to the one God and so does his coin.

People may not perceive Tiberius or Cyrus as instruments of God, but that does not mean that God is not at work through them.

In the early centuries of the Church, Church leaders encouraged people to pray for the leaders of the Roman Empire. They recognized with Isaiah that the Emperor could be used by God, so they prayed that he indeed would be used by God and that one day he would come to know God. It was not until the fourth century that an Emperor, Constantine, became a follower of Christ.

We may pat ourselves on the back, “Oh, we understand that there is only one God,” but it is not easy to apply the perspective to the specifics of our lives.

As the presidential political season heats up, we may have a hard time seeing certain politicians as being the instruments of God's good work in our lives. Some of the rhetoric I hear makes it sound like people think their least favorite President was an instrument of the devil, not of God.

There was a saying in Jesus' day, “Can anything good come from Galilee?” Today there seems to be plenty of rhetoric that is based upon the question, “Can anything good come from the other political party?”

But God is in the habit of using unlikely people: Galileans, Gentiles, Roman Centurions. They all belong to God. Right now God may be using some unlikely person in our minds whether or not they know it or we recognize it?

I have been a part of precious little conversation across opinions about the issues of our day there seems to be very little civil conversation that recognizes that the other may actually have something worth listening to
Yet, I believe that is what God is saying to us today:
“Those other people are my instruments for good.
“Give them your respect; Listen to them.
“They may have something to say that is truly worth listening to and you will miss it if you don't let down your guard.”

Look for the work of God for your benefit in those unlikely people. Take time to listen. Ask real questions, not rhetorical questions. Most of all, pray for them, that God will truly use them for good.

Fr. Doug Hale

October 2, 2011, 16th Sunday after Pentecost

2011-10-05T09:43:00.000-07:00

October 2, 2011, 16th Sunday After Pentecost
The Rev. Doug Hale
Isaiah 5:1-7; Matthew 21:33-46

Isaiah sang a song for his beloved's vineyard and Jesus told a parable about those who tended a vineyard. While I don't think I'll try to sing you a song today, let me tell you about my new yard.

Our new house has an amazing garden. There are blackberry vines, apple trees, peach trees and cherry trees. You would expect that it would yield a variety of fruits, but other than the very productive blackberries, the apples were inedible and the peaches and cherries bore nothing.

Clearly, those who tended this garden in the past were not concerned that it bear fruit. The trees have gone without pruning. It is as if it had been allowed to go wild and fallow. On the other hand, I am sure it has received plenty of Oregon rain.

So judge with me. What should be done? This garden needs a new tenant who will help it bear fruit. In the many places I have lived, I have always tried to work with what the yard already has in place, trying to help it look it's best.

This yard is the most challenging I have ever faced. It is the only one that ever had fruit trees, and I don't know if I know enough to judge what are the right steps to take for the path to fruitfulness.

I know it will take some drastic pruning in some cases and some dormant spray. And then I will have to wait and see if they will bear worthy fruit or not.

Unfortunately, I already know that a peach tree and an apple tree will have to be dug up and cast out, for I judge that they are already dead.

In time, I hope to see a restored yard that is pleasant in appearance, and keeps me busy during the summer gathering in it's fruits.

Being the recipient of the gardener's pruning saw may not be a pleasant experience. At the time that it happens, do the trees really know the difference between the branches cut off by a gardener's judicious cuts and branches snapped off in a storm? The shock to the tree is one thing when yearly pruning removes small amounts of the tree is one thing. But what is it like for a tree to have half of its branches removed because it has gone out of control and it is not producing worthy fruit?

What is it like for us when difficulties come in our lives and large portions of who we are are torn away from us? It can be deeply painful. And how do we understand it? Is it simply the vicissitudes of life? Is it God's punishment? Is it the judicious discipline of our Lord? Whatever it is, it hurts all the same.

How shall we respond to what has happened to us whatever the cause or reason? Shall we be angry? Depressed? Shall reject the idea of God's judgment? Or what?

Let me tell you about what else is in my yard that I do know something about. There are five rose bushes of varying conditions. None of them had been cared for recently. The aphids where having a hay-day, when we moved in. Four of them seemed fairly healthy with a lot of growth, but they had not been properly pruned and they had very few if any blooms.

By the driveway is an old rose. It looked like it had been through a war. There were very few branches and fewer leaves. And yet, when we moved in, it had two large beautiful white with red blooms. I was amazed that it could actually bloom at all.

I did a bit of judicious pruning and applied systemic fertilizer and insecticide. Then I waited to see what would happen.

One has produced amazing clusters of small pink blooms. This rose will do well. But three of the healthiest looking roses have yet to bloom again, but they have put a lot of energy into more branches and leaves. This winter, I will need to do some drastic pruning and then wait and see if they will respond.

Then there is the old rose by the driveway. It began to put out new growth. On closer inspection I realized that in that new growth were five new buds...amazing! One of them began to open yesterday. Clearly, this rose knows that it's purpose in life is to produce flowers.

The purpose of life is what really matters. What was the purpose that Isaiah's beloved gave to the vineyard? To produce fruit! What purpose did Jesus' landowner give the tenants? To produce fruit!

God gave to the fruit trees the purpose in life to produce fruit for eating and for the roses to produce blooms of beauty.

God has given purpose to our lives as well. Jesus speaks of people producing the fruits of the kingdom. Isaiah tells us that God wants our lives to be ones of justice and righteousness. God wants our lives to produce to satisfy the hungry hearts and care for those who suffer. God has planted us for this purpose.

God has applied to our lives a myriad of blessings to help us grow. God has pruned us so that we might be better focused upon what we are here to do.

Remember in those times in your life, when it is so painful, what your purpose is life is. Take a lesson from the old rose. Produce the fruit God has asked of you to produce,no matter your condition at the time.

September 25, 2011, 15th Sunday after Pentecost

2011-09-28T12:13:00.000-07:00

SEPTEMBER 25, 2011
PHILIPPIANS 2:1-13
MATTHEW 21:23-32
FR. DOUG HALE

Our passage from Paul's letter to the Philippians is one of my most favorite passages of scripture. It is not a favorite because it is pleasant, but because it describes the very depths of the Gospel. It is so full that there seems to be no end to reflecting upon it and it’s implications for our lives.

At the core of the passage is what is considered by some scholars to be an ancient hymn of the church that Paul was probably quoting to make a point. The hymn is a depiction of the Son of God: Who took on human form, humbled himself, emptied himself, became a slave. He became obedient even unto death. He did not exploit, utilize or grasp his equality with God.

Our Gospel story illustrates this depiction of Jesus. Jesus was confronted with the question, “By what authority are you doing these things and who gave you this authority?” In other words, “did God send you to teach and heal? Why should we listen to you?”

But Jesus turns the questions around. It is not a question of him claiming authority nor that John the Baptist claimed authority. It is a question of “Do YOU RECOGNIZE John’s authority? Do YOU RECOGNIZE my authority?”

Jesus didn’t claim his divine origin, he didn’t grasp it, he didn’t exploit it. He didn’t take it and wack people over the head with it. Jesus humbly waited for people to recognize who he was, to recognize his authority in their lives, to get up and follow him.

He did not force the tax-collectors and prostitutes to follow him. They chose to follow him. What would the chief priest and elders choose? What will we choose?

This is the Jesus described in the hymn. He does not push himself on anyone. Rather, he allows himself to be pushed to the point of suffering and death. Yet in the end he will be recognized for who he is. He will be given the name above every name. Every tongue will confess him as Lord.

I am really drawn to this passage because it give me an image of not only what Jesus Christ has done for me, but also about how he approaches me. He comes to me as my servant. It blows me away that the Creator of the universe would come to me that way.

My wife and I have a friend in Turkey, who is a devote Muslim. Sumer has a lot of respect for us as people of faith. Our spiritual lives have much in common. But when we touch on this depiction of Jesus as the humble Son of God, he reacts, “GOD HAS NO SON!” He also cannot see God as humble. Rather, God is to be obeyed!

We Christians can struggle as well with this depiction of the Son of God. Some may see the incarnation as a passing phase before he becomes ruler of all. Some may so reject the image of God as Ruler of All that they cannot accept Jesus as anything other than a humble man. Some may find themselves in the middle, constantly fumbling with the implications of the paradox that God in Jesus Christ is both ruler and humble servant.

Paul's purpose in giving this description of Jesus is that our worship of him would lead us to seek to emulate him. He calls upon us to have the same mind that Jesus had: setting aside selfish-ambition and conceit, viewing others as more important than ourselves, looking out for others before we look out for ourselves.

This depiction of Jesus tugs at me. It is like he is tapping me on the shoulder and saying, “Go and do likewise. Have the same mind. Be humble. Don’t be impressed with your own prowess. Seek to be a servant of others, not there master. Don’t grab after positions of power over others. Do all this even if it means you will suffer and maybe even die.

It is much easier to use this passage to critique how others are behaving. There are bishops and bosses and politicians that are so enamored with there positions of power that they don’t bother to ask the question, do their people WANT to follow them?

There are spouses and parents and acquaintances that like bossing us around or filling the air with their precious ideas and never bother to ask: do people think my ideas are good? do they value what I have to say?

It is much harder to take a good look at ourselves and ponder, how we may step on other people’s toes, how we may be impressed with our importance in our family, in our work, or in the church.

Having the same mind as Christ is not easy. Even heading my life in this general direction is impossible for me without the inspiration and strength Christ’s mind gives to me. If I could not hold onto this image of Jesus, I would not be able to hold up to the challenge of what he is asking me to do.

It is the image of this humble God that makes it possible for us to have humility. As we hold this image of God up over and over again, it can transform how we thing about how things should be done, how we should act. Then we shall be on the road to having the same mind, not because he has forced us, but because we have chosen to follow him.

September 18, 2011, 14th Sunday after Pentecost

2011-09-28T12:11:00.000-07:00

SEPTEMBER 18, 2011
MATTHEW 20:1-16;
PSALM: 145:1-8
JONAH 3:10-4:11
FR. DOUG HALE

On the first opportunity that I get to be with you, I am tempted to keep the sermon upbeat. I could focus on the last verse of our Psalm and expound upon the glory of God with the Psalmist's words: “The Lord is gracious and full of compassion, slow to anger and of great kindness.” (145:8) and I could use Jonah's words: “...you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.” (4:2)

Or...I could take it a step further and see the story of Jonah as a call for us to emulate God's willingness to forgive, and see Jesus' parable as a summons to be generous people even as God is.

But in order to take the Old Testament and Gospel texts seriously, I need to go deeper. What both texts focus upon is not the praise of God nor setting standards for moral behavior. What both texts focus upon is how difficult it is for humans to accept God's forgiving and generous nature. Jonah didn't want the Ninevites to be forgiven. The first laborers didn't want the later laborers to be paid the same wage. The first laborers grumbled. Jonah was angry to the point of wanting to die.

It is not easy to be truly forgiving. Jonah and the Jewish people had reasons for hating the Ninevites. They had invaded the Northern Kingdom of Israel and carried off the whole population. Those ten tribes were never heard from again. At least once, they lay siege to Jerusalem itself and extracted a heavy tribute to leave them alone. The prophet Nahum described them as endlessly cruel and everyone who heard of their destruction would clap their hands. (Nahum 3:19)

Does this sound familiar, as we reflected back upon 9/11 this past week or so. There were the images of people in the Middle East clapping at the news of the attack on the US. There was the outrage that drove our country to war. And then there was the response to the news that Osama Bin Laden had been found and killed. We may not identify with those reactions, but honestly, I found it harder to object to such reactions. There was a certain rightness about them. There was a sense of justice to it all I think we need to be honest with ourselves about how we feel about certain people. Are there people, like sex offenders, whom we so fear that we would just as soon see them locked up permanently? Are there people who have so wronged us personally that we would love to see them get their “just desserts?” Are there people that while we don't sense that we are angry with them anymore, we really do not want to see them again. We have put them behind us and we want to move on.

Now imagine God coming to you and saying: “I have forgiven these people. They shall not receive their just desserts. I want you to welcome them back into your life, this community and this church.”

Who would you find it difficult to welcome and forgive?

We can talk about being a “Welcoming Church.” But the real test of welcoming is the willingness to forgive face to face. We can offer the peace to one another each Sunday, but the real test of the offer of peace comes when the person whose hand we take has done a real wrong to us and we are forgiving them.

It is not easy to be truly generous either. Why did the first laborer's in Jesus' parable object to the landowner's pay practice? It violated a very basic standard of justice: equal pay for equal work. We still struggle to meet this standard today.

There is a group of people in my wife's former church that will not be happy with hearing this passage this morning. They have already made it clear, quite vehemently, that they think the landowner was unjust. They get angry about it.

How about you? Have you ever experienced being paid less than someone else for the same work? Have you ever watched someone else receive more recognition for accomplishing the same thing you have? Do you have a sibling that you always felt your parents liked best?

The landowner's defense is that the first laborers had agreed to their pay prior to starting work. Historians tell us that they were paid the standard wage for a laborer for a day's work. The wages of the first laborers were just, in and of themselves.

What they objected to was generosity. Generosity of which they were not the recipients. They were filled with envy. Have you every envied what another has received and you have not?

It is one thing to be the recipient of generosity. It takes a gracious spirit to give generously to another. It takes real humility to watch as others fair better in life and accept this with grace.

Have you ever felt that life is not fair? How can life be fair when people practice unequal generosity? How can we have a just legal system when some people are forgiven? How can God be both just and forgiving? How can God be fair and generous at the same time?

What we are being told by these passages is that God's justice and righteousness include forgiveness and generosity. And what may be most difficult for us is that it is God who determines ultimately the extent of the forgiveness and generosity. God will not wait for us to be ready to forgive and will not be generous on our terms. God will decide and God's ways are not our ways; they defy our ability to make them into a predictable system of justice and fair play.

I think the only way to make sense of this is to change our perspective. We need to rethink who we are. We need to see ourselves not as Jonah but as the Ninevites. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as basically good people who are better than those who deserve their just desserts and instead see ourselves as people who have been forgiven much. We need to not see ourselves as the first laborers, but as the last. We need to stop thinking that we deserve the good we have received and instead think of it as God's generous undeserved gift.

That way, when we see others forgiven, we can rejoice that they have come to know God's forgiveness as we have. And when we see others fairing better than ourselves, we can recall the times we have been the recipients of God's generosity.

May 22, 2011, 5th Sunday of Easter

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Every week I am presented with a challenge, the lectionary readings. The stoning of
Stephen kept going through my head. We only get a small part of the story of Stephen in our reading. We get the tragic end of the narrative. I kept wondering how I can make this pertinent to today’s world. Honestly, it didn’t take that much effort. However, putting it into coherent sentences and paragraphs was a challenge.

Today, I intend to continue from last weeks homily that referenced the differences
between the practice of religion and the growth of inner spirituality. I will also touch on what occurs to a society in crisis, when long standing structures are breaking down and dysfunctional. The overall theme will ask what happens to our morals and ethics in the midst of breakdown and new vision for the future. Boy, does that sound heavy?

A short recap is necessary here: religion deals with the exterior questions of 1. what do I believe, 2. how should I behave, and 3. who am I. Spirituality deals with the interior questions of 1. how do I believe, 2. what should I do with my life and 3. whose am I.

The reading from Acts 7:55-60 is a succinct narrative with a number of complex themes. It also shows what happens to morals and ethics under stress, it shows the difference between religion and spirituality.

Stephen had been with the Council of the Sanhedrin which was the Jewish supreme
council and court of justice in Jerusalem. The council consisted of both priests and laymen. The laymen were Sadducees and Pharisees. The priests, Sadducees, and Pharisees knew the law of Moses. They knew the ten commandments and surly the Book of Leviticus which tells them how they should behave. They were the very essence of morality and ethical being. But, something happens to humans when there is a breakdown of legitimacy, when the culture becomes dysfunctional, when the prevailing order has failed. It seems that people who live mostly from the external religious stance, who know in their head what is right but do not live by the internal reality and experience of their faith lose their grounding.

Stephen is a man who is filled with the Holy Spirit. The Sprit gives Stephen authority to speak and to witness to whom he belongs. Stephen challenged these men with his vision of Jesus as the “Son of Man.” What angered these men was placing the crucified Jesus in close relation to God. It did not matter that Stephen was able to use the words of the prophets and Moses to back up his case. He gives a lengthy retelling of Israel’s history. He connects Israel’s rejections of their leaders, especially Moses, with his audience’s rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. He used really strong language.

What did the men in the council do when Stephen pointed out their failings? The
narrative says they covered their ears and with loud shouts all rushed together against him.

They covered their ears and shouted over him so they might not hear. That rather reminds me of what children at a certain age do when they don’t want to hear what mom or dad are saying. I have a confession. I do something similar when I just do not want to hear what political pundits are saying. I just change channels. I’m just not going to listen.

Morality can be seen as a set of answers or rules about how to behave. The Book of
Leviticus is dedicated to ritual and moral holiness. It is very precise in how one should behave and how one should believe. But what happened to “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” Leviticus 19 11-18 says do not render unjust judgments, do not profit by violence against your neighbor, do not hate your kinfolk, do not take vengeance or bear a grudge. Rage and anger can erase all our head knowledge. Murder happened. The stoning of Stephen could also be seen as just; Exodus 21:12-26 gives reasons for capital punishment. The one outstanding reason it cannot be seen as just is the killing was done out of rage. Stephen’s humanity was ignored.

We live in an era of rage, of lax morals and situational ethics. Now, I am not against situational ethics.

The situational ethics theory was first postulated during the 1960’s by Joseph Fletcher. It was intended to be a middle ground position in the Christian world of ethics between legalism and a stance that says there is no law—everything is relative to the moment and should be decided in a spontaneous fashion with man’s will as the source of truth. Legalism has a set of predetermined and different laws for every decision-making situation. Fletcher’s ethical theory is based on only one absolute law, which when applied properly, handles every situation. Fletcher’s stated we must enter every situation with only one moral weapon—the law of agape love. ( internet source)

What we witness in the stoning is the ethic of legalism turned into no law at all that turned into a legal persecution of the early Christians. Humans have a way of justifying their actions. Christians did this when they burned heretics who held “unorthodox views”. Stephen’s views were also unorthodox to the Jewish leaders.

Almost every day we are confronted with dilemmas that challenge our heart, our mind
and our soul. Fletcher urges those who are concerned about their ethics to use agape love as the test of action. In the sermon on the mount Jesus said that we are to love God, love neighbor and to pray for our enemies. Jesus constantly used agape love as the yard stick for our actions.

How will we live out our Spiritual life as we continue to move into the future with all its dilemmas, with all the different situations we will be confronted with? Stephen prayed for his persecutors to be forgiven in the manner of Jesus.

When we are confronted with difficult decisions it is good to have a community of
people to whom we belong and a God to whom we belong that we can go to for help. Our
Spiritual life helps us to know what to do with our life, our practice, intentionality and purpose. Working together in a relational community with intentional practice and experiential belief, we can continue the process of ushering in God’s Kingdom. Faith can transform the world only when love, peace, and tolerance are given more than lip service.

May 15, 2011, 4th Sunday of Easter

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I spent two days at our annual Clergy Conference this last week. The setting was
beautiful for it was at the Oregon Gardens in Silverton. Our speaker was Diana Butler
Bass a church historian. Her books are quite readable. I enjoyed “A People’s History of Christianity”. Her presentation was very good and very timely.

I am motivated to see if I can weave the story we heard from Acts 2 with what is
occurring today in our churches, primarily within the “Institutional Church”. I’m not sure I can pull this off, so we shall see. Note in our reading in Acts the people devoted themselves to the apostles' teachings and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Verse 46 states that day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home. Fellowship occurred in homes where they listened to and shared the apostles' accounts of the teachings and life of Jesus.

Some background information is needed here. The writing of Acts has been dated
sometime around 85-95 CE. The Roman’s have sacked and pillaged Jerusalem and the
Temple was destroyed. Luke’s account was intended to fill Christians of his day with an unshakable confidence in their future with the story of their beginning. They were a society in great transition.

The Jewish culture and religion were under great stress; there was violence, loss of
bearing and a breakdown in the institution of the Temple. It was dysfunctional because of the influence of Rome. The old Jewish religion which was dependent on the Institutional structure of the Temple no longer existed. Certain people were without jobs, what was a priest to do without a temple? Sacrifices came to a halt. The population was at odds with itself. Those in authority started to look for scapegoats to cast blame.

William McLoughlin writes that following the breakdown come visions of a new
way of being. There are new insights, new understandings of identity and new moral and ethical possibilities. This is precisely what was going on in acts and there are many who say it is what is going on now.

The old Religious Model offered three questions: 1. What do I believe? These are
generally the regulations, the doctrines, creeds and dogmas. 2. How should I behave?
These incorporate the rules, the techniques of worship, the programs the institution has set in motion. And 3. Who Am I? The question is answered by membership in the institution and biology which was either Jewish or Gentile. All of these questions deal with the external.

Something new was emerging, a spirituality that was internal. The questions
changed to 1. How do I believe? (What is my experience with my faith, with whom do I
place my trust, what does it lead me to see as a future) 2. What should I do with my life? This question leads to intentionality and purpose of practice. The people of “The Way” became different from the greater community by the way they helped one another and those in need. 3. Whose am I? Relationship with God and in the risen Christ defined to whom they belonged. They belonged to God by faith, by the presence the Christ and the presence of the Holy Spirit.

It is no secret that the Christian Religion as an institution seems to be broken. There have been numerous polls taken on the church and belief for years. Diana Bass stated that not all questions have been answered honestly. In the Eastern and Southern section of the US actual church attendance does not match the number of people who say they attend church regularly. She did say that Oregonians are at least honest perhaps because we don’t care if mother knows we are not going to church.

There is an interesting movement going on. In 1999 only 6% of the people polled
said they were both religious and spiritual. Religious meant they attended some type of external institutional faith organization and spiritual meant they also have practices that developed inner growth such as meditation, yoga, prayer, labyrinth walks, study groups that focused on being in touch with the Divine. In 2009 48% said they were both Spiritual and Religious. There is a combining of external religious participation and growth in spiritual awareness.

The number of people attending church is down, but the quality of the spiritual
experience with the living Christ is increasing with those who are attending church. The American Institutional Church is in the middle of change. We can lead, do nothing, or go backwards looking for a past experience as an institution or as a congregation.

What are the perceptions that youths between the ages of 16 and 29 have of the
church? If we look at those outside the church we would see that 91% see us as
homophobic, 87% judgmental, 85% hypocritical, 75% too political and militaristic, 72%
see us as out of touch with reality, and 68% say we are boring. These have nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus.

The attitudes of young people who were raised in the church are not so different
80% say we are homophobic, 52% say we are judgmental, 47% hypocritical, 50% too
political, 32% out of touch, and only 27% see us as boring.

Back to the Spiritual awaking in Acts that changed the world. They did not have
programs. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching which were the teachings of Jesus. They got together to share common meals (potlucks), and they were missional. They reached out to those around them that were in need. They practiced the radical hospitality of Jesus. Many mainline churches, for the most part, are doing this but it is my opinion that the media doesn’t broadcast it because it's boring. They would rather focus on the more outrageous and sensational. Do they ever show what Episcopal Relief and Development does around the world and here in the US?
As long as we, here at Resurrection, know how we believe and experience our
relationship with the Holy Triune God, as long as we know how we are intentional in our faith practice and our purpose for being Christian and to whom we belong, we are moving boldly into the future with the God who makes all things new again. We will be leading the new transformation of the church into a vibrant life that brings the Kingdom of God into reality. It is not about quantity it is about quality. Resurrection is a congregation that enhances the quality of life around you. Continue to see yourselves as the leaders of a renewed vitality in a faith in God and God’s Kingdom on earth.

Easter Vigil, April 23, 2011

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April 23, 2011, Easter Vigil
The Rev. Jo Miller

Matthew:
There is no simple way of speaking of the resurrection. The dawn is
interrupted by the earth’s quaking and the appearance of an angel. It is as though he
rides in on the earth’s quaking, flashing like lightning and dressed in snow!!. He is
powerful enough to roll away the stone in front of the tomb and then, calmly sits on
it!!! Then the angel turns to the women and says, “ Do not fear.”

In the full scope of human history it is hard to hang on to hope and live
without fear. However, that is what we are called to do, live in hope.

The angel’s full blown message is heard: he, the very crucified one, has been
raised, and he is going ahead of you to Galilee, where he will gather you around him
in forgiveness and for a renewed sense of mission. The living Spirit of Jesus today
meets us where his ministry is: to the calling of disciples who will follow his
teachings, to the crowds who are suffering and need healing, to those who are weary
and need rest, to the oppressed who need to be freed, to the lost who need to be
found, to the hard hearted who need love and compassion. God continues to
reconcile the world unto God’s self.

Jesus broke free from the bonds of death that we not even fear death, but live
a life full as we can. The risen Christ meets us here where healing and wholeness is
a reality.

The encounter with the risen Christ is not a self-contained, solitary spiritual
experience. It is an invitation to join God’s mission, to be a conduit of grace, mercy, kindness, love, and forgiveness.

Amen

Easter Day, April 24, 2011

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Easter Day, April 24, 2011
The Rev. Jo Miller

“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." A
quotation from Lewis Carol’s book, Alice in Wonderland. The book has several wonderful quotes. This one I particularly like and in the lastest movies it is used in an appropriate way. As Alice is walking toward her destiny she starts reciting six impossible things which turn out to be real. In my growing up I have heard another phrase, “If I can’t see it I don’t believe it.”

Believing in impossible things. Several nights ago on a science channel there was a
program on our sun. I became mesmerized with the young physicist who was explaining
the sun and so many of its properties. Our sun is an amazing star.

The scientist talked about Solar Winds- Soar winds stream off of the sun in all
directions at speeds of about 1 million miles per hour. How can scientists clock the speed of solar winds and how can they clock it at 1 million miles an hour? To me that is impossible. I can’t begin to wrap my head around a million miles an hour. But it is real.

The speed of the winds coming at our atmosphere could blow it away but it doesn’t.
I was so entranced at that moment that I missed the reason our atmosphere doesn't fly off into interstellar space. Some told me at the 8 am service that it was our magnetic poles that prevent those winds from blowing us away. Amazing. There are probes that have moved deep into the Milky Way and beyond that track the solar winds, a billion or more miles out in space and the solar winds are still blowing at phenomenal speeds. The impossibility of it all but it's real.

There were so many impossible things at the beginning of the 20th century that we
take for granted. My grandparents would have never believed that you could put a contract in a machine in Eugene and FAX it to Australia in minutes. Now we just create a PDF file and e-mail them. All these documents now just fly through the air leaping from one satellite to another with great speed and not one period gets lost from the document. Impossible, but real. Telephones that are really computers that you can use as a telephone, or a camera, or a miniature typewriter that you can text a messages to the person sitting next to you. Impossible sounding, but real. The owners of these phones can download apps such as GPS that can tell them precisely where they are sitting while they are texting the person sitting next to them.

Why are we here this morning? Did we come to hear something new, or to hear the
old, old story once again. Swiss theologian Karl Barth said that what brings people to worship- not just Easter- but any day is the unspoken question clinging to our hearts and minds. “Is it true? Is it real?

Is it true that God lives and gives us life? Is it true that perhaps this creative,
pulsating spirit who seems to fill all space, who established the laws of nature, then broke the law somehow by raising Jesus from the dead? We can’t prove the resurrection like proving that the solar winds travel 1 million miles an hour through space and time.

There are people who refuse to believe that the earth’s climate is changing even
though earth’s history shows the earth has undergone many climate changes from covering the earth in a tropical forest to Ice Ages. Impossible things that are real and true challenge us all the time. They make us uncomfortable, make us change our minds and perspective.

The resurrection is not for the beginner. It is rather an advanced course to be
undertaken only after reading about and dealing with the man Jesus and his life and his teachings beginning with Matthew’s sermon on the mount. We need to read and marvel at Jesus’ wisdom, learn from him, become fascinated by his life, fixed on the person of Jesus. If we begin there perhaps we are better prepared to hear this mystery of the resurrection, this impossible event and see beneath and beyond it to a much deeper reality and truth.

The resurrection was not and is not the end of the mystery. On any chosen day we
may accept the indwelling presence of the living Christ or reject it.

I have read several “Saul to Paul” stories from contemporary, every day people. I
can choose to accept what they say or reject it. ( that can’t be real). One of my favorite stories was written by a woman who considered herself a quasi-agnostic. “Yea I think there is a God, no not really.” One day while driving her car to the store she was having an internal argument with the God she really didn’t believe in when the car was filled with a blinding light. She pulled off the road and sat in her light filled car and felt a very real presence.

She ended up going to seminary, becoming a Methodist minister, and then went on
to teach homiletics at a Methodist seminary. Impossible, but really true. Regardless of what we can and cannot see, or believe it will always take a leap of faith. There is something in the resurrection story that reaches into the deepest regions of our hearts and minds where both doubt and faith are found.

In the resurrection God gave us such a miracle of love and forgiveness that it is
worthy of faith and therefore as Paul Tillich says is open to doubt.

Realities about which we hold no doubt may not be large enough to reveal God to
us. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without
him not one thing came into being" as the Word flew across the face of the Universe going 1 million miles an hour the Word threw thousand upon hundreds of thousands of pixels into the Universe creating stars and planets.

Perhaps we can say, without apology, what we proclaim at Easter is too mighty to
be encompassed by certainty, too wonderful to be found only within the boundaries of our imagination. Perhaps, the resurrection is yet another impossible thing that is really true.

April 10, 2011, The Fifth Sunday in Lent, Yr. A

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Sunday, April 10, 2011, The Fifth Sunday in Lent
John 11:1-45
The Rev. Jo Miller

What I have learned as a supply priest is you can't give an Annie Dillard kind of
homily in most churches. You know the kind of homily in which you need a crash helmet
instead of a nice Easter bonnet and a seat belt in the pew to keep you from flying off the end or out the door. It is hard to find a place where old assumptions and ways of seeing one's faith is allowed to be challenged. Do we really want our barriers and boundaries torn down? I am referring to the barriers we have built to keep God safe in God's place and to keep people well defined so we know where to keep them or where we can keep ourselves safe from God and others. We also want to keep our fears intact. We are skeptical that love wins in the end. It is a human tendency, or at least that's the way I read it in the Bible.

Love wins. Bottom line. There is a fairly new book out by Bob Bell, an
"Evangelical", a pastor of a mega church in Grand Rapids, Michigan whose book is titled Love Wins. He is tearing down walls, barriers, and boundaries. He along with some other people are beginning to preach Annie Dillard type sermons and writing books that sound a lot like the Jesus I have come to know in the Bible. And you know what, they get picketed by and receive nasty e-mails from Christians.

The Gospel of John critiques the social relations and structures of the world that
Jesus confronted. Those structures back then are very similar to our social structures today that create, uphold, and sustain boundaries, walls, divisions, prejudices, and fears. Many of these social structures are generated from religious belief systems.

In the past two Sundays and today we have had three fairly long Gospel Readings
from John. They are full, rich, deep, multilevel dramas that confront certain social
structures that we read and hear Jesus dismantling. We see how our blindness interferes with our greater spiritual understanding, we see how fear of life and death can be overcome through the presence of the Living Spirit of God who dwells in us, who is the one in whom we walk and live and have our being.

All three of the main characters in our Gospel readings were given new life: the
Samaritan woman at the well given new life, the blind man given new life, Lazarus given new life by Jesus dismantling barriers. The very presence of Jesus was a demonstration of God's love and that God's love will win in the end.

Let's take a brief look at the Samaritan woman and the boundaries or barriers that
came down. Jesus a lone man at the well of Jacob speaks to a lone Samaritan woman at
the well. Barrier number one: Jesus spoke to a woman, barrier number two a Jewish male spoke to a Samaritan, barrier number three Jesus as the Christ of God spoke to an adulteress, a sinner. The love of God was present to her. In her conversation with Jesus, the Samaritan woman slowly moves from unbelief to faith, from darkness to light, from blindness to sight, from ignorance to knowledge, from misunderstanding to understanding. Jesus was just present with her and she began to see. Her growing faith that Jesus was the Messiah brought her justification by her faith as Paul wrote in Romans.

Let us now have a brief look at last week's Gospel. The three players in this drama
were a blind man, men who had sight but were blind, and the very presence of Jesus. The primary social barriers that Jesus broke down were the understandings of sin and
righteousness. These two barriers keep all kinds of relationships from growing and
especially our relationship with the indwelling Spirit of God. The man born blind
according to the Gospel reading did not ask Jesus to heal him. He did not know who Jesus was at the time. But Jesus was present to him even in his blindness and his ignorance.

Jesus was also present to the men who were willing to make religious judgments.
Our religious judgments perhaps are the most difficult for the Spirit of God to dismantle. Our religious judgments embody our fears, our prejudices, our hatreds and we have a tendency to make them noble by claiming they are sanctified by God. Religious judgments were one of the powers that sent Jesus to the cross. God was even reconciled to those who held those judgments whether we like it or not. Perhaps because we hold judgments against those who hold negative judgments on others.

Again, as with the woman at the well it took time for the man born blind to fully
understand who had touched him and who was willing to love him. It takes us time also. It can take a life time to accept the full presence of the living Christ in our life.

Now the story of Lazarus. Keep in mind the verse in Ephesians 5:14 that we heard
last week. "Therefore it says: Sleeper awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine in you. Paul in Romans 8: 6-11 speaks of the indwelling nature of God in the Spirit. It reads "If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ from the dead will give life to your mortal bodies also through his Spirit that dwells in you." Our reading from Ezekiel is also an articulation of how the very breath of God, the Rhouak, the Spirit of God can bring life back to us even if we had chosen to live in darkness, a life without hope, and a defeated life.

We read that Jesus wept. This is an emotionally profound testimony to the truth of
the incarnation itself, of Jesus being truly one of us to the point of sharing our human need for friendship and our grief at the loss of a friend. Jesus was there to have the rock rolled away that separated living from the dead. Life was breathed back into the one who had died. Love wins.

The tension between the hope of resurrection and finality of death is palpable during
this season of reflection. The tension between hope for new life and having to live in the death of the old is being played out in our news every day. Amid the painful circumstance and death-dealing social realities, we yearn for resurrection and the unbinding that releases us to dream beyond the boundaries and experience a renewed life. To dream beyond the boundaries we impose on ourselves and others impose on us is to imagine a world in which wholeness, well-being, health, and purpose are the normal expression of our human existence and to partner with the God of life in making the dream come true. It is to recognize that our world is not as it should be, while rejecting assertions that the socioreligious barriers that prevent persons from experiencing God's presence in their lives is impervious to change. This fifth Sunday of Lent invites us to consider the possibility or new life as in the resurrection in the lives of the many persons and communities who deeply need God's presence in the nowness of our existence. We need to live the life that demonstrates that God's love wins. That God's love through the indwelling Spirit of Christ
can continue to tear down the boundaries and barriers.

March 27, 2011, Third Sunday in Lent, Yr. A

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Sunday, March 27, 2011, Third Sunday in Lent
John 4:5-42, Romans 5:1-11
The Rev. Jo Miller

If there can be one over all, prevailing theme in the Bible, whether in the Hebrew
Scriptures or the New Testament it is relationship with God. Religion through many, many centuries has mucked it up. I think our human nature just relishes making something simple more difficult because difficult is better. My personal theology is that our relationship with God is a long Spiritual journey which requires faith. Paul Tillich wrote, “He who enters the sphere of faith enters the sanctuary of life.”

We have in our readings today in Romans and the Gospel of John two great
examples of what relationship with the Triune God means. Keeping in mind please, last
weeks story of Abraham who demonstrated his righteousness through faith - aka his
relationship with God.

A little digression is needed here to look at the literary devices used by the author of the Gospel of John and Paul’s letter to the Romans. We moderns often fail to appreciate the more sophisticated literary devices used in relaying important messages in the Bible. A large contingency has flattened the depth by preferring literal interpretation. At times that is the correct way, at other times the whole point may be lost.

Irony- the use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning, dramatic
irony is an effect produced by a narrative in which the audience knows more about the
circumstance than a character in the story. The early readers and hearers of the Gospel knew of the risen Christ. They knew something that the Samaritan woman did not know.

Classical argumentation is the logical process of reasoning. It can be elaborate. Paul was well versed in the use of classical argumentation. Unless we have taken debate or certain classes in philosophy most of us are not well versed in the process of classical argumentation. I suspect that is why some of us can get a bit lost in Paul’s chain of reasoning as he works his way to his theological conclusions. He does eventually make his point and we hear his point today when he wriets, "we are justified by faith." Paul’s theology of justification by faith is about relationships. He learned from his own experience that following the strictness of religious law would not bring us into a joyful, empowering, free, and full relationship with God. Thank goodness Martin Luther helped to unravel the simple means to a relationship that helped to bring in the Protestant
Reformation.

What does justification by faith look like for the Samaritan woman at the well? If
the law was her only access to God she will never, ever get there. She has three huge
strikes against her. 1) she is a woman, 2) she is a Samaritan, 3) she is an adulteress. She is a total outsider. In the eyes of the people of her time she is a nobody. The Gospel writer uses this situation to show us how we gain access to God through the risen Christ.

Where is the irony? What is the Good News? Those who were early followers of
“The Way” the early Christians who were read this Gospel knew who Jesus was, knew
what was meant by living water, knew what was meant that God is Spirit and those who
worship him must worship in spirit and truth. They knew what the Samaritan woman did
not know but will be lead to see.

The Jesus she first encounters at Jacob's well is only a thirsty Jewish stranger who dares to ask her for a drink. This is quite daring because by speaking to her he crosses significant social boundaries of religion, ethnicity, and gender. Jesus constantly broke down the boundaries that humans erected between themselves, others
and God. It did not make him very popular with the ruling group. Those
who view and understand the world literally and with high walls of separation do no do well with an ironical Jesus and an ironical Gospel such as John. Irony presupposes a distinction between appearance and reality.

The twist on reality here is the Samaritan woman thinks Jesus is the one asking for
assistance, help, a drink of water. She at first fails to understand that it is not he who needs help, but she who needs what only he can give “Living Water.” Appearance belies reality when Jesus says; “I am the bread of life that came from heaven.” It is hard to see beyond the apparent, but the universe is full of objects that we can not see but are there.

It takes time and effort to develop relationships; to accept a relationship for what it is, a gift. Some never come to know this relationship with the Divine because of the boundaries of fear, distrust, or seeing the world through concrete literal eyes.
In her conversation with Jesus, the Samaritan woman slowly moves from unbelief to
faith, from darkness to light, from blindness to sight, from ignorance to knowledge, from misunderstanding to understanding. Jesus was just present with her and she began to see. Her growing faith that Jesus was the Messiah brought her justification.

It is faith over the law that brings us into relationship with the Ground of our Being. Our job is to be open to the journey as was Abraham. O God, to you our hearts are open, our desires are know, and from you we can keep no secrets and you love us anyway.

*ideas from Ward Ewing and George Stroup Feasting on the Word Year A, Volume 2

March 20, 2011, The Second Sunday in Lent, Yr. A

2011-09-12T09:51:00.000-07:00

March 20, 2011, The Second Sunday in Lent
Genesis 12:1-4, Matthew 3:1-17
The Rev. Jo Miller

I thought it would be interesting to spend this morning with the reading in
Genesis which tells us the beginning of Abram’s journey. This is a story of a call, a
response, and a journey. It is a hero’s story. Heroes are not perfect, they make
mistakes as does Abram whom we know better as Abraham. We hear of his faith
and his righteousness. His righteousness is in his relationship with Yahweh and his
faith is demonstrated in his following the call.

“So Abram went, as the Lord had told him.” Abram’s story is both an
outward journey and an inward journey. God tells him to go to a place he has never
been before - go from your country, go from your kin, go from your father’s house,
go from your comfort zone, go from what you have always known and what you
have always done, go into something new.

At the beginning of this story we know very little about Abram. We hear little
about his pedigree, credentials, or qualifications to become the father of nations.
Why would God call Abram? At the beginning of the story we do not know. But, his
story is a thrilling one because he steps across the threshold into his calling, into the hero’s journey. In Joseph Campbell’s book, “The Journey of the Hero” he uses
Abraham as a positive example of responding to the call of the hero. No surprise, he
uses Jonah as a negative response to the call of God.

Perhaps, we know the ways of God through our own experiences or by
observing others who have responded in our church communities by taking on
varied lay ministries they did not feel they had either a skill or talent for; or by
traveling with those who have responded to the call of ordained ministry. There are
also secular vocations we may be called into.

We have seen that God does not always call those with the “best” credentials
or the most shining pedigrees. Peter the fisherman is a good example. One who
would speak first and then think. I identify with that. There is James and John the
sons of Zebedee aka, the sons of thunder, and then there is Matthew the tax
collector. It is amazing who God calls, perhaps it is even more amazing when we
see them follow.

We see again and again that a faithful response to God’s leading results in a
blessing of gifts and talents and skills in which one learns and grows.
God calls and Abram responds faithfully. Just because we have been called
once to one journey does not mean we may not be called to yet another journey
which uses the skills and inner spiritual growth that we gained on the first journey.
The city Haran from which Abram is called means “highway or crossroads”. This
text could be used to exam your own crossroads; the needs, callings, and challenges
of your congregation as well as the faithful response of individuals you know who
have responded to God’s call. Such exploration may lead to naming some of the
unique crossroads faced by your congregation and you have had a few. Perhaps, you can see how you were equipped to meet the challenges. The one who equips always
leads the ones called to a more complete expression of who they were created to be.
It is a holy journey.

If we look at the Gospel’s reading and Nicodemus perhaps we can see that
being born from above or anew or again may be understood as the embrace of
God’s calling of one’s true vocation which may mean taking leave of our own
self-directed course. A change of course may happen more than once. Bishop
William Temple is credited with responding to a question from a Christian of
another tradition when asked if he was born again. Bishop Temple said, “Yes I have
been born anew, I am in the process of being born anew, and I hope to be born
anew in the future.” He understood the spiritual journey of inner transformation as
well as his outer vocation.

So, we can say that Abram was born into a new reality. Every new birth is a
blessing and every blessing holds the possibility of newness; a sense of well-being,
or the presence of peace in the midst of change, challenge or hardship.
God calls us to go; will our response offer blessings to those who follow after
us? If our faith history reads, “So she went, so he went, as God called”, blessings
will flow for generations beyond our own faithful response.

*includes thoughts from Donald P. Olsen, Feasting on the Word Year A, Volume 2

March 13, 2011, First Sunday in Lent Yr. A

2011-09-12T09:43:00.000-07:00

Sunday, March 13, 2011, First Sunday in Lent
Matthew 4:1-11
The Rev. Jo Miller

First, I want to thank everyone who participated in the two Ash Wednesday services.
Both were good. I so enjoyed serving with Father Bingham. I was moved by both services. Since all of you together represent the Temple of God, God’s Spirit was present.

We know that we are in the season of Lent not only because of Ash Wednesday but
because we start the first Sunday with the Temptations in the Wilderness. This reading from Matthew is in the form of a Rabbinic midrash. Which means that it is a homiletic method of exegesis, a way of interpreting a biblical story. The temptation in the wilderness is not intended to convey objective biographical data. It is best read as a lesson.

The Gospel of Matthew was written for Messianic Jews. They understood rabbinic
stories that take an underlying historic truth and build a lesson from it. I have read several commentaries and interpretations of the three temptations. Some commentaries say they are strictly temptations for Jesus. But if true what would the midrash be for the Messianic Jews who were hearing this section following the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple? What do they mean for us as we enter into our Lenten Season? Let’s look at some possible lessons.

Some commentaries say that hanging over the three temptations are the tempting use of
power, the tempting of God, and the temptations of self-righteousness. Let’s look a little deeper. The first challenge is the temptation of turning stones into bread. Perhaps we can say that Jesus refuses to engage in this meaningless demonstration of power. Jesus is nourished through the Spirit in “every word that comes from the mouth of God.”

Perhaps Matthew is telling the early followers who were weary, hungry, tired after the fall of Jerusalem and the loss of the temple that their temptation would be to go back to the broken stones and try to reconstruct the temple, to go back to the old ways because their Spiritual nourishment had come from Temple worship. They had always believed that God was there in the Temple. All through the Gospels we hear Jesus teaching otherwise. God is Spirit, worship him in spirit.

The old ways are easier because we know them. A new situation stretches us, causes
discomfort, makes us work, and can make us feel we are in a wilderness. How many times do we hear the refrain: “But, we have always done it that way.” There are Episcopalians who are still upset with the “new prayer book.” The lesson tells us that God was not in the old stones, their strength is to come from being in the presence of God, in being spiritually nourished by hearing and following the words of God spoken to us through the Spirit.

The second temptation: Jesus is placed on a pinnacle of the temple and is prompted by
the Devil to prove his divinity by throwing himself off the temple. Surely, if he is God’s Beloved the angels will come to him. Do not tempt your God. What midrash lesson would be found here for the Messianic Jews? The people are in pain and their world is turned upside down. The mighty Romans have squashed them. Perhaps because of their choosing to follow “The Way” of Jesus friends and family had disowned them. And, there is also the Gnostic belief that Jesus wasn’t human anyway and therefore could not suffer. Matthew pushes them to understand the deeper meaning of faith in God. He pushes them to understand what trust means. Faith and trust in the mercy, kindness, grace of God are a prevailing messages in Matthew. Having trust and faith does not mean we should tempt God to have God prove God’s self to us.

The third temptation: one of self-righteousness, of setting one’s self above others as being special. TV, radio, magazines, politics, religions are rife with special people. Jesus was special, the Beloved of God, yet he walked the dirt roads, ate with sinners, touched the untouchable. Self-righteousness about one's belief system is a hard lesson. It is a sin that “all believers” are susceptible. It can be a particular problem when we claim our beliefs and our practices are the right ones. Orthodoxy, the system of right thinking and belief killed many people in the early years of Christianity. But, as we travel through Matthew we will see how
many times Jesus draws a distinction between “right belief” and faith. He said to those who were healed, “Go your faith has healed you.”

Last week's reading of the Transfiguration gave us a picture of Peter, James, and John getting smacked down by the light and voice of God. The same light and voice smacked down Saul as he was traveling. Saul had rather seen himself as special as he went about imprisoning Christians. They all ended up with their faces in the dirt, a very humbling position. The disciples and Saul who became Paul all had to walk a humbling road in order for their faith and love in the Divine to flourish.

We can fall to the illusions of power, taking the easy way out, to self-righteousness, but that is all they are illusions. The midrash shows us an example through Jesus how not to fall into those three traps.

Marcus Borg in “The Heart of Christianity” writes about the Christians’ unending
conversation with the Bible, our traditions, and each other. Borg says we can’t get our doctrines right because “Being Christian involves not just talk but transformation of our lives.”

If our Lenten Challenge can do anything for us may it help us to see the difference
between belief and faith. The temptations in a strange way were challenging Jesus’
understanding of himself as the Beloved of God and stretching his understanding of faith and trust in God whom he called Abba.

Faith is about trust in God. It does not mean trusting in statements about God.
Kierkegaard, a radical Christian of the 19th century wrote that faith is like floating in seventy thousand fathoms of water. If you struggle, if you tense up you will sink. But, if you relax and trust you will float. Faith is trusting in the sea of God’s being in whom we live and move and have our being. Faith is a radical centering on God of which our creeds point. This Lenten season our challenge is to deepen our trust and faith in that which is not us, in that which continues to create at the furthermost expanses of the universe, to open our heart, mind, and
soul to the Spirit’s leading and then follow, to let the God of the universe be the Ground of our being through the living Christ by the Holy Spirit.

*Alexander Shaia: The Hidden Power of the Gospel *Marcus Borg: The Heart of Chrisianity

February 27, 2011, Eighth Sunday after Epiphany

2011-09-12T09:38:00.000-07:00

Sunday, February 27, 2011
Eighth Sunday after Epiphany
Matthew 6:24-34
The Rev. Jo Miller

Sing: Seek ye first.

What are we seeking when we seek God’s Kingdom? Where do we look? I made a
search on my Bible Works program looking for the phrases Kingdom of God and
Kingdom of Heaven. Consider this approximate but the phrase Kingdom of .... came up
43 times in Matthew’s Gospel and 49 times between Mark, Luke and John. It seems to
me that the author of Matthew’s Gospel is stressing the importance of understanding what Jesus meant about living in the Kingdom of God.

Over the past 2000 years the Christian Church has not always understood this
concept very well. It has been boiled down by some to mean that place we go to when we die if we have believed doctrine correctly. Now that is put rather simply. A decade ago the prosperity Gospel was preaching that when you seek God’s kingdom you will get all these things, you will prosper. I Googled the term and not much has been written on it sense 2006. I think it is another fad that has seen its day.

I am going to present some ideas and you have the option to agree or disagree or
simple ponder. You do not have the option to nap. I don’t allow that during my homilies. It seems to me that the Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ primary manifesto, if you please, on what and where the Kingdom is. We could also call it his proclamation, his announcement of, his edict or his teachings about the kingdom. It is scattered throughout Matthew.

Our lectionary readings on the Sermon on the mount started Jan. 30 with the
Beatitudes. We might say the egg has been broken open right at the start. Jesus turns our human kingdom standards up side down. As I have read through this section a number of times, with some people I work with as a spiritual companion and just my own study there are times, I feel I have at least one foot in the kingdom. Sometimes I have only a toe in the kingdom and other times I am saying mia coppa, mia coppa, mia coppa. It is meant to be hard and it is meant to be encouraging.

The encouraging part -- the righteousness of the scribes and the Pharisees are the
bottom line. If you have ever watched the biggest loser you know there is the yellow line that if you fall below that you are out. So we can say the Pharisees are the yellow line. But, listen to this from Matt. 5:19, “Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the Kingdom of heaven.” They are still in. That sounds encouraging. But, are we to strive to be the least? There truly is a wideness in God’s mercy. But, opting to sit on the yellow line is not God’s intent for us.

In the Sermon on the mount we hear tensions between how we run our human
kingdoms and God’s kingdom, it is all very counterintuitive. Jesus puts forth a challenge to raise our moral, ethical and spiritual standards; to deepen them and fulfill them. He moves us from practicing external conformity of religious practice (the Pharisees) to the internal change of heart, mind, and soul which moves us into a living faith. We start getting our toe into the kingdom.

What does Jesus call us to do: briefly: 1) be poor in spirit, 2) be meek, 3) hunger
and thirst for true righteousness, 4) be merciful, 5) be salt and light in the world, 6) do not hate or indulge in anger, instead seek to reconcile, 7) do not lust or be sexually unfaithful in your heart, 8) to not seek revenge but find creative and nonviolent ways to overcome evil, 9) love your enemies, 10) be generous, 11) not judge, and 12) not worry. Faith is to be lived 24-7.

Perhaps the hardest part for Americans overall are the statements throughout the
Gospel that address wealth and greed. If we think of our collective behavior in America and how our lives revolve around status, wealth, and consumption then we should not be surprised by the recession we are in. The real kicker here is that the rich continue to get rich while the least and the last get even less.

So where is the kingdom? Matthew 3:2, 4:17, 10:7 says the kingdom is at hand.
Luke 17:21 says “The Kingdom of God is within you.” St. Catherine of Siena understood
it in the 13 hundreds when she is quoted as saying: “The path to heaven lies through
heaven, and all the way to heaven is heaven.”

Sometimes the kingdom of God starts very small within us- small as a mustard
seed. Sometimes the Kingdom of God is seen when God’s Spirit grabs hold of us and
brings us back when we have gone astray. Perhaps the kingdom is that joyful, peaceful
place in God’s presence and is experienced so fully that all who are there gladly do God’s will. I think of Mother Teresa of Calcutta. It can refer to time as well as a place, a when as well as a where, perhaps our life after life.

Brian McLaren writes: “If Jesus was right, if the Kingdom of God has come and is
coming the many ways described, if we do indeed have the choice today and every day to seek it, enter it, receive it, live it as citizens of it, invest in it even suffer and sacrifice for it then today our future hangs in the balance no less than it did for Jesus’ original hearers in AD 30.” It is always about choice. We can seek to live the moral, ethical life Jesus put forth in the name of God or we choose our human way.

Sometimes I know I have a foot firmly in the kingdom and other times it is only a
toe. Sometimes the cares of the world makes me blind or deaf to kingdom’s call. The
Kingdom is where we live and move and have our being. It is here, it is now, it is
wherever you go. We are called to live it 24- 7.

February 20, 2011, Seventh Sunday after Epiphany

2011-09-08T09:59:00.000-07:00

Sunday, February 20, 2011
Seventh Sunday after Epiphany
Matthew 5:38-48
The Rev. Jo Miller

Hopefully this Sunday I will be applying salve to the bruises from last week.
No crash helmets are necessary. However, this still requires careful listening as I
attempt to weave Leviticus, Matthew, and Paul’s letter to the Corinthians together. I
think I just saw some eyelids droop.

In Leviticus we have an excellent companion to the Gospel reading today.
Most of us have not read Leviticus. It was written for an ancient people who were
learning how to live an ethical and moral life together. Leviticus 19 is concerned
with internal integrity and outward behavior in daily life: in the home and in the
field, in our words to God and in our words to each other. All three of the Synoptic
Gospels quote Leviticus 19:18, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The
reading lists a series of laws designed to guide the people of Israel into holiness,
into the image of God. The text mixes singular and plural verbs underscoring the
role that individuals must play as moral agents whose action affects the well-being
of the entire community.

In Matthew we could say we are hearing the very heart of God. We see the
heart of God through the incarnational life of Jesus. We see one who loves the
unlovable, comes among us, suffers our worst, and rises to forgive us, who turns the
cheek, who gives the cloak, goes the extra mile and loves the enemy. We hear this
from the cross: “Father forgive them, they know not what they do.” Jesus gives us a
guide for living out the image of God in us.

All of Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount are difficult. How many
times do I end up saying Mia Culpa. And perhaps the most difficult is the
admonition to non violent resistance or the call to be perfect as God is perfect. Lev. 19:2 states it as to be holy, "You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God am holy."

We are seeing the power of non violent resistance being played out in the middle
east. What would it look like if American Christians could live into the inclusive
love Jesus demonstrated?

Now, let’s look at the reading from Corinthians 3:16 Do you not know that
you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s
temple, God will destroy that person. .For God’s temple is holy, and you are that
temple. Uh oh, maybe we still need crash helmets or at least seat belts. Now, the
word “you” throughout verse 16 is in the plural as in you all. Paul equates the whole
community, not just the individual, as the temple of God just as the community is
the body of Christ in I Cor. 12:12-31. These readings are not about American
rugged individualism.

This is clearly about extending our thinking beyond “me, myself, and I”. We
are incarnational people. Being incarnational we are linked with Jesus as his
followers to all people. Brian McLaren writes; “When I say we are linked and
bound through Christ’s incarnation to all people, I am not saying all religions are the same....I am saying that because we follow Jesus, because we believe Jesus is true,
and because Jesus moves toward all people in love and kindness and grace, we do
the same.” It is sweet when we belong to a community that is linked to Jesus this
way.
Resurrection, you all, you are the temple of the living God, you have a job to
do between now and when you call your priest, who is only one small part of this
community. You are to embrace the reality that you are the temple. A priest does
not make this place holy, a priest does not make this place a temple. Without you
all, the ecclisia, this is only a building. It takes all of you and at all times to be a witness to who you are; people who have accepted God’s grace, call to be holy, and called to share that unconditional love of God with the world from humans all the
way down to the rocks. Sometimes it is easier to love rocks.

As individuals you also take the Incarnational Christ with you where ever you
go. It is really hard to be this kind of Christian and that is why you have each other.

When one of you falls there are others there to lift you up. When one of you can not
find the love of God in you the others are there to love for you. When a few of you
are called to search for your next priest it takes all of you to hold them up and
support them and help them to find the person who will be able to bring out the best
of who you are. You are individuals drawn into the circle of the Holy Trinity making
you as one.

Paul tells the people of Corinth in Chapter 12:4 that everyone has a gift to
give to the community from the beloved babies to the cherished elders. He writes:
“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of
services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities but the same God
who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the
Spirit for the common good. You all are the temple of the living God and each
individual has been given the Spirit and the mind of Christ. What more do you need?
What have I learned from being here with you? I have learned that you are strong,
you are open hearted, you love this community of Resurrection, and you are
committed to the church -- What more do you need? Rejoice in what you do best
and do it even more.

Now a personal aside. My name will not be in the pool of names for priest-in-charge. My current calling is to be a supply priest and a spiritual companion. A spiritual companion is someone who walks with another as they work to understand who and what they are called to be on their personal spiritual journey. But, let me tell you, you all are easy to love.

*Feasting on the Word, Year A, Volumn 1
*Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodxy

January 30, 2011, Fourth Sunday after Epiphany

2011-09-08T09:51:00.000-07:00

Sunday, January 30, 2011
Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
Micah 6:1-8, Matthew 5:1-12
The Rev. Jo Miller

I am going to reflect on our readings from Micah and Matthew. First, to Micah and
the last verse in the reading:” He has told you, O Mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” It starts off with the Mortals being told to plead their case before the mountains. The mountains are being their jury. The people have been on trial.

Why is God putting the people on trial? Why is God so disappointed in the people?
If we read through Micah we will hear the indictments against the people. Micah 2:2 The powerful, the elite will take whatever field that they covet as well as house or household. They take them for their own. 3:2 He speaks to the heads of Jacob and the rulers of the house of Israel: “You hate the good and love the evil, who tear the skin off my people and the flesh off their bones.” 3:5 He scolds the prophets who have plenty to eat but wage war against the poor. 3:11 The political leaders take bribes for their judgments and the priests sell out for money. Change a few of the names and it could be a play on the condition of the world today. The indictment has been handed down by the time we reach the oft quoted
verse.

What does God require of us? The perfect cultic practice of our religion or ethical
obedience that faith in God requires? God requires more than empty words sung in praise songs, or chanted in high church, empty words preached or prayers said. Micah tells us that God desires justice that is measured by how well the most vulnerable fare in the community, such as giving the homeless a place to sleep and food to eat. God holds the leaders and the ruling members of any community, organization, state or country to do more than talk the talk. We are to walk the way of justice, loving and doing kindness, and walking humbly with our Creator.

Justice, kindness, and the humble walk take us beyond the confines of personal piety
into life giving relationships with God and with God’s creation: from the earth to humans all that is in-between.

If you think this poetic statement from Micah may be hard to live by day in and day
out 24 7, it’s like having to be conscious of whatever we are saying and doing all the time. And then Jesus really lays one on us in the Beatitudes. What be your attitude toward God, God’s creation, and one another?

In the lyrical and poetic blessing we hear supportive and constructive attitudes of the heart - a path way on our spiritual journey as disciples of Jesus. Jesus pushes us to think in new ways of being. All through Matthew we hear that the perfect practice of religious rites and rules does not bring rewards in the kingdom.

The Beatitudes often sound onerous to our post modern mind. Alexander J. Shaia in
his book “The Hidden Power of the Gospels” restates them in a way we may better
understand.

Accept that we do not and will not know results in advance. We often feel “poor
in spirit.”

Make farewells to our yesterdays and embrace the grief we feel.

Be humble in our willingness to journey. Yielding to exile will yield riches of
Spirit.
Know that our true hunger and thirst are for Spirit, and only Spirit, despite all
trials and temptations.
Greet all we encounter, within and without, in mercy, and reap the rewards of
gratitude.
Be full of heart. Do not seek to remove any thought, any feeling, or any person
from our inner life. Each is an aspect of Spirit. Welcome them all.
Believe in “Jeru-Shalom” as a home of welcome that accommodates the true
peace of respect for differing voices, if we will but listen.
Accept inner and outer hardship as needed fro the sake of living a new life in the
presence of God. Power and applause are not what we seek.
Anticipate lack of esteem. Be prepared instead for conflict and meet it with
respect and love.

The Beatitudes open us to compassion for our self and for others. They can become a
help on our journey on this beautiful earth. Yesterday’s wisdom is as wise for us today as it was in Micah’s time and in Jesus’ time. Micah calls us to a higher level of ethical living as does Jesus, as does our Creator. When our son was taking a class on business ethics he wanted the bottom line on ethics. He asked, what are our ethics today in business? The instructor said, “If you can get away with it, it is ethical.” Think about where we are right now and we are living the results of the kind of ethical walk that does not do justice, that does not love kindness and does not walk humbly.

The ethics of God often are contrary to those of humans. We can achieve these ethics
through practice. We can enter into spiritual transformation. We can learn how to walk the walk which is a life in an interactive relationship with God and one another. Jesus’ message is not hidden, is not secret. He tells us over and over O Mortal how to do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with God. He tells us in many ways how to love the Lord our God with all our heart, mind, soul and how to love our neighbor. Our ethics and spiritual practices are shown in the way we walk upon the earth.

January 23, 2011, Third Sunday after Epiphany

2011-09-08T09:47:00.000-07:00

Sunday, January 23, 2011
Third Sunday after Epiphany
Matthew 4:12-23
The Rev. Jo Miller

This past week I was in Corvallis with a few people, including Maron
Van, for a 3 hour class on Matthew presented by my New Testament Professor
at Northwest House,The Rev. Dr. Kempton Hewett. I was reminded of an
important detail regarding Matthew’s Gospel. Dr. Kempton brought up the
book “To Kill A Mockingbird” written by Harper Lee.

The story was written in the 60’s reflecting on the racial problems and
prejudice that were facing the nation but the story’s setting was the 30’s. The
story was layered with issues of the past and the present.

Remember this as we read through the Gospel of Matthew this year that it
too is layered. Matthew was written around the post 70’s after the collapse the
of Jerusalem had occurred. The Gospel’s audience is Jewish/Christian and his
story of Jesus is mindful of the predicament and problems of his own
community in the present while also reflecting on the life and ministry of Jesus
set in the past.

Matthew records the launch of Jesus’ public ministry. As the story
unfolds to us Matthew clearly conveys that Jesus’ ministry is going to advance
independently from John the Baptists ministry. In fact we hear an echo of
John’s proclamation in chapter 3:2 “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has
come near” in our reading today. Matthew has Jesus on the move. Jesus moves
from Nazareth to Capernum on the Northeast coast of the Sea of Galilee.
Matthew also employs the quoting of the Hebrew Scriptures to point to Jesus’
fulfillment of the prophets. Matthew signals the beginning of what God is
doing in and through Jesus by the declaration of his kingdom message “Repent,
for the Kingdom is at hand.” He came to announce, to invite all into, to
proclaim the demands of, and to usher in God’s kingdom.

In verses 18 to 22 in our lesson today Jesus begins calling his disciples.
This episode varies a good bit in each of the Gospels. Even though they are not
contradictory, the accounts vary in (1)what led up to the call, (2)which
disciples are mentioned,(3) what order those disciples are called and (4)what
they were doing when summoned. In Douglas Hare’s commentary on
Matthew he notes that Matthew’s portrayal of the call is reduced to its
barest essentials: Jesus summons with irresistible authority, and the men
respond with radical obedience. They drop what they are doing and leave
immediately.

Good grief, James and John leave their dad Zebedee sitting in the boat
with a tangle of nets coiled around his feet. We know that Peter is married
because in a few lessons down the road Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law. What
happens to Peter’s wife? No doubt there must be children. Jesus’ call is for
radical obedience. Hmmm. Not exactly an American trait. We need to also
recognize that they leave their professions. And, back then fishing was a
lucrative profession, as were carpenters who were highly thought of as were
most craftsmen. We also do not hear them asking qualifying questions, they
drop what they are doing and follow.

What they hear is a call to adventure so to speak. Discipleship can be an
adventure that, if we allow it to, can change our life and the direction in which
we are going. The disciples are called into a life of Evangelism. Several of them
had to get out of their boat to follow. It is really hard to get out of one’s boat
to do something radically different. It is really hard to just drop what you are
doing in your life to go and do something different. Jesus’ calling of his
disciples is almost scandalous. I think that is why, for the most part, we stay
safe and secure in our pews. We certainly do not like the way evangelism has
been portrayed to us in our generation. Many have a tendency to shy away from
the word all together.

Perhaps we can go back to what Jesus called his disciples to do, proclaim
the good news that the kingdom of God is at hand, is near us, is in us, it is now.
It was proclaimed by Jesus in word and deed and through teaching. He
demonstrated inclusive love, mercy, kindness, and compassion and forgiveness.
Perhaps we can see the mission of God as a spiritual-social movement
dedicated to plotting goodness and helping to save our corner of the world from
human evil- both personal and systemic. Perhaps it would be the radical
obedience of a community dedicated to the teaching of lifelong spiritual
formation as disciples of Jesus, dedicated to teaching the most excellent way of
love.

This kind of love as Brian McLaren notes would celebrate the good in the
Christian religion and lament the bad. It would invite people into a faith that
would experience formation in the way of Jesus.

To have this happen, though we would have to drop our nets and get out
of our safe comfortable boats that we are currently living in. It would be scary,
adventures can be scary. Like Frodo in the Lord of the Rings. He took the challenge to make a difference in his world, it was a scary adventure and it didn’t matter that he was really small. But, he had help all along the way. So do we in our church community and through the power of the Holy Spirit. Christ in us.

Jan. 23, 2011 Third Sunday after Epiphany
Matthew 4:12-23

July 3, 2011, Third Sunday after Pentecost, Year A

2011-07-20T09:10:00.000-07:00

Third Sunday after Pentecost, Year A
July 3, 2011
Dave Beuerman

Key quotes for today. First few are from MT 11; the last is, well, seasonally appropriate.

“among those born of women no one has arisen greater than [JtB]”

“John came neither eating nor drinking … they say [of JC] … a glutton and a drunkard”

“you [The Father] have hidden these things from the intelligent”

“no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him”

”For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”

Forbes: “The middle class has disappeared. Many of the millions of jobs lost … I don’t think are coming back.”

Today’s Gospel reading comes from Chapter 11 of Matthew; this is a very RED chapter. Not in terms of politics; I would have no problem with that sort of politics. Not in terms of finance; being in the red is always troubling. But in the sense of red PRINT, indicating the actual words of Jesus. Chapter 11 is mainly just that, Jesus speaking. It turns out to be a bit of a hodge-podge or a smorgesbord, today’s selection as much as any. It includes some quite puzzling sayings of Jesus, which cry out for attention.
In verses 16 – 19 and even before, John the Baptizer is mentioned. Jesus says of him, “No greater figure than JtB has ever emerged in history.” How would you like to attach that to your resume?! But this is also a puzzle: greater than Jesus, also born of woman (you may recall)? The only sense I can make out of that is, “up to now.” Also, Jesus says that JtB came not eating or drinking, and that He (i.e., Jesus) was seen as a glutton and drunk. The point of this is that folks who do not want to hear will always find some excuse!
Verses 25 – 27, the next segment, poses several puzzles, including do we have to check our minds at the church door? Isn’t the problem here mainly one of intellectual pride? Newton, one of the great figures in the history of science, remarked that whatever folks thought of him, he saw himself as a boy playing on the beach, finding, from time to time, the odd pretty stone – such as Newton’s Second Law of Motion, perhaps! In just the same way, the Saints show remarkable modesty. They know they don’t know it all! AND: we are told to love the Lord our God not only with our heart and soul but also with OUR MIND (MT 22:37, LK 10 : 27, ETC!)
Our minds as well as our ears must be open; more to the point, we must open them. And, of course, that means that we must be open to God. And that is done through prayer.
Another problem posed by this segment is: is Jesus the only way to God? Note that this is much more than can a non-Christian find the Truth through Jesus? The Hindu Gandhi gave a resounding yes to that! But has the Delai Lama not found God? That he would not use that language is not the point. Billy Graham once said that Jesus is NOT the only way; many Christians said that this was a very sad day. On the contrary, I think that most of us would think that Billy had it right. The idea of Christian exceptionalism – which really finds no justification here in any case -- has caused many problems and continues to do so, forming the basis of the religious intolerance which seems so ubiquitous in today’s world. As well as Christian exceptionalism, we have American exceptionalism, another problem; among other things, this masks political and social reality.
Next we have v. 28 – 30, the final segment, in which we learn from Jesus that His yoke is easy and His burden is light. This is very comforting, but is it true? Or, rather, in what sense is it true? For many years I have looked for confirmation of my answer to that. I finally found it in a recent issue of America, the Jesuit magazine, in which we read, “Gospel love is not easy to do, but is quite simple to understand.” Just so, Jesus’ message of non-violence is simple to understand but difficult to practice; so we don’t hear it.
Which brings us to that great patriotic holiday, the 4th of July. What is a Christian who loves his country to think of it, always at war, even at wars? And we now have in addition the war on the middle class and the war on the elderly, not to mention the on-going counterproductive war on drugs. I think that we can only revert to “my country, right or wrong,” with the important add-on, “when it is wrong, change it.” That won’t be easy with so much money and propagandizing on the other side, but non-violent change in the spirit of Jesus Christ IS always possible! And, yes, we will need our minds in the process. A great song for the 4th of July is “This Is My Song (Finlandia by Sibelius).” I’ll close with verse one of that, but first a word from our sponsor, the Kingdom of Heaven, which is also another puzzle.
Earlier in MT 11, when speaking of JtB, Jesus mentions the Kingdom of Heaven, which we have begun to re-learn is not just another place, another time. THAT world (The Kingdom of Heaven) is a world living in accordance with Jesus’ teachings of love and non-violence. THAT world is already here if we recognize it, claim it, become it. THIS world suffers from those who do not hear and do not try to live it. They do it violence and they do God violence.
And now for the musical moment you all have been waiting for!
You know, when you think of it, this speaks against exceptionalism of all
kinds.
This is my song, O God of all the nations,
A song of peace for lands afar and mine.
This is my home, the country where my heart is;
Here are my hopes, my dreams, my holy shrine;
But other hearts in other lands are beating
With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

Jun 5, 2011, The 7th Sunday of Easter

2011-06-06T10:41:00.000-07:00

TWIXT ASCENSION AND PENTECOST
Dave Beuerman, June 5, 2011, The 7th Sunday of Easter, John 17:1-11

Wachet Auf, Ruft Uns Die Stimme!

Today’s Gospel is “A Farewell Prayer of Jesus for his Disciples” but that makes it seem more interesting than it turns out to be! On the other hand, in John’s Gospel this reading immediately precedes the very interesting Arrest in the Garden. On the third hand, in the Lectionary it immediately follows the Ascension, which, again, is very interesting.

These considerations give me ample grounds for giving a review of readings, starting with Palm Sunday, which I had intended to do in any case. Except that this will be, perhaps, more of a revision than a review.

It always seems a shame to me that Palm Sunday has become, in effect, Passion Sunday. I suppose the rationale for de-emphasizing the Palm aspect is that folks may not turn up for Holy Week services. In the same spirit I should say at least a few words about Ascension, which I will at the end.

Still, we may have missed the likes of Marcus Borg’s story of the two processions on Palm Sunday, which really would be a shame. So here goes. Two processions entered Jerusalem on that first Palm Sunday. The one from the East was the Jesus procession; the one from the West was the Roman Imperial procession. The latter demonstrated the Roman Imperial way: violence, power and hubris, whereas the Jesus procession was exactly the opposite, featuring non-violence, love and humility. For example, recall that Jesus rode a borrowed donkey; very different from the Roman Imperial procession! To come to the point here: we need to ask ourselves as individuals and as a nation – in the words of an old union song, “Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?” I suspect if we don’t struggle with that, giving the usual nonsense about being on the side of democracy, we don’t really understand the situation.

Next stop: Holy Thursday, excuse me, Maundy Thursday. There is something very compelling about the words of Jesus here, “Do you realize what I have done for you?” One overall answer would be that He lived for us, He died for us and He rose from the dead for us; we might well add, He ascended to Heaven for us. But here the immediate answer is that He washed our feet – and we are to wash each others feet! There is something beautiful about that. However, taking this very literally and narrowly, this seems absurd. But then such readings are always absurd. Clearly, what is intended here is that we are to have compassion for others AND to ACT on that compassion, the focus being on the other, not ourselves. I think that you really could make the case that Maundy Thursday is the most important day of the year; here we find how we are to continue the work of Jesus. I repeat, we are to continue the work of Jesus!

In the Sundays of Easter, we often have readings from Acts in place of the more usual readings from the Hebrew Scriptures. One of the most challenging and therefore most ignored is Acts 2 : 44 - 45, in which we read, “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need.” One of many ways around this is to claim that the very early church was really not this communal. But still, there you have a reading from Acts which Marx took much more seriously that we Christians do.

Two passages from two Gospels on The Arrest of Jesus should also be food for thought, especially in a permanent war economy country. In Matthew 26, we read Jesus saying “Put your sword back into its place; for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.” In Luke 22, we read Jesus saying to the one who cut off the ear of the high priest’s slave, “No more of this!” Something I just recently noticed: in the passage from Luke, the victim is a slave, rather like the Russian peasants who might well have fallen in great numbers if the cold war had heated up.

Two thoughts on Good Friday. Firstly, we see here how much God loves us: that he allows Jesus to go through this awful experience of Crucifixion; can you imagine allowing your son or your daughter to go through something like that when you could have stopped it? Secondly, what is most important about Good Friday is what does NOT happen: God does not send in the Marines. The way of Jesus is the way of non-violence. Of all the hard teachings of Jesus, of all the main teachings of Jesus, that has to be top of the charts.

Has all this been too materialistic, not sufficiently spiritual, even not sufficiently theological? OK, let’s talk about THEOSIS as applied to the Resurrection and the Ascension; it begins with the Incarnation. St. Athanasius said “God became man so that men could become gods.” And – I am glad to say -- this is part of our Anglican tradition through Lancelot Andrewes for example. Jesus became human in the Incarnation, rose from the dead as a human and ascended to God as a human. His humanity then implies the possibility of our resurrection from the dead and the possibility of our ascension to God. By using the term “implies” I don’t mean to suggest that this connection is easily understood; indeed, finally it is a mystery, a sacred mystery. More importantly, it is TRUE. Indeed, it is one of the most fundamental Christian Truths.

THEOSIS is an important, beautiful and neglected idea. Perhaps it might be better to say instead of “we could become gods” that “we could become more god-like.” However, with the Love of God, the example of Jesus and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, who knows what we might become. We just might find the courage to end war and violence of all kinds. That would truly be continuing the work of Jesus!

I conclude with a reformulation, in the immortal words of the world’s leading authority, my wife, who, as usual, is right on. “Who knows what is possible for us if we would enter completely into the love of God.”

May 1, 2011, 2nd Sunday of Easter

2011-05-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

Homily May 1, 2011 David Beuerman

What would your response be if I were to say “Christ is risen?”

What would your response be if I were to say that this is the first Sunday after Easter?

OK, I’m glad we don’t have to start like that!

Karl Barth – or was it Karl Rahner? – anyways, some guy named Karl -- said that the homilist should have the newspaper in one hand and the Bible in the other. That’s sort of the King James Version; the RSV is - - - Internet in one hand, Bible in the other.

So what do we find on the Internet? Well there is trivia: the Royal Wedding, the President’s birth certificate and all that. There is also depression – in more ways that one! – as when we read that NEARLY ONE MILLION folks just applied for minimum wage, part time jobs at Mickey D’s! So much for the economic recovery!

Turning away from trivia and depression, we open the Bible, the Good News according to some guy by the name of John and we find – Alleluia! – two Resurrection appearances. One of these is without Thomas and one is with Thomas. Thomas is one good dude, slandered with the adjective, DOUBTING.

To me, the key themes in the first appearance are Peace, Forgiving and matters relating to the non-appearance of Thomas; the last of these we will deal with when we come to the second appearance.

Before and after Jesus shows his scars, He makes two statements, both beginning with the word Peace. This is certainly not just an accident and is more than just the start of a kindly greeting. Following this, Jesus brings the Holy Spirit to them and chats them up about Forgiveness. So, Peace & Forgiveness: any connection?

Well, if you will forgive me, I’d like to quote from the Buddhist scriptures on that point, this from the Twin Verses. [READ SHORT VERSION]. I understand this to say that if you don’t forgive, you will have no peace, you have no chance of getting your act together, let alone taking it on the road.

I don’t know if I can forgive YOU if you don’t believe The Buddha, but there is also St Matthew at the end of his version of the Lord’s Prayer. [MT 6:14-15 “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do NOT forgive others, neither will you Father forgive you.”]. I rest my case for the NECESSITY of forgiveness.

If peace is not enough of an outcome for forgiveness, let us turn to another authority: The Brothers Grimms’ story of Cinderella! At the end of one version of this, one of my grand-daughters’ favorites, we read that Cinderella forgives her step-mother and step-sisters (collectively, her “steps”), invites them to her wedding with Prince Charming and the steps were never unkind again! Not only that - - the steps learned to smile, as Grandma has pointed out. How to make the world a better place! A little forgiveness can have great consequences.

Even if you are convinced that we should forgive and that forgiving will have good outcome, there remains the question, how CAN you forgive? How do you even KNOW if you have forgiven? Do you have to forget? No! Do you have to deny that you were hurt? No! Do you have to condone what was done to you! No! Is there any simple formula, something like six easy pieces for forgiving? No! Do you have to assume that YOU will be forgiven if you nicely chat up the other party? No, one last time!

There are many highly recommended approaches to forgiveness; all of these seem to involve at least three steps. One is: 1) Awareness, 2) Acceptance and 3) Asking (for help). A more explicitly Christian one is: you are well on the road to forgiving if (1) You no longer HATE the person who wronged you; (2) You no longer want to retaliate; (3) You can and do pray for the other. The last of these is key. Here you may well need to include a plea along the lines, Lord, Help me to forgive. God will help you if you do! Good Luck if you don’t!

What does forgiving have to do with Thomas, whose absence was a big part of the first resurrection appearance and whose presence was a big part of the second resurrection appearance? I would suggest two things: 1. WE need forgiveness for calling him Doubting; 2. He does NOT need forgiveness for being a no-show at the first appearance.

OK, as to the first, we should admit, “Tom, old chap, it is a bum rap!” We need look no further than JN 11 and JN 14 to see that Thomas was a courageous believer and seeker after understanding. Even in today’s Gospel we find his powerful confession, “My Lord and My God!” We have given him this Doubting label on the basis of one incident [BIG PAUSE] how not to judge others! Besides an honest doubt openly expressed is better than pretending to belief where there is no belief. You might also consider exactly what Thomas was struggling to believe – that this was really Jesus, NOT who Jesus was -- and that, in the last analysis, he didn’t need more proof than those other 10 fellas.

Finally (together: Thanks Be to God!), we should forgive Thomas for not showing up at the first appearance, not only because it would have obviated the second appearance, but because we simply don’t KNOW why he didn’t show. We might make a case for community at a time of need, with the idea being that when the going gets tough, the tough get together with their community, their Church. We can face tragedy and sorrow with community support. Thomas may have been brooding about Jesus’ death alone. We need to grieve in our own way. And, again, we just don’t know why he was not there! We might also wonder why he didn’t take the word of the 10; should he not have believed those who were at the first appearance? Well, simply put, I think we just have to allow Thomas to be Thomas!

Well, I lied to you, I’m not done. There is one more thing. Maybe you will forgive me – at least if I make this brief. In the very last sentence of appearance two, Jesus might be seen as being critical of Thomas. But certainly the main point of this sentence is that WE can come to believe without seeing the scars, on the basis of the testimony of the Apostles, the Bible and Holy Tradition.

AMEN!

(From The Dammapada, TheTwin Verses in the Viking World Bible).
“He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me” – in those who harbor such thoughts hatred will never cease.
“He abused me, he beat me, he defeated me, he robbed me” – in those who do NOT harbor such thoughts hatred will cease.
For hatred does not cease by hatred at any time; hatred ceases by love – this is an old rule.

Easter Day, April 24, 2011

2011-04-25T09:47:00.000-07:00

Easter Day, Year A, Sunday, April 24, 2011
The Rev. Jo Miller

“Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." A quotation from Lewis Carol’s book, Alice in Wonderland. The book has several wonderful quotes. This one I particularly like and in the lastest movies it is used in an appropriate way. As Alice is walking toward her destiny she starts reciting six impossible things which turn out to be real. In my growing up I have heard another phrase, “If I can’t see it I don’t believe it.”

Believing in impossible things. Several nights ago on a science channel there was a program on our sun. I became mesmerized with the young physicist who was explaining the sun and so many of its properties. Our sun is an amazing star.

The scientist talked about Solar Winds- Soar winds stream off of the sun in all directions at speeds of about 1 million miles per hour. How can scientists clock the speed of solar winds and how can they clock it at 1 million miles an hour? To me that is impossible. I can’t begin to wrap my head around a million miles an hour. But it is real.

The speed of the winds coming at our atmosphere could blow it away but it doesn’t. I was so entranced at that moment that I missed the reason our atmosphere doesn't fly off into interstellar space. Some told me at the 8 am service that it was our magnetic poles that prevent those winds from blowing us away. Amazing. There are probes that have moved deep into the Milky Way and beyond that track the solar winds, a billion or more miles out in space and the solar winds are still blowing at phenomenal speeds. The impossibility of it all but it's real.

There were so many impossible things at the beginning of the 20th century that we take for granted. My grandparents would have never believed that you could put a contract in a machine in Eugene and FAX it to Australia in minutes. Now we just create a PDF file and e-mail them. All these documents now just fly through the air leaping from one satellite to another with great speed and not one period gets lost from the document.

Impossible, but real. Telephones that are really computers that you can use as a telephone, or a camera, or a miniature typewriter that you can text a messages to the person sitting next to you. Impossible sounding, but real. The owners of these phones can download apps such as GPS that can tell them precisely where they are sitting while they are texting the person sitting next to them.

Why are we here this morning? Did we come to hear something new, or to hear the old, old story once again. Swiss theologian Karl Barth said that what brings people to worship- not just Easter- but any day is the unspoken question clinging to our hearts and minds. “Is it true? Is it real?

Is it true that God lives and gives us life? Is it true that perhaps this creative, pulsating spirit who seems to fill all space, who established the laws of nature, then broke the law somehow by raising Jesus from the dead? We can’t prove the resurrection like proving that the solar winds travel 1 million miles an hour through space and time. There are people who refuse to believe that the earth’s climate is changing even though earth’s history shows the earth has undergone many climate changes from covering the earth in a tropical forest to Ice Ages. Impossible things that are real and true challenge us all the time. They make us uncomfortable, make us change our minds and perspective. The resurrection is not for the beginner. It is rather an advanced course to be undertaken only after reading about and dealing with the man Jesus and his life and his teachings beginning with Matthew’s sermon on the mount. We need to read and marvel at Jesus’ wisdom, learn from him, become fascinated by his life, fixed on the person of Jesus. If we begin there perhaps we are better prepared to hear this mystery of the resurrection, this impossible event and see beneath and beyond it to a much deeper reality and truth.

The resurrection was not and is not the end of the mystery. On any chosen day we may accept the indwelling presence of the living Christ or reject it. I have read several “Saul to Paul” stories from contemporary, every day people. I can choose to accept what they say or reject it ( that can’t be real). One of my favorite stories was written by a woman who considered herself a quasi-agnostic. “Yea I think there is a God, no not really.” One day while driving her car to the store she was having an internal argument with the God she really didn’t believe in when the car was filled with a blinding light. She pulled off the road and sat in her light filled car and felt a very real presence. She ended up going to seminary, becoming a Methodist minister, and then went on to teach homiletics at a Methodist seminary. Impossible, but really true. Regardless of what we can and cannot see, or believe it will always take a leap of faith. There is something in the resurrection story that reaches into the deepest regions of our hearts and minds where both doubt and faith are found.

In the resurrection God gave us such a miracle of love and forgiveness that it is worthy of faith and therefore as Paul Tillich says is open to doubt. Realities about which we hold no doubt may not be large enough to reveal God to us. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being" as the Word flew across the face of the Universe going 1 million miles an hour the Word threw thousand upon hundreds of thousands of pixels into the Universe creating stars and planets.

Perhaps we can say, without apology, what we proclaim at Easter is too mighty to be encompassed by certainty, too wonderful to be found only within the boundaries of our imagination. Perhaps, the resurrection is yet another impossible thing that is really true.

March 6, 2011, The Last Sunday After the Epiphany

2011-03-08T09:47:00.000-08:00

Sunday, March 6, 2011
The Last Sunday after the Epiphany
The Transfiguration of Our Lord
Preacher: Dave Beuerman

A funny thing happened to me on the way to this homily, funny in the sense of strange. The funny thing was this: this Gospel brought to mind too many introductions. I was going to mention the last one which came to mind – but this morning yet another came to mind as I remembered my original inspiration. So, we begin with two wonderful moments: in Cairo the army refused to shoot the protestors; in Wisconsin the Madison police refused to move the protestors out of the State Capital Bldg. For those of us inspired by the non-violence of our Lord Jesus Christ, those are two moments of joy, two moments to remember, and two moments of great promise. Just as The Transfiguration was a theophany, a manifestation of God, so, to me, were these two incidents.

Today’s Gospel continues the great theme – which began already with the Creation story – the great theme of LIGHT, as in Light and Darkness. God seems to be fixated on Light. How come? What is the big deal about light? What’s the problem with darkness? Simply put, Light is good because it enables us to see what is going on – well, at least it makes it possible. Darkness is just the opposite: in the dark, we can’t see what is being done to us, let alone who is doing it.

If anyone is still singing “Everything’s all right, yes … “, if anyone is still chanting “we are number one!,” I can only recall the RVS of an old saying. If you can keep your head when all those around you are losing theirs, then, my son, you probably don’t understand the situation! But who can blame us – we are kept in the dark and/or distracted or simply are somehow kept from knowing who is doing what to whom.

In many ways, these are dark times. Let’s focus primarily if not solely on one issue: the economic cost of war. Unlike some other issues, we can be non-partisan about this; after all, neither major party is willing to even talk about this. For another thing, we can easily – if not pleasantly – contrast the Way of Jesus with Our Way. I try not to be negative; after all, there is much light be seen. But – and you could look it up -- over the past ten years the total cost of our wars has averaged over 100 billion dollars per year. This does present an economic problem. The solution to this sort of economic problem? Cut teachers’ benefits; after all, they only work part time. And we surely can’t afford Head Start; we will have to cut social security; etc, etc and so forth, ad nauseam indeed. But finally, we can look at a country’s budget as a moral statement about the country.

Still, let’s try to be positive and look for Light under three headings: Jesus our Light, Light from the East and Light from Madison, Wisconsin; I would not be surprised if you were surprised by the last of these or if you wanted me to leave out the second. While we will find much positive in these, we simply cannot ignore the negative, if only by way of contrast.

So, Jesus our Light or Back to the Bible. In today’s Gospel, The Transfiguration, we see Jesus for what He is: the LIGHT of the World. Not to quibble, but I prefer Our Light to The Light because we need to be open to light from any source. A quick first example: for me modern physics sheds some light on the dual nature of Jesus: just as we learn in physics that light is of both particle and wave nature, so we can better understand that Jesus is both divine and human.

OK, back to the bible again. One of the great neglected lines of all time is “Listen to Him” – and consider the source! Mary says much the same at Cana. And so we should listen to Him; in fact, we also should also watch what He does and watch how He does it! What should we have heard, what should we have seen? The Way of Jesus is the Way of Compassion and the Way of Non-violence. Fans of the 4th Gospel will want to add, The Way of Truth; cf. JN 14:6 – “I am the way, the truth and the life.” Compassion, non-violence and truth are the hallmarks! I’m sorry to say that I find little of these in contemporary American politics. What we find here is violence and indifference, together with 57 varieties of ignorance, deceit and just plain lying.

In today’s Gospel we find very welcome guest appearances of Moses (hint, hint: The Law) and Elijah (hint, hint: The Prophets). Jesus, remember came neither to repeal The Law nor to trash the Prophets! We must always be mindful and respectful of our Jewish roots. Knowing that Jesus was a Jew helps us understand Him. Two major mistakes of some Christians here: ignoring the Prophets and thinking that The Old Covenant is off. But perhaps the major way some Christians go wrong is misreading the Law! Contemporary American religion would be much brighter without these.

We begin our brief journey to the East with Buddhism. While there are great differences between Christianity and Buddhism, in the end I feel that the common ground is most important, as does our very own Canon Theologian Marcus Borg. In any case, the Buddha can be a light for Christians as well – and, again, we need all the light we can find! I would like to give three examples, the first two from Buddhist Scripture, the third from Buddhist practice.

The Buddha’s “Questions Which Tend Not to Edification” helps me to center on the basics of the Way of Jesus. His words in “The Twin Verses” help me to follow the teachings of Jesus on Forgiveness. Finally, Buddhist emphasis on Meditation practice has helped me to open to this somewhat neglected aspect of the Christian tradition, which is not just for Monastics.

Moving west, how about a brief visit to Istanbul – well, really Constantinople or Mt. Athos? Eastern Christianity can shed some light for Western Christians; it has for me. Their view of the Transfiguration gives us The Light of Mt Tabor, where traditionally The Transfiguration is said to have occurred. This Light of Mt Tabor they understand to be the light that Paul saw on the Road to Damascus and the light which every Christian is to seek. Here we rediscover Centering Prayer and related Christian meditation and mysticism and are encouraged to give these greater emphasis. Historically, appreciation and celebration of the Transfiguration started in Eastern Christianity, died out for a time in the West and was rediscovered for Anglicans by us, the Episcopalians. May we also lead the world-wide Anglican communion to a better reading the Law of Moses, in particular the Sodom & Gomorrah story.

On the way to Madison, a brief visit to Cairo is in order. The protests here were covered pretty well even by our mainstream media. These protests seem to be bearing fruit, thanks be to God! Whatever the final outcome, we can rejoice that these protests were non-violent and they represented the people seeing the light about their particular political situation.

Finally – and briefly, thanks be to God! As with Cairo, the protests in Madison were non-violent and they represent the people seeing the light about their particular political situation. My grand-daughter was among the very many and very diverse people who came out in support of the protests; in her case, it was as a student in support of her teachers.

On the dark side, we find propaganda denying the non-violence from the usual suspects and little and poor coverage of the protests by the mainstream media for whom Cairo was easier and safer to cover. Having a free press is needed for a functioning democracy. It is also very troubling that money is such a large factor in elections, this with great help from the Supreme Court. But let’s close on a more positive if still critical note from The Episcopal Bishop of Milwaukee; this is from a piece “What Religion Looks Like, Wisconsin Edition” on Religion Dispatches.

“I believe we can all agree that our baptismal vow to “respect the dignity of every human being”
is not served by a majority simply pushing through legislation because they have the votes
necessary to do so. As Christians, it is our duty and call to make sure that everyone has a place
at the table and every voice has the opportunity to be heard. Respecting the dignity of every
human being requires taking the time to have honest and faithful conversation that respects
the rights and freedom of all.”

The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A, Feburary 13, 2011

2011-02-14T11:09:00.000-08:00

The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany, Year A
Matthew 5:21-37, Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Psalm 119:1-8,1 Corinthians 3:1-9
February 13, 2011
The Rev. JoAnne Miller

In my studies for these readings today I couldn’t help but think of one of my favorite quotations from Annie Dillard. You can go on line and Google Annie Dillard quotes, there are some good ones. This one I have used before. “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats, to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return. "

The more I studied the readings for today I had another vision. Similar to Dillard’s quote. One of my favorite carnival rides when I was young was the Octopus. It would jerk you from one side to the other rapidly and then up and sideways to the right. It would then drop you down and to the left and just for thrills whip you backwards. They should have called it whiplash.

If we read the whole section of the Sermon on the Mount with eyes open and heart open – Whiplash. Brian McLaren in his book The Secret Message of Jesus calls this section of Matthew the Kingdom Manifesto. A manifesto is a declaration, decree. A manifesto carries with it an absolute pronouncement.

Jesus uses dangerous, provocative language. In last week’s reading of Matthew the last verse said “For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Now if you were a Pharisee - sitting on a padded, comfortable pew, enjoying the well-known liturgy and readings for Sabbath worship in Synagogue -and you heard this you would have just been thrown on the hard floor. Crash helmet. The standard that Jesus just set with that line is something like the yellow line in the TV reality show “Biggest Loser.” At the end of the program each Tuesday, after you watch them sweat and work out the person whose percentage of lost body weight is less than everyone else, they drop below the yellow line and they are out. The scribes and the Pharisees are the yellow line. Jesus says not to let your righteousness fall below them.

I must remind myself that the Pharisees are seen as the guardians and paragons of personal piety, goodness, morality, uprightness, decency, justice, and fairness. When all wrapped together you have a good understanding of the meaning of righteousness. And Jesus says they represent the bottom line? Are you holding on to your pew? The disciples who were sitting at Jesus’ feet must have fallen off the rocks they were sitting on. They just heard something that moved the earth under their feet. Here, as in the previous two Sundays’ readings Jesus reveals God - God’s nature and intent for humankind. The external display of religion is not God’s intent for us but the internal transformation of our heart, mind, and soul. It is faith and not religious practice that matters.

Jesus goes on to say that he has come to fulfill the law and the prophets. He makes it clear with each example what he means to fulfill. He begins “you have heard that it was said“....But, I say…” What follows is an invitation not to stay with the minimal standards but to raise them, deepen them, and fulfill them – to take them above the level of the religious specialist. God pulls us from external conformity to internal change. “You have heard that is was said to those of ancient times, “You shall not murder”, and “whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.” But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council, and if you say, “You fool,” you will be liable to the hell of fire. Crash helmet time. Ushers find the flares.

Jesus is telling us to stop insulting people. An insult is a form of character assassination, a socially acceptable form of violence. One that a goodly number of American’s practice because it is our first amendment right. Words, derogatory words can and do lead to physical violence and harm. Scathing words thrown at children does harm to the children. Insults cast at adults for political or religious advantage causes harm. We are called to a higher and deeper moral and ethical way of being. Jesus calls us to active reconciliation with brother, sister, neighbor. In fact, reconciliation seems to be more important than the offering we make at the altar. Before reconciliation can take place, we are called to forgive.

Next Jesus addresses divorce. In Jesus time and before, women were easily cast aside, they were considered property, once they were married and then divorced they were damaged goods. Jesus was upholding women. Even more pointedly is the statement concerning lust. No one, male or female should be regarded as a sex object. And yet, TV commercials exploit sex and lust to sell just about everything. Do you feel our American culture beginning to slip below the yellow line? However, Jesus is speaking to individuals and the individual’s walk. However, individuals are often viewed as their culture is viewed.

The final verses in this lectionary reading are concerned with the taking of oaths. The aim of this interpretation is to establish truthfulness. “Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’.” It is the reckless use of oaths that is condemned. Truthfulness is living out a higher righteousness. Philo, a Jewish philosopher roundly condemned those who unashamedly invoked the name of God in pointless oaths. We Christians have not taken this command of Jesus very seriously for all the ways we misuse the name of the Holy. If Jesus was distressed by the linguistic habits of those who swore by their own head, what would he say today?

We can all fall subject to a moral lapse. Own up to it. I have to commend the GOP congressman who did and resigned from the house. He lapsed. He committed adultery in his thoughts. Lust took over and probably ego. Of course, the exposure of his failing was hard to refute. His oath was “yes, yes” and “I regret.” We have a gracious God who calls us to be reconciled, who calls us to search our heart, to confess our failures, who calls us to live in the Kingdom, to be the living light in this beautiful and strange world. God calls us to be the living salt that brings out the highest and best flavor of our humanity. And, every now and then God has to shake us up, take us by the shoulders and shake us to get us to respond. That is what Annie Dillard means when she suggests we wear crash helmets to church.

1. The Secret Message of Jesus: Uncovering the Truth That Could Change Everything: Brian D. McLaren
2. Interpretation on Matthew: Douglas R. A. Hare
3. Feasting on the Word: Year A, at goodreads.com

January 2, 2011, The Second Sunday after Christmas

2011-01-04T12:28:00.000-08:00

The Second Sunday after Christmas
January 2, 2011
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison

Open with Rilke’s poem “Rest on the Flight into Egypt”

Those were the words of the great German poet Rainier Marie Rilke. It is part of a series of poems he wrote about the life of Mary. This poem puts into tale what happens in response to the dream Joseph has after his child is born. It also hints at what happens in the encounter between God and what is not God—when the not-Gods we worship meet the living God of Joseph and Mary. And at the end of it all they had to rest as in a dream. Perhaps it was a waking dream, perhaps a daydream, but whatever we think it was it was a place where reality was seen through the prism of dream-like distance. Such a dream-like state reminds me of a kaleidoscope; it allows us place to play with the pieces of our world and rearrange them, perhaps into something more good, more whole, more loving, more beautiful.

I think that the Gospel, that encountering Jesus as the Incarnation of a saving, grace-filled God, is an invitation to dream. Dreams abound in Scripture. They are constants in all cultures and often they are associated with divine communication. In some traditions people practice dream incubation to cultivate dreams that are prophetic and or have divine meaning. In our culture we look to them for clues to understanding what is going on in our life or to understand our past. In Hebrew tradition they were clearly prophetic, often future-oriented, and a way to convey important information as we see with the instructions given to Joseph to flee and why.

Whatever dreams are I think most of us sense that in some way they connect us to a deeper reality than our own. Perhaps in dreams we escape the illusion that we are independent beings that are solitary in nature and are swept up into the truth that we are social beings. I often wonder if dreams connect us to a communal conscience, a place where souls meet and share, a place where we touch our source of being, that reality that we name God. Who knows? But what I do know is that dreams are both necessary and powerful.

Dreams can give us a vision for what could be or what is possible. The reading from Jeremiah is full of a portrait of a dream come true: the people come home; there is plenty for all; people are merry and dancing with joy; the land and people are radiant for there is a restoration of the people to wholeness with God and each other. It is a beautiful vision, a dream for what can be. God is naming himself as a father to the people, a guiding hand that leads them to goodness and redemption.

I think that in Jesus people saw the possibility for dreams fulfilled. In Jesus they saw the dream of the outcast brought in made real. In Jesus the hungry were fed without condition or qualification. In Jesus people encountered a voice that spoke for the poor and lonely and that sought to heal those broken or wounded in body and spirit. It is a powerful vision and experience. It is that dream of love made manifest in our lives--that deep hope and need we all have and all need to have met.

The dream or the vision of Jesus is a simple one: all are beloved of God. And if beloved of God than no matter who we are or what we have done, there is a place for us in God’s embrace. No matter our flaws and imperfections, no matter our socio-economic status, no matter if the world flatters us or ignores us, no matter how broken or lost we may feel on the inside the dream that comes to life in Jesus is the coming true of a reality where we are received as we are.

Just as a child receives us as we are. Children, at least at first (I know this changes in time) simply accept that we are as we are and that is enough. Maybe that child-like faith is what Jesus is speaking to when he asks us to understand God as a father, a parent. Perhaps we are to view God with that kind of trust and understanding that we are simply loved. The world often fights that dream. All around us we are told it is hard and complicated to be worthy of love and acceptance. You have to be a certain way and sadly, most of us are far, far from that ideal. It is about power trips and control—as the rest of the story about Herod and his son’s rule in Judea tells us—even at the cost of killing others to maintain one’s grip over them. We kill each other physically all too often and we kill each other spiritually all the time.

Our dreams of a better world, or a better relationship, or to feel better about ourselves are, I believe, divine promptings to flee to Egypt with the Christ-child. By that I mean it is time to let our dreams take flight and be free, protect them from the world that would destroy them, give them space to breathe, and offer them as a gift to a Jesus who will reflect back a grace-filled face of God. I know that when I look in my child’s face I don’t worry about my ratings or my status. All I worry about is loving him enough and well.

I don’t worry that I am unaccepted or judged and found wanting. I find that I am freed from that and all I want is to love him wholly back. I seek to serve the holy in him without thought for my own gain or status or to prove myself worthy. Or, my deep dream that someday we can find ways better than war to solve our disputes and perhaps cultivate virtues that make conflicts less likely. (Give example of Eyes Wide Open combat boot display…) did it end the wars? No. But it keeps the dream alive within me and in the world. Each family we host in our parking lot is keeping the dream to end homelessness alive. It doesn’t solve the issue, but it is a small step towards doing so and keeps us true to our conviction to care for each other and continue to fight for that dream to be made real.

I think this is at the heart of that encounter with the Jesus that flees into Egypt with his parents. Self, in the sense of ego-driven self, fades, and in the journey that happens in response to our dreams we find an open space to receive grace and by extension begin to see the world with eyes shaded by that grace. Suddenly, every one of us is the Christ-child and every one of us is a Mary or Joseph who will do all in their power to love and protect the lives of others for all lives are vessels of the holy.

As Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians: He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he freely bestowed on us in the Beloved. That is Paul’s encapsulation of the dream made real as knowers and friends of Jesus.

And what happens when our dreams are dark and bad? There is a Jewish practice called Hatavat Halem, which literally means “making the dream a good one”, where a disturbing dream is shared with a rabbi so that a positive interpretation can emerge. Often the positive is revealed via the negative. So, whether our dreams are good or disturbing, our dreams are meant to help us strive for the good both within and without.

In this season of Christmas and as we approach Epiphany, the season of things made manifest, let us take our dreams—daydreams, waking dreams, nighttime dreams and visions—and make these dreams good ones, let us make them be part of making manifest the incarnation of God in Jesus, a place where a tree spreads wide, as though to serve, by our sides, and bows down to embrace us.

Christmas Eve, December 24, 2010, Year A

2010-12-27T09:40:00.000-08:00

The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 9:2-7, Psalm 96, Titus 2:11-14, Luke 2:1-20
Christmas Eve, 2010

There is something so beautiful about this story that instinctively we feel it must be true. Whether we are Christian or not this story captivates us, invites us into the inside of life to find an eternal truth—a divine understanding. We sense a truth in this story that is deeper and more real than if all the “facts” of it actually happened as described. This is the heart of myth. A myth is not a lie; a myth is not just an invention of fancy. A myth, as one very precocious five-year old explained, is a story that is not true on the outside, but true on the inside. All the details may not be utterly accurate, but that isn’t the heart of the matter. The heart is the truth that is within and that emerges through the way the story is told.

The heart of this story tonight is that God comes to us as one of us in the very same way that all of us come into this world: as a baby, a child. The heart of this story is that through the life of this child we discover how the love and peace of God takes flesh and is lived in the here and now. The heart of this story is that the deep hope for peace on earth is possible and it will become real through what we do and how we understand the world. It is also a collision of myths.
The story takes place in the time of the Roman Empire. Based in Rome its troops and its bureaucrats were stationed throughout the empire’s domain—a domain that covered continents. Calm, called peace by the Emperor, was maintained through strong-arm control, repression, occupation and the imposition of Rome’s norms as the best and only form of civilization.

The myth of the day was that of Rome’s inherent superiority and the greatness of its kingdom for all who were under its control or sway. Luke starts his story by reminding us of this other myth—Augustus was ruler of all the world. He was called the Prince of Peace, Our Lord, Son of God, Counselor and many other titles. They should sound familiar to our ears for they are ones we use for Jesus. But these were the common appellations for the Caesars: found on coins, engraved on statues, recorded in histories.

The peace and order of Rome was also a myth, perhaps better named propaganda or spin. It is here we find the crucial difference. A myth, a true myth, is one that speaks to a universal, to an understanding about human nature and reality that helps us know who we are and what we are, to a revelation of the holy that is larger than any particular people or kingdom or culture. The false myths take a particular and try to make it a universal. This was Rome. What the shepherds heard was the true myth that echoes across the universe eternally.

Luke is inviting us to juxtapose these two kinds of myth and to understand the truth revealed in this child born in humble circumstances to parents trying to survive in a hard and brutal world. Peace comes to all as a gift, not by force. The reviled and outcast, the poor and the rich, the wise and the foolish, all are able to come to Bethlehem to be touched by grace and love. The holy is born in a child that lies in a feeding trough in a city that’s name means house of bread. We are to understand that it is God that feeds us in all ways from the grain of the fields to the spiritual food of the soul. The holy is tangible in a family, in a mother and father, in stars that sing and a universe that reveals God’s glory. These are only some of the truths this story is giving us.

Yet the central truth Luke wants us to grasp is that of the angels’ message: peace on earth. When we glory in God, respond to God and to the God revealed in each other than peace is not merely a wish, but a possibility. The inside truth of this myth is the continual longing of us humans for peace. The plea and hope for it rings through thousands of years of history. The shepherds yearned for it as much as we still do today in a world that is so riddled with violence and seemingly endless war.

Perhaps no story better captures the way that this baby creates peace on earth and this myth becomes experienced truth than the one I am about to share:

My dear sister Janet,
It is 2:00 in the morning and most of our men are asleep in their dugouts—yet I could not sleep myself before writing to you of the wonderful events of Christmas Eve. In truth, what happened seems almost like a fairy tale, and if I hadn’t been through it myself, I would scarce believe it. Just imagine: While you and the family sang carols before the fire there in London, I did the same with enemy soldiers here on the battlefields of France!

As I wrote before, there has been little serious fighting of late. The first battles of the war left so many dead that both sides have held back until replacements could come from home. So we have mostly stayed in our trenches and waited.

But what a terrible waiting it has been! Knowing that any moment an artillery shell might land and explode beside us in the trench, killing or maiming several men. And in daylight not daring to lift our heads above ground, for fear of a sniper’s bullet.
Through all this, we couldn’t help feeling curious about the German soldiers across the way. After all, they faced the same dangers we did, and slogged about in the same muck. What’s more, their first trench was only 50 yards from ours. Between us lay No Man’s Land, bordered on both sides by barbed wire—yet they were close enough we sometimes heard their voices.

Of course, we hated them when they killed our friends. But other times, we joked about them and almost felt we had something in common. And now it seems they felt the same.

Just yesterday morning—Christmas Eve Day—we had our first good freeze. Cold as we were, we welcomed it, because at least the mud froze solid. Everything was tinged white with frost, while a bright sun shone over all. Perfect Christmas weather.
During the day, there was little shelling or rifle fire from either side. And as darkness fell on our Christmas Eve, the shooting stopped entirely. Our first complete silence in months! We hoped it might promise a peaceful holiday, but we didn’t count on it. We’d been told the Germans might attack and try to catch us off guard.

I went to the dugout to rest, and lying on my cot, I must have drifted asleep. All at once my friend John was shaking me awake, saying, “Come and see! See what the Germans are doing!” I grabbed my rifle, stumbled out into the trench, and stuck my head cautiously above the sandbags.

I never hope to see a stranger and more lovely sight. Clusters of tiny lights were shining all along the German line, left and right as far as the eye could see.
“What is it?” I asked in bewilderment, and John answered, “Christmas trees!”
And so it was. The Germans had placed Christmas trees in front of their trenches, lit by candle or lantern like beacons of good will.

And then we heard their voices raised in song.

Stille nacht, heilige nacht . . . .

This carol may not yet be familiar to us in Britain, but John knew it and translated: “Silent night, holy night.” I’ve never heard one lovelier—or more meaningful, in that quiet, clear night, its dark softened by a first-quarter moon.
When the song finished, the men in our trenches applauded. Yes, British soldiers applauding Germans! Then one of our own men started singing, and we all joined in.
The first Nowell, the angel did say . . . .

In truth, we sounded not nearly as good as the Germans, with their fine harmonies. But they responded with enthusiastic applause of their own and then began another.
O Tannenbaum, o Tannenbaum . . . .

Then we replied.

O come all ye faithful . . . .

But this time they joined in, singing the same words in Latin.

Adeste fideles . . . .

British and German harmonizing across No Man’s Land! I would have thought nothing could be more amazing—but what came next was more so.

“English, come over!” we heard one of them shout. “You no shoot, we no shoot.”
There in the trenches, we looked at each other in bewilderment. Then one of us shouted jokingly, “You come over here.”

To our astonishment, we saw two figures rise from the trench, climb over their barbed wire, and advance unprotected across No Man’s Land. One of them called, “Send officer to talk.”

I saw one of our men lift his rifle to the ready, and no doubt others did the same—but our captain called out, “Hold your fire.” Then he climbed out and went to meet the Germans halfway. We heard them talking, and a few minutes later, the captain came back with a German cigar in his mouth!

“We’ve agreed there will be no shooting before midnight tomorrow,” he announced. “But sentries are to remain on duty, and the rest of you, stay alert.”
Across the way, we could make out groups of two or three men starting out of trenches and coming toward us. Then some of us were climbing out too, and in minutes more, there we were in No Man’s Land, over a hundred soldiers and officers of each side, shaking hands with men we’d been trying to kill just hours earlier!

Before long a bonfire was built, and around it we mingled—British khaki and German grey. I must say, the Germans were the better dressed, with fresh uniforms for the holiday.

Only a couple of our men knew German, but more of the Germans knew English. I asked one of them why that was.

“Because many have worked in England!” he said. “Before all this, I was a waiter at the Hotel Cecil. Perhaps I waited on your table!”

“Perhaps you did!” I said, laughing.

He told me he had a girlfriend in London and that the war had interrupted their plans for marriage. I told him, “Don’t worry. We’ll have you beat by Easter, then you can come back and marry the girl.”

He laughed at that. Then he asked if I’d send her a postcard he’d give me later, and I promised I would.

Another German had been a porter at Victoria Station. He showed me a picture of his family back in Munich. His eldest sister was so lovely, I said I should like to meet her someday. He beamed and said he would like that very much and gave me his family’s address.

Even those who could not converse could still exchange gifts—our cigarettes for their cigars, our tea for their coffee, our corned beef for their sausage. Badges and buttons from uniforms changed owners, and one of our lads walked off with the infamous spiked helmet! I myself traded a jackknife for a leather equipment belt—a fine souvenir to show when I get home.

Newspapers too changed hands, and the Germans howled with laughter at ours. They assured us that France was finished and Russia nearly beaten too. We told them that was nonsense, and one of them said, “Well, you believe your newspapers and we’ll believe ours.”

Clearly they are lied to—yet after meeting these men, I wonder how truthful our own newspapers have been. These are not the “savage barbarians” we’ve read so much about. They are men with homes and families, hopes and fears, principles and, yes, love of country. In other words, men like ourselves. Why are we led to believe otherwise?

As it grew late, a few more songs were traded around the fire, and then all joined in for—I am not lying to you—“Auld Lang Syne.” Then we parted with promises to meet again tomorrow, and even some talk of a football match.

I was just starting back to the trenches when an older German clutched my arm. “My God,” he said, “why cannot we have peace and all go home?”

I told him gently, “That you must ask your emperor.”

He looked at me then, searchingly. “Perhaps, my friend. But also we must ask our hearts.”

And so, dear sister, tell me, has there ever been such a Christmas Eve in all history? And what does it all mean, this impossible befriending of enemies?
For the fighting here, of course, it means regrettably little. Decent fellows those soldiers may be, but they follow orders and we do the same. Besides, we are here to stop their army and send it home, and never could we shirk that duty.

Still, one cannot help imagine what would happen if the spirit shown here were caught by the nations of the world. Of course, disputes must always arise. But what if our leaders were to offer well wishes in place of warnings? Songs in place of slurs? Presents in place of reprisals? Would not all war end at once?

All nations say they want peace. Yet on this Christmas morning, I wonder if we want it quite enough.

Your loving brother, Tom

This recounting of this true event was written by Aaron Shepherd and he has truly captured the truth of this story that has in time become a myth, true mostly on the outside and true on the inside.

If we truly long for the Messiah, for that peace, than we too can hear the songs of the angels’ in the night sky. These soldiers heard it and joined in. They touched the deep inner truth of the myth and held it. They knew that it was in this story of a child who comes to us as a bearer of peace that true salvation and wholeness are found. And for a time they lived it and by their witness asked us all to choose the truer story. The question remains—do we want peace enough? It is possible. The story sings across time and space if our hearts can perceive the angelic host in the stars and the heavenly hosts. The longed for Messiah is here with us if we can embrace it and allow his life to transform ours. It can happen, it does happen. But we, like those soldiers and shepherds must get up and go to Bethlehem to see this thing that God has made known to us.

December 19, 2010, The Fourth Sunday of Advent, Year A

2010-12-21T12:49:00.000-08:00

The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 7:10-16, Psalm 80:1-7, 16-18, Romans 1:1-7, Matthew 1:18-25
Advent IV, Year A

The story of Jesus' birth—yes, this is it in Matthew in that line “until she had borne a son”—is not the easiest of stories to connect to the season of Advent. It is so stark and to the point (and Matthew's author had many points he was making in the short 8 verses) that it is hard to connect it to the themes of anticipation, waiting, receptivity, and so forth that we tend to associate with Advent. It is much easier to make these connections when hearing Luke's version. In trying to think about how to tie this passage in to the theme of waiting that I have been preaching on, I discovered an interesting symmetry in the stories of Mary and Jesus. It may take me awhile to ramble my way there, but I will get there I promise. Let me know if you think what I see makes sense. That symmetry I discovered led me to think of the tensions of waiting and living both in the here and now in a world that still needs full redemption—as our prayers of the people so perfectly illustrated--and being part of the Body of Christ that is living the resurrected life of full redemption and grace.

Tension is one of the things we see in this story today. The tensions laid out here are ones that repeat in this Gospel: tension between the letter and the spirit of the law and between early Christians, many of whom were Jewish, and Jews being two of them. In this story, Joseph chooses not to follow the strict letter of the law in his planned response to Mary's pregnancy. According to the law she would have been stoned. Scholars and historians tend to agree that by this time this punishment was not generally implemented and other ways had been adopted, though still ones that cast shame. Joseph instead, as best he can, opts for mercy in a way that respects both the law and the command to love given by Jesus. This story was written years after Jesus' death and the author is clearly injecting the command to love of Jesus back into this story. Joseph embodies the dilemma of many early Christians who were Jewish and Matthew portrays him to be a prototype and example for these early followers of Jesus. Likewise, we too live in the same tension of adherence to the law and responding to situations where the law or legal response seems inadequate, wrong or misguided, with mercy and love.

Likewise, Jesus is understood to be the son of God by the movement of the Holy Spirit and the participation of Mary. Joseph gives him a human lineage of the house of David. For Paul as we hear in today's readings, it seems quite clear that he understands Jesus' birth and conception to happen in a way like ours (descended from David according to the flesh). Luke takes this story in Matthew and expands on it dramatically. At the time this was written similar stories about the birth of Moses from a virgin were in circulation, so even within culture and scripture there are multiple ways to understand the origin's of Jesus. And that is a good thing. We can explore and engage all of them.

The early hearers of this story weren't worried about the tension of this as we are and all the other issue we have brought into this story such as original sin, purity, a negative view of human sexuality, etc.. The story points to the union of the divine saving plan and the royal human household of Israel—its kings and anointed ones. Matthew's author and his understanding of how Jesus was conceived are concerned not with biological questions, but with the function this person would have in the saving of Israel by God. In other words, the focus is on Jesus' role and function, not his nature. Is he human? Is he divine? Is he a hybrid? These aren't Matthew's questions really. His concern is what this child is going to accomplish for God and for God's people. This story of Jesus' conception and parentage are never referred to again in any way and even if deleted the confession and understanding of Jesus' role as a savior would still stand firm in this Gospel. This is not the proof so to speak of Jesus' identity. It is his life and the cross and what God brings forth from it.

And it is here that I would like to explore a bit and start winding my way to the symmetry between Mary and Jesus. The heart of this whole passage is, at least to me, that line “and they shall name him Emmanuel, which means, God is with us”. This is the kernel, the nugget of theological insight, the gem. He isn't named Emmanuel of course; he is named Jesus which is play on the Hebrew word “to save” and related to the name Joshua who in the Hebrew Scriptures was a saving figure in history. But Jesus saves us by being with us.

That is the very crux of the incarnation. And it is amazing when we think on it. We preachers often get pressure to always connect the readings with the nitty gritty of daily life, but sometiems we need to simple spend time on our theology and what it proclaims. We need to ponder it and contemplate it for that is what shapes how we see and understand the daily nitty gritty. So for us we hear this: Jesus saves us by being one with us. It is the total and complete merging of divinity and humanity until we perceive that there is no separation between the two in him. And if we belong to him, than our hope too is to be so close to God that our humanity is totally infused with divinity. It is a sharing of natures and being. It is participatory and active and also full of tension—we live in Christ, but all has not been reconciled to him in this world.

It is all about embodiment. We humans are best at understanding what is enfleshed. If we believe as we confess that the nature of God is love, than love came to be embodied in the way we could understand: in a human being. It is about bodies: Jesus' body, Mary's body, Christ's Body, my body, your body, our body. It has always puzzled me that for so much of the church for so long there was, and still is, disdain and even feelings of disgust towards the human body. It is precisely in a human body that God chooses to express the greatest acts and revelations of love. It is in and through a body that we are fed and grow into Christ's image.

It was at this point in my ramblings that I suddenly saw this mirror image of Jesus and Mary. Before his death Jesus gives us the the Eucharistic Meal, Holy Communion, and it opens with the words, this is my body given for you. Jesus gives his body to the cross to reveal God's salvation. Jesus gives us the gifts of bread and wine understood now to be so much more than that—the very nourishment of God. We are fed by him and through him and our task is to then go out and feed others. We wait for our acts of nourishment to bring forth the kingdom and persevere in doing them even when it seems they have no impact.

Mary is the mirror of this. If Jesus gives us the body of God, Mary gives God her body. She too says this is my body the moment she says yes to the invitation to bear the Messiah. For nine months her very being feeds and nurtures this little life. Her body very literally feeds that of Jesus, just as in time his life will be the food of salvation for her and for all who believe in him. Mary is with Jesus and he with her in the most intertwined and unified way: one dwells within the other. Talk about being with one another! Mary as one person holds within her the divine incarnation of love and brings it forth in the person of Jesus. Jesus as that incarnation shares it with the whole world and allows it to be received by us as a whole and as individual persons. Like Jesus whose body endures the cross and is raised a spiritual body as Paul says, Mary's body bears pain and is forever changed in the act of childbirth. In some ways Jesus and Mary can be seen not only as the Messiah and Virgin Israel, which is certainly one of the many levels that Matthew wants us to read this story on, who is to be saved, but also as the masculine and feminine ways we understand the holy. Jesus does not come to be without her; Mary does not come to fullness of life without him.

And in all of this we find a variety of ways that God is with us. God is within us. God is among us. God is our very being as the Body of Christ. Mary is blessed to be the very first person that the God we know in Jesus is with. He is with her in the most intimate way possible: connected, tethered to her for life and the sustaining of life. In time, it is we who will be tethered to him for sustained life through the bread and the wine and the life and the cross and the resurrection of Jesus the Messiah.

Like Mary, we wait. We wait for Jesus to grow in us so fully that we totally and utterly his. We wait for the Body of Christ in the world to be a witness to his mercy and peace and compassion and for the world to respond. We wait for the love of God that was embodied in Jesus to be embodied in each of us and in this world—heaven on earth, where it should be, the will of God indistinguishable from ours.

November 14, 2010, 25th Sunday after Pentecost

2010-11-15T09:54:00.000-08:00

November 14, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Malachi 4:1-21, Ps 98, 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13, Luke 21:5-19

There is an old saying: It's always darkest before the dawn.

If you've ever been up in the early hours it seems true. The darkness seems almost tangible. A heavy stillness covers things. The sky has no light in it, especially once the moon has set. Sometimes the thought has come to my mind, “what if the sun decides not to rise today?” Each morning the rising sun is a small miracle for those with eyes of faith to see it, ensuring that life continues on this planet. The gift of light and warmth is given each day by a loving God. A sunrise is a symbol of hope; a sunrise is a reminder that God is faithful and reliable.

But in that darkness there is a choice we make. Do we hold firm to the belief that the light will come even if at the moment there is no sign of it, or do we become afraid?

It is the same choice the presents itself in all kinds of darkness or times of distress. When we are overwhelmed by burdens or sorrows do we hold fast to the promise of life in Jesus or do we give into fear and despair? When societal problems are huge and seem intractable do we give into anxiety and blaming those who are seen as the face of those problems? When history seems bent on a nihilistic course full of suffering and destruction do we abandon God or our faith that calls us to continue to live as people acting for mercy, peace, reconciliation and compassion? Or do we make an even bigger mistake and think God is causing it all and in so doing judging who is good and who is not?

Our reading from Luke today is posing these kinds of questions. On on leve it was speaking to the very particular history that had happened in ancient Israel. On another it is speaking to the repetition of such events since human nature has changed very little if at all in the 2000 years since.

Let's hear it again, this time from the version “The Message”.

The immediate setting of this reading is the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. It didn't take anyone with special clairvoyant powers to predict this. Judea chaffed under occupation and occasionally there were violent flare-ups. Eventually, the insurrections grew and Rome came down as empires do when those under their sway aren’t behaving as they ought and came down hard, burning the Temple, killing thousands upon thousands. The cultic worship life of Jesus' people was finished. The Temple was never rebuilt and Judaism was practiced in new ways. From the ashes grew the synagogues and rabbinical faith we know today.

In these chaotic and increasingly violent times, the followers of Jesus were handed over, were put on trial and, some think, asked to abandon the non-violent stance to stand in opposition to the Romans. So, Luke is describing real events in the life of the early Church and looking at the present to see what the future holds based on current events.

The trouble is that we have taken these texts and turned them into the final end of the world by God. They are not. They are about what humans have done and continue to do. No one knows when the world will end, not even the Son of God, so anyone who uses such texts and then predicts such events is assuming quite a lot! Apparently, they have more inside information than Jesus! But more to the point is that the pull and the driving energy of such types—the doomsday, apocalypse, types--is FEAR. Fear you will be left behind. Fear you aren't saved. Fear you aren't on the right side of a vengeful God. Fear of others. Fear of changing things, of addressing social problems, because the idea is that things are running their right course and God is driving the truck right towards the wall. Fear if that we did some serious self-reflection we might find that things were found wanting, that maybe we aren’t as right as we thought.

But is that the faith to which we who follow Jesus are called? Is that the Good News he lived and preached?

One of the resounding themes in Scripture from the earliest stories of the Hebrew people to the letters of Paul encouraging the early Church to the Gospels is this: Fear not.

Moses is worried about what to say to Pharaoh. God tells him to not fear; he will be given what he needs. The Israelites fear the change of leaving Egypt and time and again when fear threatens to devour them or causes them to distrust God (think the Golden Calf incident), God gives them signs to encourage them. Often the prophets are a bit anxious about their message, yet God sustains them saying to not be afraid. This doesn’t mean that there won’t be painful consequences to staying true to their message. It does mean that staying true to it is about staying true to oneself and to God’s ultimate hope for us even when that hope will encounter resistance.

The angels who come to Mary and to others always begin their meeting with the words fear not. Though the task given is often one that will be hard and perhaps even lead to death, the assurance is given that God is with them and that fear will destroy their self, their soul, which is a destruction worse than those who can hurt the body….as we hear time and again.

So many of the world’s values, worldly values as we theology wonks say, have as one of their roots fear. We fear that we won’t have enough. We fear those who are different than us though we really can’t say why. We fear change. We fear losing our privilege or our power, if we are one of those who has it. We fear death. And the consequences are greed, hatred, anger, vengeance, war, constructing elaborate rationales as to why some should be poor or exploited or discriminated against as a way to make us feel secure and unafraid. We get stuck in the way things are done because we are afraid of what change may demand. We can be almost perverse in this clinging. Even when we can see that what we are doing is not working, may in fact, be deadly, we resist and avoid and deny.

In my own life I see the consequences when I live out of fear. I become suspicious, narrow, grouchy, and judgmental. I lose the ability to laugh or play. I am increasingly selfish and self-absorbed, unable to see others with clarity. They become projections of my worst thoughts and traits. When Tommy was in the hospital there was a lot to fear. But I looked at the fears, touched them and then let go because I realized if I got lost in the fear I wouldn’t be able to love my child. I am convinced that part of why he lived and is thriving is because I did not let the fear take hold.

Jesus taught something else. Love of others. Love of enemies. Mercy. Trust that if one shares generously with all than all will have enough. Difference does not mean less than. Conflict can lead to peace not violence. Power over others will corrupt us and draw us away from God. In this ethical frame there is not room for fear to shape our response. No, Jesus asks us to hold to another truth: trust. Trust in God and God’s goodness. Trust in living a life shaped by loving stances towards others that can only happen when we don’t start from a place of fear.

Fear is a parasite of the soul. It rots us away from within. And this is what I think Jesus is getting at when he says, “By your endurance you will gain your souls.” Soul, in the Greek “psyche”, can be best understood as life, your self, your whole self. The call Jesus is making is to hold fast to his teachings even when all around you seems to say, what! That’s crazy! Go and get rid of those people or cut funds for this or launch an attack over there to get rid of the threat. In such times it is our thinking and our vision, which is the biggest threat and which feeds the fear that reinforces it. Fear begets fear and when we live in fear there is no room for creativity or seeing new ways forward. It devours us and it eats up our self.

Jesus is saying continue to be true to the Gospel. Continue to stand compassion and the work of reconciliation. Continue to believe sharing is better than hording. Continue to live into a generous and merciful spirit. Continue to see the reflection of God in every person, loved as much as you by the creator. Be humble. He says: “Fear not little flock, for it is God’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” This is true even if in holding true to the Gospel we seem to “lose” in this world.

In this time in our world and in our country, one of the most powerful witnesses we are called to as followers of Jesus is to not succumb to the fear. A healthy group does not use fear or threats to hold together. All day, every day, we are encouraged to be afraid and to distrust others. Fear-mongering, war-mongering and threats are the common coin of conversation. Jesus is telling us who believe in him and follow him to save our lives, to not give into the atmosphere of fear. To not get caught up in fear of immigrants, fear of Muslims, fear of compromise, fear of changing course to avoid coming calamities such as global climate change; fear of crime, etc. etc. We are to be bold voices for trust, for caring, for partnership and possibility, for creative thinking around the very real challenges that face us with the touchstone being mercy and compassion. Talk about swimming against the tide. But Jesus tells us: fear is not of God.

In the Sudan, as you know, there is a civil war raging between the north and south. It is over many things, but the line of demarcation also falls along a religious one of Christians and Muslims. There is a strong Anglican Church in the south and one day two priests saw fighters from the north coming towards them and it was obvious that their intentions were not good. These two men got onto their knees and prayed, in Arabic, for the fighters, praying for blessings for them and for goodness. The fighters spared their lives. Something powerfully good happened here through this witness and act of trust. Imagine what might be if things like this happened more often.

I believe there is no more powerful act we can make at this time than to be people of hope and trust. There is no more vital witness than to stand against the fear and the animosity and hate and anger it spawns. The world needs this witness; it needs this testimony. And this Good News of God is the rising of the sun of righteousness and wings full of healing…in God’s time.

Sermon update September 2010

2010-09-02T12:53:00.000-07:00

The Rev. Garrison has been on maternity leave through most of the summer. She is back at work but her sermons have been more spontaneous than scripted so there have been no copies to post.

June 6, 2010, The 2nd Sunday after Pentecost

2010-06-07T09:53:00.001-07:00

SERMON preached on the Second Sunday after Pentecost (5C)
6 June, 2010 - Ted Berktold

When I was a young child, my awareness of wartime casualties centered on an annual Memorial Day visit to the grave of my uncle Joe, who was buried in the military cemetery at Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Mom would cut a bouquet of flowers, pack a substantial picnic, and the whole family would drive off for the day listening to the car radio and my mother's re-telling the tragedy of his death on the beach at Anzio in far-away Italy before I was born. He was a name to me - that's about all. I remember a photograph of him - a handsome young man in his soldier's uniform. Watching Ken Burn’s epic series “War” a few years ago gave me a new perspective on Anzio, in the prayer of a soldier there. “God help us,” he said. “And you come yourself. Don’t be sending Jesus. This ain’t no place for children.” When we would arrive at the cemetery with its row upon row of white markers, I would realize that many other people must have died as well, but the numbers never meant very much to me. The day was largely an outing, an unusual kind of outing, but there was nothing sad or gloomy about it. Even my mother used to enjoy it, although she would always end the day saying: "I suppose the time will come when no one will do this." She was right - we don't do it any more. My father is dead, Mom’s in a nursing home, my brothers and sisters are grown up and moved away like me and have other things to do on Memorial Day, so no one goes to that cemetery any more.

Memorial Day is more than an outing. When I visited the D-Day beaches several years ago, I found it more than a tourist destination in the Normandy countryside. Instinctively, I became more and more somber as I drew near the beaches. When I reflect on the amount of life lost in the wars of the last century alone, I shudder. Millions have been killed, including hundreds of thousands of Americans. Millions of British and French and Germans – tens of millions of Russians and Japanese soldiers and civilians - more than I ever imagined looking at those rows of white markers honoring America's dead at Fort Snelling. How many have been scarred or disabled, some for life? How difficult it is to pray out name and rank, week after week, remembering the dead in Iraq and Afghanistan in our own day.

There is a truth, found in Memorial Day, which goes deeper than statistics, a truth we know, but do not always stop to remember. It is this; someone has paid for everything we have. Think about this parish. Although some of you are founding members, this parish was here for many of today’s members when you arrived. Someone else started it. Life is never a free ride. There is a cost involved in anything that amounts to something. No baby is born; no child is raised to maturity without cost to its parents. No job continues through dozens of years without sacrifice. No marriage vows are kept though a lifetime without cost to both people. No nation has ever existed that has cost its people nothing. Think of our own nation, its original inhabitants from whom so much was taken, and its European settlers who established our government and made our laws. Present-day Americans have what we have because others were willing to pay the price for it. Some people paid the full price of their lives to preserve it.

One of the gravest dangers facing the world today is that we think, or at least we are sometimes encouraged to think, that we can have what we want for nothing. If we want happiness, someone else will give it to us. If we want peace, someone, somewhere, will give it to us. That isn't true, of course. The good things in life are bought with a price. The price of our salvation was paid by the blood of Jesus on the cross. In the first centuries after Jesus, spreading that news cost people their lives. Salvation is offered freely to anyone who will receive it, but it came at a great price.

Memorial Day and D-Day raise a question in me. Why do people fight? Why have so many people been killed? What was the potential of the young theologian Dietrich Bonheoffer, executed in a Nazi prison just before the fall of Berlin in 1945, or my own uncle Joe, or the young men and women we name in our prayers each week? How many others were lost who had within them the possibilities of great and creative things that never came to pass? And why do people in families fight? Why are management and labor always at war? Why young and old? Why do Christians fight so much? I don't pretend to know the answer, but this much I can say: People fight because they are aggressive by nature, some much more so than others. We must be aggressive up to a certain point. When we see something we want, we go after it. The complication is that two people often see the same thing. You see it happen among children. Two children want the same toy, so they fight over it. Two business firms want the same contract and fight to get it, because they feel that their future depends on closing that deal.

Competition adds fuel to the aggressive instinct. On a still greater scale, two countries want the same land, the same natural resources, the same oil fields or water, or the same prestige; and they fight for it. They fight, and history makes it clear that one fight leads to another. The war to end all wars was not the last fight. The treaties that followed, according to some historians, made World War II inevitable. To make things more vicious, when one person does something wrong, innocent people suffer the consequences. Life would be much simpler if that were not true. I don't know why God allows that to be. I don't think God planned it so. All I know is that evil is contagious.

The question all this raises on such a weekend is: Must this go on forever? Are we doomed to live in a world like this for the rest of our lives, and are our children to face a world like this? Aggressive people, aggressive nations. One fight leading to another. The innocent suffering as well as the guilty. This much we can say - the cost of life will continue. Aggressive instincts will not disappear from human nature. Conflict of interests will always be a factor in situations and relationships. But fighting need not continue. Peace is possible. We can learn to disagree with opponents and help them learn to disagree with us without destroying one another. We can learn to handle hostility, and keep it under control in our relationships.

The authors of several gospels saw the truth more clearly than we often do. They used a language we don't easily understand; it is the language of the spirit of God. They said, “You can’t serve two masters.” They didn't have to fight people because they didn't have to fight God. Through their relationship with Jesus they were able to tell us that God's love dwells among us, and because of that, peace is possible. Peace on earth, good will among people - that is God's will.

For those who have seen war and felt the power of death, D-Day and Memorial Day are more than an outing. For those of us who have felt God's saving grace, this sacrament is more than a picnic. It is a sacrificial prayer we make in the name of Jesus who died that we might live; who gave his body and his blood as a sign of God's endless love for us. In doing so, he gave us the peace that passes understanding.

Let us pray:
Loving Lord
Let your love be here
Fill us with your peace
Let your joy be here
Fill us with your grace
Let your light be here
Fill us with your power
Let us know that you are here
Fill us with your presence
Today and every day.
Amen.

May 23, 2010, The Day of Pentecost

2010-05-24T09:18:00.000-07:00

SERMON preached on May 23, 2010 -Pentecost - Ted Berktold
Church of the Resurrection, Eugene

When a volcano erupts, what happens on the surface is a result of unseen things happening underneath. Heat and pressure from gases and molten rock build up. They cause the ground to bulge and quake and then, amidst fire and flooding mud and flowing lava, a volcano is born. What happens under the earth’s crust happens to people. The People of Israel, God's Chosen People, once spiritually powerful and influential, lay dormant despite so much potential force, talk of a messiah, and the promise of God's power. Some Jews thought that the eruption had come with Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth. But it blew up in their faces. Dreams of glory were buried under fear and death, and their hopes were turned to ashes. The disciples, however, did not disband and go fishing. They did as the Lord instructed; they waited. The Lord of all creation, of all the past and all the present, had claimed to be the Lord of the future as well. So they waited.

During Jesus’ time on earth, the disciples got to know him as they walked together and talked together, felt his healing touch, and heard his words of comfort and truth. They began to respect and love him, and place their hope in him before his arrest, but “He was crucified, died, and was buried,” says the Creed. Then something tremendous happened within the earth; so tremendous it still brings a shout of “alleluia” to our lips two thousand years later. Inside the earth itself, God gave life to the crucified one. The stone was rolled back; the Holy One of God arose to rejoin those who had followed him faithfully. Although they had no hope of ever looking into his eyes again or hearing his voice or touching him, they found themselves doing all those things. Now their relationship with Jesus changed. He was still who he had been before the cross, but they made it clear that now he was more, much more. They could touch the holes made by the nails and the spear. They recognized him in the breaking of bread. He came through closed doors. He had become, to use the words we know so well, the risen Christ.

But this, too, had an end. Christians have always regarded the Ascension of our Lord as the ending of Jesus’ presence among us in a special, personal way that will only begin again in the kingdom of God, after this phase of our life has ended. The early Church would need half a century to absorb his departure and speak about his return. The phrase that comes into my mind when I think of the Ascension is “Parting is such sweet sorrow.” In his account of the Ascension, Luke says that the disciples and Mary went home with joy after Jesus ascended into heaven. I know that we must read the lines of scripture before we read between the lines, but I can’t help feeling that their joy was mixed with sadness on the day Jesus departed. I'm not surprised that scripture mentions only joy, for joy and sadness are opposite ends of the same line, and are often intermingled. So they waited, because he told them to. On the Jewish feast of Pentecost, 50 days after Passover, when Jews commemorate the giving of the Law to Moses on Mount Sinai, the waiting stopped. We read in the Acts of the Apostles: “And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2: 2)

We live in the area of active volcanoes. But we know that the power of a volcano is nothing compared with the power of God; nothing. The disciples poured out of that room on fire with the Holy Spirit. Like volcanic ash, they began to choke the world, and its powers. They drifted toward Spain and Africa, Rome and Corinth. Those original followers, many who had never left their tiny homeland, covered the known world. They preached love, forgiveness. They preached Jesus Christ. They baptized; they immersed others in the Spirit of God which was poured out in them, the same Spirit which is poured out into us in baptism. “In each of us the Spirit is manifested in a particular way; wise speech, healing, ecstatic utterance, or ability to interpret it,” said Paul. He expanded the list in the 12th chapter of Romans. The gift of the Spirit can be administration, teaching, giving to charity, leading. Paul gave no definitive list. The Spirit blows where it will, he said. We do not know where the Spirit of God will be tomorrow.

According to Paul, the gifts of God are given for the building up of the church, Christ’s visible, tangible presence on earth. They are not for the elite few, these gifts. Each member of the church has his or her particular character, from the youngest to the eldest. There is no Christian who does not have one or more of the gifts of the Spirit, and no individual has them all; not even the bishop. So the question for Paul was not: “What is biggest, best gift for a Christian to have?” but rather, “What gifts has the Spirit given to me?” and “How can I use those gifts?” How can the Church discern the gifts of each person, recognize those gifts, and celebrate them? Some gifts are extraordinary, miraculous, sensational. Some are quiet and ordinary, as modest as a welcoming smile to a newcomer on Sunday morning. At bottom, all the gifts are one gift. There is one Lord, one Spirit, who gives the gift of eternal life. “Almighty God, on this day you opened the way to eternal life to every race and nation by the promised gift of your Holy Spirit,” says the collect for today. That life begins today when we live the love of Christ. Love is our experience of eternal life now.

As their relationship with the risen Christ ended when he ascended, the disciples realized that the love they had come to expect from Jesus would now have to come from among themselves. Chapters 13 -17 of John’s Gospel, the portion of the Gospel we have been reading since I came at the beginning of May, are known as the Farewell Discourses because, in them, Jesus was saying goodbye and handing on his work to those who were to continue his mission. Today’s Gospel (John 14: 8-17) is a key section of that farewell speech. The test of their love for him, he said, is that they continue to practice all he taught them. At the end of the Discourses, at the 2Oth verse of Chapter 17, Jesus prayed not only for the disciples among whom he had lived and ministered, but also for “those who believe in me through their word.” Jesus was praying for us; inviting us to inherit the gifts and become divine love in our own day. He knew people would no longer run into him at the marketplace; they would run into us. They would see and hear us, and he knew that through us, they might eventually come to know him. Over the centuries, by way of water and Word, bread and wine, that first Christian community has become us and we have become them. Like the disciples, we may feel tempted to look back nostalgically to the times when Christ was there for us, and not realize he wanted us to be here for him.

Pentecost redirects our vision from ascending Lord to empowering presence; from sky to earth; from far-away God to Christ in our midst. Pentecost is the mission statement of the Church. Celebrating it with you today is a privilege and a joy. Within us burns the flame of Pentecost. Embowered by the Spirit of the Living God, may we always be Christ to each other. Thank you for being Christ to me today.

Let us pray:
May the Spirit’s fire be in our thoughts
Making them true, good and just
May it protect us from the evil one.

May the Spirit’s fire be in our eyes
May it open our eyes to what is good in life and
protect us from what is not.

May the Spirit’s fire be on our lips, so that we may speak the truth in kindness
That we may serve and encourage others and
Be protected from speaking evil.

May the Spirit’s fire be in our ears
that we may hear with a deep, deep listening
and all may know that we respect them.

May the Spirit’s fire be in our arms and hands
So that we may be of service and build up love.

May the Spirit’s fire be in our whole being; in our legs and feet
Enabling us to walk the earth with care
So that we may walk ways of goodness and truth. Amen.

May 16, 2010, 7th Sunday of Easter

2010-05-17T09:52:00.000-07:00

Sermon preached on Easter 7 (16 May, 2010) by Ted Berktold
At the Church of the Resurrection, Eugene

The whole of the Easter season is God’s answer to our unavoidable concerns about death. Jesus was killed, dead as could be, then rose from the grave. Perhaps that’s the focus for the whole Church Year, and the reason we don’t need to build pyramids to house a corpse. We hold onto the promise that our essence will continue when our bodies die. “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” we say when we bury someone. Much of our faith is about the body; the physical human body. It is, after all, the death of the body of Jesus, and the death of our own bodies, that initiates eternal life in its fullness. We believe that death is our entrance into the presence of God in a way that we can only sense here on earth. We get a foretaste of heaven in the Eucharist. We feel a union with God here in the midst of the Body of Christ, the Church. But we follow and celebrate a Savior who brings eternal life out of death.

My thirteen year old granddaughter prepared a list of books for me to read now that I am retired. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings top that list. Then comes: “Katurah and Lord Death” by Martine Leavitt. I read it first since it was a single modest volume. It’s a blend of folktale, myth and romance. Katurah is a young woman, lost in a forest, who is able to charm Lord Death with a story and gain an extra day of life, in which she must find true love. At one point, when she asks him if it hurts to die, Lord Death replies, “It is life that hurts you, not death.” “Tell me what it is like to die,” she says. “Is it like every night when I fall asleep?” “No. It is like every morning when you wake up,” he answers.

Some say that we are preoccupied with our bodily existence. Medical advances and our civilized way of living have prolonged life. We live, on average, twice as long as people lived a century and half ago. For most of us here today, physical existence is just about as good as it can possibly be, ever, anywhere, for anyone. Death brings that existence to an end. I think it is not so much that we are afraid of death as it is that we begrudge it. It interrupts and interferes with an existence that most of us enjoy, in spite of a certain amount of pain and anxiety. So we tend to think of death as the worst thing that could happen to anybody and we do everything we can to act as though it did not exist. We cloak it with flowers, we screen it behind sentimental music, and we almost never speak about it. It is the elephant in the room for us, isn’t it? Even as we rejoice with Natasha+ and Blaine at the birth of Thomas, we, like them, pray that he will survive multiple operations on his heart; that he will grow up and live a good life.

I want to speak about death today, not in the full splendor of New Testament faith, concerned not so much with what comes after death, as with the coming of death itself. Obviously my perspective is that of an older man who has already lived out most of his years. And I want to begin with this fact; death is not like a disease that comes to some but not to all; death comes to everybody. When you hear people talk about death it often sounds as if they were talking about a terrible accident, as though it struck some poor person who might ordinarily have been expected to avoid it. Death isn’t like that. Death isn’t a tragedy that hits one family and leaves another free and happy. It is more like birth; it happens to everyone. It has no favorites. The person who wrote the 90th psalm, one of the psalms used at burials, took a grim view of life, but at least he was realistic about death. “We are like grass,” he said. “In the morning, with the dew on it, we are fresh and green and alive, but then the reaper comes during the day and mows it, and when you see it in the evening, it is faded and withered.” We are like that, all of us. Here today and gone tomorrow.

The life of every single one of us comes to an end like a story that is told; that is finished. We don’t have all the time in the world. Some people have more time than others, but when you think about the age of the oldest person you know, it’s not very many years. So the psalmist prays, “Teach us so to count our days that we may take it to heart.” Recognizing the shortness of life, we can also appreciate the seriousness of it. I remember my favorite aunt’s final days when I was in my teens. She was a young Franciscan nun, a dynamic high school teacher, full of life and fun, and she was dying of cancer. She said that something happened to her in the few minutes after she left the clinic the day she was diagnosed to be terminal. Everything from that moment on made a deeper impression on her. She went back and read some of her favorite books, and enjoyed them even more than the first time she read them. She came to our farm to spend time with my Mom and our family, and then visited her other siblings. She eventually had only a few weeks, and then a few days. Every day was something precious; every moment was something to be treasured. The love we hoard up in ourselves and never spend on others, we will never give and never spend. The things we don’t appreciate now in life, the beauty in the world and all the things that make life so good, we will never enjoy. We have only one chance to live each day.

It helps me to remember that death is a normal part of a person’s existence. In itself, it is not evil. There may be evil circumstances, like the death that comes from terrorism or disease, or the painful death of starvation which thousands suffer every day. But death in itself is not evil, any more than birth is evil. Nor is death sad when you think about it as a universal experience. Many of us know all too well that with death comes sadness too deep for words when we are separated from someone we have loved. Separation saddens us.

Let me tell you something else about death. There are things that do not die. Beethoven died in 1827, but the concerto he wrote when he was a young man will outlast him for how many years to come? God’s creation, the mountains and the oceans, the sun and earth and stars, outlast and outlive us. Last week I was on the way to school with my grandson who is in the first grade. He informed me that the sun would burn up in five million years and suck the earth and the planets into itself. Not knowing if this worried him, I said, “We won’t have to worry about something that going to happen so many years from now, will we?” “Well, Grampy, you sure won’t!” he replied. Our birth, our life, our death, rest in God in whom we can put our trust. The majesty and timelessness of God is our final defense against the fear of death. The beauty all around us and the glory that can only be from God gives us hope. In spite of the fact that death comes to all of us, that life is short and therefore so serious, nevertheless, life is safe because God is so great. God is our dwelling place from generation to generation. Thanks be to God.

Let us pray:

The God of each sun rising
With new life so surprising
Come to us

The Bread of Life, our Savior
Live in us forever,
And give us the grace to come to you. Amen.

May 9, 2010, 6th Sunday of Easter

2010-05-10T09:39:00.000-07:00

SERMON preached on Easter 6 (Mothers’ Day), May 9,2010, by Ted Berktold
Church of the Resurrection, Eugene

"If you know what's good for you, young man," my mother used to say, ""you'll do as you're told." She was right. Her bonding of obedience and goodness holds true. In today's reading from John's Gospel, Jesus says: “Those who love me will keep my word.” (John 17: 20-26) It is an alternate version of last week’s gospel, "If you love me, you will keep my commandments." (John 14: 15) "You'll do what I say." And right there you find the secret of discipline - of discipleship - for they are one and the same. There you find authority, obedience, and love. Without any one of those three, there is no discipleship.

Very little has ever come about in this world without discipline - in a family, in a nation, in a human being, in a church. Self-discipline makes us who we are. If you really care about good health, you have to do what it takes to stay healthy. Have your flu shot, eat right, and get enough sleep and exercise. See your doctor when you need to. I know what happens to me when I ignore the rules. On Mother's Day, I think of the ways Jesus' words apply to a family. There's nothing as enjoyable as a family that knows what discipline means, an orderly way of life that doesn't crush a person's spirit, but releases members of a family so they can be in healthy, happy relationship with others. We've all seen children who, when asked to open a door, close it; or if told that its time to go to bed, even if they are tired, pay no attention and stay up. Going to bed becomes a battle in which both child and parents are miserable.

Some families have the wrong kind of discipline, where there is simply authority and obedience without love. It’s a sad fact that we need agencies to protect children who are victims of unhealthy, unloving authority in their own homes. Obedience for fear of punishment was not the way of Jesus. Unless children love and respect their parents, they will obey them only until they have a chance not to. My fear of my parent's anger seldom matched my deep urge to obey and please them out of love. They acted consistently, important for any authority figure, and they acted as one. At night, they didn't just send me off to bed. One of them went up the stairs as if they were going with a friend. When Jesus returned to Nazareth and was obedient to his parents, he was responding to people who meant what they said, people who loved him, people who walked the roads of life with him. He had, even in childhood, a habit of responding to God with perfect obedience.

What works for families works in communities. If you want to learn anything at school, you have to listen to others, to those who know more than you do. The same applies when you finish schooling and take a job. One of the great fears in American cities today is the alarming growth in the crime rate. While Eugene is not among the most dangerous cities in America, it is also not listed among the safest. A state-wide study indicates that alcoholic beverages are served illegally to one in every three minors seeking to buy them. Would it really feel better if we kept juvenile crime down while adult offenders multiplied? We have a 25 mph speed limit on most streets. Have you ever been in a flow of traffic that observed that speed? You might argue that speeding is not all that bad, but the young might argue that neither is underage drinking. For young and old, in matters large and small, obedience is a thing of the past. Authority has given up in despair. The jails are full. Love has been dropped as an impractical or unsuitable motivation, and we hear a cry on every side, especially in election years, for a return to law and order; enforced law and order. What about the Church? How many people follow the canons which say a member of the church is one who attends worship every Sunday, participates in the activities and ministries of the church, and contributes a portion, a tithe, of their income?

Jesus was a great teacher, one of the greatest in history. He spoke with authority, says the Bible. That doesn't mean he shouted. His disciples knew he meant what he said because he went with them through every thing, through every valley, to the top of every mountain. He went with them because he loved them. He still goes with us in the power of the Holy Spirit because he loves us. Sometimes we would like to forget what he says: Deny yourself, take up your cross every day, take the lowest place, forgive your enemies, be with the sick and the poor and those in prison, love God and love one another; the list goes on.... As his students, we know that what he requires, he requires. Either you do what he says or you leave the class. He doesn't threaten us to get us to listen. We hear what he says because he loves his subject so much, and he loves us so much. His subject is the Kingdom of God and he cares about us with such passion because it was meant for us. His disciples tried to do as he asked, because they loved him. They never quite made the grade, but they never completely gave up, nor did they realize what he was about until they saw him die. That's when they knew how much he cared, and they began to take seriously the commandments he had given them. Their obedience grew out of their love.

W. H. Auden wrote: Obedience to some authority is inescapable; if we reject the authority of tradition, then we must accept the authority of local fashion." Our tradition is Christianity. The authority of that tradition has often been exchanged for the authority of local fashion. I can't help wondering how many people in this un-churched state miss the love of Christ every day, and especially on Sunday, because of local fashion. I believe it’s more important to be here than sipping mocha at Starbucks or out on a golf course; to bring your children here instead of to T-ball or a soccer match. When Jesus says we can't live on bread alone, he means it. When he says you can't live a completely self-centered life, he means it. When he says you have to keep his word, not just hear it, not just repeat it, but keep it, he means it.

We did not come together today to pass judgment on others. We came here to look at ourselves and to remember that we are under the authority of Christ who first loved us and who loves us still, in spite of everything. We came together in love. I believe my mom was right. If we know what's good for us, we'll do what Christ told us to do. Only then can his will be done is us; his kingdom come in us.

Let us pray:
In our worship, in our work, and in our daily living,
May our hearts touch the things we do with love.

May who we are and what we do
bring healing and renewal to others,
the way Christ touches lives all around our community and our world.

May our days never burden us,
and may we approach this day with dreams, possibilities, and the promise of eternal life. Infused with Christ, may our lives become gifts to be received and, at the same time, gifts to be given away. Amen.

May 2, 2010, 5th Sunday of Easter

2010-05-10T09:37:00.000-07:00

SERMON preached on Easter 5, May 2, 2010, by Ted Berktold
Church of the Resurrection, Eugene

It is a great privilege for me to join you, the Episcopal Church of the Resurrection, as the Church Universal continues to celebrate our oldest, most important feast, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. We had forty serious days of preparation in fasting and prayer and a dramatic series of services during Holy Week. Now we are part-way through the seven weeks of the Easter Season. All of this helps us to focus on the FACT of the resurrection. We are a religion based upon reported facts. Our first question as Episcopalians is not: "Do you know where you're going when you die?" but rather: "Do you know what Christ, who is alive, has done for us? Do you know the power of the resurrection?” People believed that Jesus rose from the dead because they saw him. They saw him dead; then they saw him risen and alive. They talked to him, the way we talk to each other. They touched him; touched the wounds in his hands and side. They ate meals with him, remembering that special Passover meal they shared on the night he was taken away from them.

There are theories that the women in the Gospel story went to the wrong tomb and in a case of mistaken identity, heard a young man (not an angel, of course) say: "He is not here." Perhaps they only thought they heard him say, "He is risen." The cynic might think that the disciples were a radical group capitalizing on a situation to make a social movement out of it. Even for the cynic, however, common sense says that the body of Jesus would soon have been located by his enemies to dispel this talk of resurrection. Jesus' friends would not have been able to destroy his body to make their story sound good - they loved him too much to do that. You may not care what the disciples thought. But they sincerely believed that Jesus was alive after his death.

Not only is it true that they believed Jesus was alive; they believed it unanimously. They disagreed about many things, as we still do throughout the Christian world. Today’s first lesson from the Book of Acts is all about the disagreement over sharing Jesus with non-Jews. After the vision with clean and unclean, or kosher foods mixed with foods that are not kosher, Peter says that God told him not to make a distinction between them (gentiles) and us (Jews). (Acts 11: 1-18) The disciples had opinions on who would be first in God's kingdom. They didn't agree on Jesus' title, or his status. They argued about money, and the role women could play in this new movement. Some of his teachings were slow to win acceptance among them, especially that bit about serving others and dying to self. But when it came to believing that he was alive, that God raised him from the dead, there was not one dissenting voice.

As you might expect, they didn't all speak about it in the same way. Some spoke of the physical dynamics; of wounds that could be touched, of a breakfast they shared with him on a beach. St. Paul spoke of it in terms of a blinding light that struck him down on the way to Damascus. Others said it was the presence of one who joined them as they walked along a road to Emmaus on a dreary day, and made himself known to them at supper, in the breaking of bread. The way you experience another person's presence is not the essential thing. You don't always need to see someone or hear a voice to feel a presence. Sometimes you just know that person is there. The people who knew Jesus best and loved him most knew that he was still with them. They proclaimed it unanimously; they proclaimed it with passion.

We don't often say things with passion. Some people think its bad manners to get too excited, especially in church. It’s hard to get excited about the amount of rainfall this year, or the distance from here to Portland. But if someone you love is falsely accused of a crime, and your opinion of his or her innocence or guilt is asked, you will probably respond with passion. If you asked the early Christians, "Do you believe in the ten commandments?" I'm sure they would all have said, "Yes, we believe." If you asked them, "Do you believe that Jesus is alive?" they would have said exactly the same thing, "Yes, we believe." The difference would have been in the passion with which they said it. They were willing to die for this belief. They were willing to die rather than deny that Jesus was alive, that Jesus was the Christ of God. They weren’t thrown to the lions by the Romans because they ate fish on Friday, sang too loud at services, or wore modest togas. They died because they believed in the resurrection.

And why not? They lived in a dark and dangerous world. We like to think that our world is dark, full of risks and threats of terrorism and war, a dark cloud of volcanic ash crippling airline traffic, and we feel the urgent need for an extra hour of daylight in the summer months. But their world was really dark. There wasn't much for them to look forward to, the little people who knew Jesus. So if death had no power over Jesus, it meant that the light was in him; that light which had almost been blown out over and over again, especially on Good Friday. His resurrection meant that nothing could put out the light. They believed with such a passion because, if Jesus was alive, death was not the last word. There was something for them to look forward to, something for them to live for. Their defeat could be turned into victory. Their darkness could become a divine light. Now the world in which they lived and suffered was a different place.

Easter is about this different world. In it, the Spirit of the risen Lord is present. The Church has always made this its central, passionate fact. Wherever, whenever two or three of us gather in Christ's name and spirit, he is there. He is here, right now. Whenever we rise above resentment and hatred and forgive the one who has offended us, Christ is there. Whenever people like us rise above our trials and tribulations, he is there. Whenever we love unselfishly, there is the risen Christ. “I give you a new commandment,” says Jesus in today’s gospel, “that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13: 31-35) Whenever we let the light of God shine through us so that others might know and feel the presence of Christ in us, there is Jesus, in the power and glory of his resurrection from the grave. The Lord is risen. Sin and death have no dominion over him. Sin and death have no dominion over us. God has willed to lift us up out of the dust of the earth and make us one with Christ. That is cause for our song of “Alleluia.” That is the heart of our faith.

Let us pray:

The Lord of the empty tomb
The conqueror of gloom
Come to us

The Lord on the road to Emmaus
The Lord giving hope to Thomas
Come to us

The Lord appearing on the shore
Giving us life forevermore
Come to us

The Lord in the garden walking
The Lord to Mary talking
Come to us
Abide with us
And fill us with your love. Amen

April 25 - July 11, 2010

2010-05-05T12:11:00.001-07:00

Mother Tasha is on maternity leave until July.

April 11, 2010, 2nd Sunday of Easter

2010-04-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

April 11, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Acts 5:27-32, Ps. 150, Revelation 1:4-8, John 20:19-31
2nd Sunday of Easter, Year C

How many of us are locked in fear? How many of us, for all our ability to move around and do things, are living behind metaphorical closed doors? For many of us this is true, I think, to a greater or lesser degree. It is for me. At this point in my life the fears are different than they were years ago, yet some of the old ones remain. Here are some of mine: what if I lost my position? What if I really gave as generously as Jesus did even if it meant not being sure I’d have enough for myself reserved for tomorrow? Can I really push the voice of social justice and its direct connection to the Gospel or will I get attacked for being too political? What if people are upset? What if they leave the church? How brave am I really in my claim that I follow and trust in Jesus when the popular image is of a judging, partisan, harsh person who seems to condemn more than love and offer unconditional grace and acceptance? And then there are more private and personal hurts.

I relate to these disciples, these followers, who were huddled together in uncertainty and dread. They had dared to follow Jesus who had by his signs of feeding, healing, accepting as equals women and foreigners, and refusing to judge and punish, directly challenged the order of his society. It had cost him his life. It might cost them theirs. And then, Jesus is there, among them alive.

This is a key point. Alive. Life. The Gospel of John is emphatic that it is Jesus’ life that saves us, not his death. John is clear that it is seeing the life of Jesus and emulating it that releases us from sin, not his dying to wipe some celestial slate clean. And it is this release from sin, the work of forgiveness, that is the crux of the passage today. We are to see the alive Jesus here and now, among us and by our side, just like those disciples. In John such seeing places us in God’s presence and in the new creation where heaven and earth are one.

Sin, in this context, means first and foremost not believing in the revealed truth that Jesus is the Son of God. Sin is lack of faith, of trust, that in Jesus we find life. It is not seeing that we are attached to that vine of life. It is to resist that all God requires for us to know salvation is to receive that love and light. Grace is first, not living by strict morality codes or obeying the demands and agendas of those in power, the authorities. Thus, we circle back to this core truth at the heart of this Gospel: forgiveness of sins is not about us judging and then pardoning or punishing others; it is about seeing with the eyes of Jesus. Only God judges. Our lives are to be shaped by loving and serving them.

This is the work of the church: sometimes hard to tell given some of our more illustrious moments of the past such as witch burning and the Inquisition or more current examples. In this Gospel today it is Pentecost; the Spirit is given to the people to continue living as Jesus lived, willing to serve and love as Jesus did. The work, the purpose of the church and therefore us is this: “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” It is to boldly proclaim that Jesus is alive in and among us, giving us strength and hope even in the face of our worst hurts and fears and terrors. Its central point is forgiveness. We live this out by serving one another in love by humble, mutual service as done by Jesus in washing our feet. This was the new commandment.

It is at this point, I believe, that the story of Thomas and this work of the church merge. Jesus meets Thomas where he is. Thomas wants nothing less than what the others have and Jesus, rather than castigating Thomas, indeed meets him where he is. He gives him what he needs. And what Thomas needs is to be able to delve into the hurt and the wounds. The most accurate translation of Thomas’ request is literally “to throw” his hands into the wounds of Jesus. And Jesus allows this saying in effect that we can throw our doubts, worries, and fears on him. I find this very reassuring. I can toss my fears unto him. I can open my doors locked with fear a bit more each day until his life drives it out. This is very much the point of prayer. We can probe our wounds and our hurts so that we can be healed by the living Jesus.

And this is the basis for true forgiveness and of truly learning to love one another as Jesus loved us. This forgiveness allows us to see correctly. This forgiveness allows us to see others as reflections of God that we are to serve and not to harm or judge as unworthy of God or each other. Even Judas was washed and shared in the meal. This forgiveness asks us to question and resist all that diminishes others and ourselves. It is to have them through us experience the transformative love of God.

When we live in this posture of forgiveness so much is opened up. For example, the family member that is a bitter and hard person, someone we really can’t stand or who we don’t want to be around is someone we invite to tell their story. Under all that there is a wound that has never healed. Instead of judging and writing them off, we can find a way to see what is underneath and maybe, just maybe, bring new life to the relationship. Or the person who always criticizes us we decide not to treat with anger, but to deflect the barbs and offer kind words in response. Or a rather amusing, but insightful, example from a Bollywood film I saw three years ago where a man is fed up that his neighbor one floor above him always spits out his tobacco juice on his door and landing. He decides to stop yelling and simple wash it up every day while smiling a warm greeting to the spitter. And finally, one day the spitter winds up, takes aim, sees the neighbor waiting and stops. He has finally learned to see with new eyes that realize he can no longer do such a thing.

In this place of forgiveness we can probe our own hurts and let go of our anger, our need to judge others, our need to justify the way the world is. We can delve underneath conventional politics, and partisan ideologies, to see a deeper and more complex truth to which we must respond. For instance, we can ask the foundational question of if the relentless pursuit of profit is compatible with washing the feet and serving one another in mutual regard. We can look at the greed and desire to profit at others’ expense be it underpaid workers, decisions to not pay for medical procedures, or miners who perish due to unsafe working conditions that were not fixed, which are the wounds of fear and insecurity turned outwards, and work to create something new. We may make new choices in what we buy or how we look at social issues or decide to work to adjust our economic relationships so that reasonable profit and fairness are not seen as mutually exclusive.

Or we look again at the cultural mindset that drugs and drug users are criminal and begin to look for the hurt underneath, both of the users and the society in which they grew up, that needs to be healed. We can begin to see the realities that need the life of the resurrected one invited in, not just condemnation, which simply locks people up as so much garbage and does so in ways profoundly shaped by racism and poverty.

We can look to Jesus sign of feeding the 5,000 and ask how is it that today there is more food than ever in the world and yet more people than ever are hungry because they cannot access what creation freely gives? How is it loving one another when food is controlled in a way that denies it to so many? Does this change what we eat, where we buy our food? Does it encourage us to learn about the realities of the global food system and the devastating impact it is having on farmers and the land? Charity isn’t enough; love and service requires dissolving the divide. The theological truth of Jesus is that God feeds all abundantly. If we believe in Jesus we too feed others all that they need and to create a world where all participate directly in that source. Radical stuff, but that is the nature of forgiveness that flows from a confession of Jesus as God.

These are some of the places that this Gospel takes me. I start from the assurance that in Jesus I meet God and that meeting is grace. I can let go of my fears and wounds and place them on his life so that I can see with his eyes. His eyes are so much better than mine that can be so clouded by misunderstanding, selfishness and anxiety.

Then I can join most fully in the purpose of the church, which is to be a community of people that embody grace, unconditional love and service without qualification. Jesus’ life reveals that no matter who we are or what we are God is love for us. To live that out in fullness and in truth would indeed be a miracle. It is the miracle we are entrusted to perform within ourselves and within this community. We each must see what this means for our own daily life and then we must be open to see what it means for our life in the greater world. As Bishop Jelinek said yesterday at Bishop Michael’s consecration we are to work for the common good and trust that in the common good we will find what is truly good for us each individually as well. Just like he did for Thomas, Jesus will give us exactly what we need when we need it. Just like that first community that wrote John, we are to believe that we are graced and loved as we are. Just like that first community, this sense allows us to see, not as judgers, but as lovers, who are transformed to see the world anew and offer the vision of the kingdom to its sin, its brokenness and its pain.

So this week I invite you to imagine what living out this vision looks like in your own life and what you imagine it could be calling us here at Resurrection to do in our future. Next week, instead of me preaching, I would like for us to share our thoughts and understandings of this, so we can learn from each other what being alive in Christ and sharing his life means to us.

April 4, 2010, Easter Day

2010-04-09T09:12:00.000-07:00

April 4, 2010
Easter Sunday
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison

Jeremy was born with what the world saw as a weak, limited body and a slow mind. Though he was 12 he was still in second grade, unable to grasp much. His teacher often became impatient with him and his classmates would get uncomfortable with his squirming. At times, though, he would suddenly speak clearly as if a spot of light had broken in to his mind. In exasperation, the teacher called in Jeremy’s parents one day for a consultation. Jeremy’s teacher spoke to them and said that their child really belonged in a special school. It wasn’t fair for him to distract the other children. Jeremy’s parents answered that there was no school like that nearby. It would be a terrible shock to Jeremy to make such a change and that they knew he liked the school.

After they left, Ms. Miller sat for a while staring out the window. The coldness of the snow outside seemed to penetrate her soul. She wanted to sympathize with Jeremy and his parents. He was their only child and he had a terminal illness, but still she felt it wasn’t right for him to remain in her class. He distracted her from teaching the 18 other students. He would never learn to read or write, so what was the point? As she followed her thoughts she become overwhelmed with guilt. Oh God, she thought, help me to be more patient with Jeremy and quit complaining. My problems are so small compared to theirs.

She did her best to live into her resolve, ignoring Jeremy’s blank looks. One day, he limped to her desk and said in a loud voice, “Ms. Miller, I love you.” She was surprised and stammered a thanks while the other children giggled and snickered.

Spring came, and the class was excited for the coming of Easter. Ms. Miller told them the story of Jesus and Easter, and then to emphasize the idea of new life springing forth, she gave each of the children a large plastic egg. “I want you to take these home and bring them back tomorrow with something inside that shows new life,” she said. “Do you understand?”

“Yes!” the children chimed, all except Jeremy. He just listened intently, his eyes never leaving her face. Had he understood what she had asked, she wondered? Perhaps she should call his parents and explain it to them to be on the safe side. But that night her sink backed up so she had to call a plumber, she had to shop for groceries and iron a shirt and before she knew it it was too late.

The next morning as the class came in the students placed their eggs in a wicker basket on Ms. Miller’s desk. After the math lesson it was time to open the eggs. In the first egg, she found a flower. “Oh yes, a flower! A flower is certainly a sign of new life.” Ms. Miller said. The next egg held a plastic butterfly. “We all know that a caterpillar changes and grows into a beautiful butterfly. Yes, that is a new life, too.” Next there was a rock with moss, which too showed life. Then Ms. Miller opened the fourth egg. She gasped. The egg was empty! It must be Jeremy’s egg. Obviously he hadn’t understood the assignment, just as she feared. She set the egg aside and reached for the next egg, not wanting to embarrass Jeremy or so she justified to herself.

Suddenly, Jeremy spoke up. “Ms. Miller, aren’t you going to talk about my egg?” Flustered, she replied, “But Jeremy—your egg is empty! He looked up at her and said, “Yes, but Jesus’ tomb was empty, too!”

Time stopped. When she could speak again, Ms. Miller asked him, “Do you now why the tomb was empty?” “Oh yes!” he answered, “Jesus was killed and put in there. Then God raised him up!”

Three months later, Jeremy died. Those who paid their respects at the service were surprised to see 19 eggs on top of his casket…all of them empty.

This day is the culmination and reconciliation of all things, of all things into something new. Darkness weaves into light and light dances with darkness. Life and death are married into a divine union and seen as part of eternity. We, who seek and yearn to be part of this union, hear the story of Resurrection that tells us to put our trust in that union, not the separateness we experience in this mortal body. On Easter, we are asked to let go of fear. On Easter, we are meant to see joy and hope in an empty tomb. On Easter, we are asked to not cling to death. On Easter, we are asked to believe that eternal life beyond biological life is at the heart of God and at the heart of our being. On Easter, we are asked to let go of what we think is the end, the final abyss, and surrender to the great tide of life.

We find this morning an empty tomb. It is not that death has escaped. It is that death is not the end; it is part of life in ways large and small each and every day. Death can be where we stop, encased in tombs, and where we linger, what we try to avoid or paradoxically what we embrace because we are so afraid. But the angels, the messengers say, Why do you look for the living among the dead? The one who showed you life, who embodied the wholeness of life, died a mortal death but has been raised. His life is greater than that death and it has been drawn into eternal life. He has broken the barrier between our biological life and our spiritual life. We are to see that one resides within the other, with the life of our spirit called ever forward.

Epicurius and the angels spoke the same language. Epicurius wrote: “Why are you afraid of death? Where you are death is not. Where death is, you are not. What is it that you fear?” Perhaps what we fear is not death but life, eternal life, a life that invites us ever to dissolve the self to join the great tide of life. Life, like death, is something we try to cling to, but in doing so we turn it into death. We make it our own possession, we reduce it to our wants and needs and body and thoughts. We segregate it out as something we have. We use it to try to control our world and others. In our fear we grab and cling and take advantage of others and try to bend them to our will and desires, rather than creating space to free their souls and ours to be a part of this eternal tide of life. And in so doing life becomes the mirror of death. Jeremy was seen through this lens, but he could see through a different one—the lens of life.

We cannot claim life, we cannot own it, we cannot see it as ours. It is something we are invited into, given a moment to share in. We can open to it and ride its waves aware that it does not belong to us, but rather that we belong to it. This is what Jesus the Christ reveals. He is raised by God, by that eternal life. He does not raise himself. He does not beat death into non-existence. Instead, he surrenders so fully to the current of life that he absorbs and passes through death, unafraid of it for he knows it is part of life and not that life is part of death. His body's death is but a key to revelation; he dies fully so that we can discover that eternal life encompasses and surpasses that bodily demise.

Death is but life waiting to emerge. The tomb is not a preserver of death; it is a womb that gives birth. The Easter egg is symbol of the womb, of new life. From early one, we understood this connection between the two. A womb holds for a while, nourishes, sustains and protects life and then lets it go, out into the world—from seamless life within greater life, to a new form a life that must seek it's place in that great stream until it is called home again into another tomb and another womb. And yet this truth remains: we can not grasp it; we can only surrender and open up to the coursing of life through our veins, through our hearts, through the wind, through the water, through the music of the stars, through the dance of sunlight, through the faces of others seen as part of our life not another life separate from ours. Such emptiness is not death; it is the requisite for life.

For our life is part of that eternal life of Christ. Death is but a place along the journey that calls us forward into life. We can put death first; we can give it the power to be the final solution and the answer, but that is not the revelation of the Resurrected One. That revelation is life—the new heaven and the new earth—the victory of life as love, as part of the great Lover and the Beloved.

As those who believe in the resurrection and the eternal life it reveals, we are called to enter fully into that life and that light. We are to rejoice with our whole being! We are part of life, eternal and always. Whatever in our world kills bodies, kills souls, reduces people to categories or names or something to be acted on by us, whatever stifles the song and dance of another, that is where death is. But we, we are called to see that and bring in life, by surrendering our own life to this great rhythm, this great joy, this great truth of God revealed this day by Jesus’ triumph over death. He gives us the gift; he rejoices to share this glorious hope with us. And we, we are to sing in this life, pray in this life and to dance, dance with joy and abandon and love for this life and in this life. For when the deepest truth is a life-giving love that enfolds and embraces all, dancing is what our hearts and our feet must do, holding in our hands an empty egg cracked open to life. So dance, this day, and every day, in thanksgiving for the love of God that dies and rises for us, to free us, to hold us, to call us ever more into union with the divinity at the heart of all things. Amen.

Easter Vigil, April 3, 2010

2010-04-06T09:16:00.000-07:00

Easter Vigil, 2010
April 3, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison

While we're asleep
The Paschal moon is shining
High above the trees

And high above the trees
Even while we are sleeping
Easter is growing
In the Paschal moon
Like a child in its mother.
(Anne Porter)

This night is the culmination of all things. Darkness weaves into light and light dances with darkness. Life and death are married into a divine union and seen as part of eternity. We, who seek and yearn to be part of this union, hear the story of Resurrection that tells us to put our trust in that union, not the separateness we experience in this mortal body. On Easter, we are asked to let go of fear. On Easter, we are asked to not cling to death. On Easter, we are asked to believe that eternal life beyond biological life is at the heart of God and at the heart of our being. On Easter, we are asked to let go of what we think is the end, the final abyss, and surrender to the great tide of life.

We find this night an empty tomb. It is not that death has escaped. It is that death is not the end; it is part of life in ways large and small each and every day. Death can be where we stop, encased in tombs, and where we linger, what we try to avoid or paradoxically what we embrace because we are so afraid. But the angel, the messenger says, do not be afraid. The one who showed you life, who embodied the wholeness of life, died a mortal death but has been raised. His life is greater than that death and it has been drawn into eternal life. He has broken the barrier between our biological life and our spiritual life. We are to see that one resides within the other, with the life of our spirit called ever forward.

Epicurius and the angel spoke the same language. Epicurius wrote: “Why are you afraid of death? Where you are death is not. Where death is, you are not. What is it that you fear?” Perhaps what we fear is not death but life, eternal life, a life that invites us ever to dissolve the self to join the great tide of life. Life, like death, is something we try to cling to, but in doing so we turn it into death. We make it our own possession, we reduce it to our wants and needs and body and thoughts. We segregate it out as something we have. We use it to try to control our world and others. In our fear we grab and cling and take advantage of others and try to bend them to our will and desires, rather than creating space to free their souls and ours to be a part of this eternal tide of life. And in so doing life becomes the mirror of death.

We cannot claim life, we can not own it, we can not see it as ours. It is something we are invited into, given a moment to share in. We can open to it and ride its waves aware that it does not belong to us, but rather that we belong to it. This is what Jesus the Christ reveals. He is raised by God, by that eternal life. He does not raise himself. He does not beat death into non-existence. Instead, he surrenders so fully to the current of life that he absorbs and passes through death, unafraid of it for he knows it is part of life and not that life is part of death. His body's death is but a key to revelation; he dies fully so that we can discover that eternal life encompasses and surpasses that bodily demise.

Death is but life waiting to emerge. The tomb is not a preserver of death; it is a womb that gives birth. A womb holds for a while, nourishes, sustains and protects life and then lets it go, out into the world—from seamless life within greater life, to a new form a life that must seek it's place in that great stream until it is called home again into another tomb and another womb. And yet this truth remains: we can not grasp it; we can only surrender and open up to the coursing of life through our veins, through our hearts, through the wind, through the water, through the music of the stars, through the dance of sunlight, through the faces of others seen as part of our life not another life separate from ours.

For our life is part of that eternal life of Christ. Death is but a place, a moment, along the journey that calls us forward into life. We can put death first; we can give it the power to be the final solution and the answer, but that is not the revelation of the Resurrected One. That revelation is life—the new heaven and the new earth—the victory of life as love, as part of the great Lover and the Beloved.

As those who believe in the resurrection and the eternal life it reveals, we are called to enter fully into that life and that light. We are to rejoice with our whole being! We are part of life, eternal and always. Whatever in our world kills bodies, kills souls, reduces people to categories or names or something to be acted on by us, whatever stifles the song and dance of another, that is where death is. But we, we are called to see that and bring in life, by surrendering our own life to this great rhythm, this great joy, this great truth of God revealed this day by Jesus’ triumph over death. He gives us the gift; he rejoices to share this glorious hope with us. And we, we are to sing in this life, pray in this life and to dance, dance with joy and abandon and love for this life and in this life. For when the deepest truth is a life-giving love that enfolds and embraces all, dancing is what our hearts and our feet must do. So dance, this day, and every day, in thanksgiving for the love of God that dies and rises for us, to free us, to hold us, to call us ever more into union with the divinity at the heart of all things. Alleluia!

Good Friday, April 2, 2010

2010-04-06T09:14:00.000-07:00

What does one say after hearing this story, this Passion of Jesus of Nazareth? Nothing can capture its depth and power. We are meant to be moved, taken deep inside, to ponder this story of pain and promise. So rather than offer some words in response I am going to leave us with a few questions to consider for the next few minutes in silence and into the day to come.

The cross is violence compressed into one powerful moment and symbol. Is the violence and death necessary? Does God require it or is it we humans who require it? Where is God in this?

Where is the story of the cross still alive today? What Calvaries are happening this very moment here in our own city and nation and around the world? How do we embrace it and why does Jesus ask us to?

Christians use the word atonement to describe what happened on the cross. What does atonement mean to you? What is atoned for? How does it save us? What might we discover if we think of it as Julian of Norwich and others did: at-one-ment?

March 28, 2010, Palm Sunday

2010-03-30T10:09:00.001-07:00

March 28, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 45:21-25, Ps. 72, Philippians 2:5-11, Luke 19:29-40
Palm Sunday, Year C

On the outskirts of Jerusalem
the donkey waited.
Not especially brave, or filled with understanding,
he stood and waited.
How horses, turned out in to the meadow,
leap with delight!
How doves, released from cages,
clatter away, splashed with sunlight!
But the donkey, tied to a tree as usual, waited.
Then he let himself be led away.
Then he let the stranger mount.
Never had he seen such crowds!
And I wonder if he at all imagined what was to happen.
Still, he was what he had always been: small, dark,
obedient.
I hope, finally, he felt brave.
I hope, finally, he loved the man who rode so lightly upon him,
as he lifted one dusty foot and stepped, as he had to,
forward.

The donkey—patient, trusting, not bold, not an eye-catcher like his relative the horse. What sort of heart does it take to follow not knowing exactly where you will be taken? Is it for good or for ill? What strength of soul does it take to have one's ordinariness invited into the birth of the extraordinary?

As he steadily climbs the Mount of Olives he sees a view new to his eyes. All Jerusalem in her pain and splendor spread out before him, the temple shining gold in the spring light, a vision of joy and hope. It is worth it for this, he thinks.

These are cloaks, the donkey thinks. But why cloaks, when I usually carry olives or bottles of wine or bundles of grain? It is a rare day when my passenger is a person. Who is it, if not my owner?

And then a gentle hand touches him and a forehead leans against his own with a voice offering thanks for the donkey's coming. The donkey looks into eyes that are fiery and passionate yet also kind and open. There is a tiredness behind them, not of the flesh but of the heart, when it knows the course is set and that the road ahead is arduous, but it is the only road to take. The donkey knows that road, and so he lifts his shoulders proudly and stands firm as this man seats himself upon his back. In all his donkey-ness he has been picked as he is to carry this man to something, something out of the ordinary... or maybe all too ordinary. In his heart the donkey knows this is no ordinary passenger, but someone of great hope, great love, great challenge. He has picked a donkey to ride into town, not a powerful horse bedecked in a saddle and bridle. He doesn't play to the worlds ideas of power and importance, but yet the donkey knows, he has a power and importance that is worth far more for it is of a different order. He knows this from the way this Galilean sits upon him and the way he guides him.

As they move forward, the donkey hears the people shouting, but it is the palms and the cloaks that he speaks to. They too are thinking their thoughts: how they make the path smooth, how they keep the dust from flying into the donkey and his rider's eyes, how they are able to do something other than their usual task.

But they all wonder, do the people see the new thing being done? Or is this merely a stepping stone towards a different version of the way things have always been done? Will the vision of God's equitable justice, of universal care, of healing prevail? Are they waiting to exchange the donkey, the branches and the cloaks for stallions, canopies of brocade and silk, guards and well-dressed attendants? Is the Mount of Olives to be exchanged for a palace and scribes and orders? Can they see the transformation being made alive before their very eyes, the unmasking of society's illusions? Or do they only look for reversal, for replacement?

The stones cry out, the palms rustle till their fronds fracture, the cloaks reweave their patterns, the donkey brays for them to notice, but is it all in vain?

For the donkey carries the Christ, the anointed one, not to political victory in terms of taking charge, of human-centered power, of killing and expelling the enemy, but to a victory that is to break that very cycle. The cycle is so strong; it is so a part of the life of civilization. Will his victory ever be embraced? For the donkey carries the Christ towards both his death and his life, toward good and ill, into the heart of paradox. He carries him into the cycle to go beyond it.

Caught up in their joy, the crowd is ready for a reversal of fortune. Use your power to bring the rich and powerful down and put us in their place! Let those who have been used and misused be vindicated and let those who used and misused experience our lot! But a reversal of fortune changes nothing; transforms nothing. And the Christ is serving the transformation where the user and used, the exploiter and the exploited, the wounder and the wounded, both find a new reality, a new kind of life that needs such ways no longer.

The man knows this, the donkey senses. And as nears the city the donkey hears his lament, the catch in his throat, and he feels the tears drop onto his dusty mane: “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.”

It must be done! The moment the transformation is defined and revealed must pass. For if not, the hope of it will be lost. And some will see it; some will understand; some will embrace it. It will begin a new thing, again, in the world. The hope of God will penetrate and shine forth to those who can see, those who long to see. The celebration of the crowd can not last. It will turn against the Christ; we know that this is so, for it is still so, but the hope is still there too, being spoken of in the trees, being heard in the footsteps of the donkey and the beggar and the humble ones, being shouted by the mountains and the river rocks. The path is carved by Christ, but do we finally love the one that rides so lightly on our backs? And when we lift our dusty foot and step, which way do we go?

Will I lay my cloak before you,
when they arrest you on olive mountain,
or pull it tighter around me,
fading into the ranks of the deserters;

will I shout
'Blessed is the one who comes
in the name of the Lord!
When they parade you
before the authorities,
or will I tell any one-and every one- around me
I never met you in my life;

will I lay my palm branches at your feet,
as they march you to Calvary,
or use them to put more stripes
on your bloody back;

will I run behind you
when they carry you to the tomb,
or turn away
as the ashes of my hopes
are rubbed into the
wounds in my heart?

And the donkey, well, he lifted one dusty foot and stepped, as he had to, forward.

March 21, 2010, The Fifth Sunday of Lent

2010-03-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

March 21, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 43:16-21, Ps 126, Philippians 3:4b-14, John 12:1-8
5th Sunday of Lent, Year C

I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death, if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead. These words of Paul are the expression of the purpose of his life. How many of us would frame our life’s purpose in this way? We want to follow Christ. We want to experience the presence of his love in our lives. We may say that we want to know Christ. But what does that mean, to know? For Paul it is clear, to share in his suffering and death so that we can know Jesus as the risen one, for without the former we cannot truly know that latter. To share in his suffering and death is not something most of us desire. We want to think on it, ponder it, claim its saving power for us, but to have it be what he does and did, not something that we too must do each in our own way. And to do this we must be clear on the nature of that suffering and death; it is love.

We hear this definition if we pay attention to the implications of the readings. Paul’s rejection of all that made his life meaningful in worldly terms is a way of saying love is at the center. The righteousness of which he speaks means forgiveness and mercy, both of which are impossible without love. We also see it clearly in the story from John’s gospel.

In John’s gospel, we hear the story of an early Christian community grounded in the act of loving service to one another. Today’s passage is a very clear example of that. As is often the case in John’s gospel and indeed the other gospels as well, it is women or an outsider, not one of the inner circle, who demonstrates the point first. When hearing this story of Mary anointing Jesus’ feet we are meant to think of the foot washing that Jesus does for his own disciples just days later. Her gift is one based on love for him and for God. She understands without being told how to respond to Jesus, to the love and ministry and life he embodies and points us to. As Gail O’Day writes: “In the anointing, she shows what it means to be one of Jesus’ own. She gives boldly of herself in love at this hour, just as Jesus will give boldly of himself in love at his hour.”

The hour in question is, naturally, the hour, the time of his crucifixion and death. All that is happening in this portion of John is prefiguring his coming Passion. He is under a death sentence that makes incarnate our human fear of divine love and selfless surrender to serving others and God. Mary keeps her heart open to the place where true life lies, even if the path leads through death. Surely she knows that Jesus’ human life is coming to its end, but that only draws her further into love of him, not abandonment or trying to avoid the path of life in God that includes both joy and suffering, a particular kind of suffering.

The community that wrote John’s gospel understood itself to be partaking here and now in the resurrected life, not in its entirety, but in a true and real way. Heaven, service, salvation and love are all words that are pointing towards the same truth, in this Gospel and in the others. They are all part and parcel of the same understanding and same call to a way of life. Jesus was clear, as most of our later theologians were not, that heaven and salvation were not places distanced from us that we got to later; they were meant to be revealed and known within and among us. And, incidentally, so was what we signify by the word hell.

Last week in the adult confirmation class we were talking about these ideas of heaven and hell. And one person shared a wonderful Chinese story about them. I did say that the story would probably appear in a sermon someday. Little did I know it would be a week later! When we are paying attention God gives us so often exactly what we need. The story goes like this. We are given a glimpse of hell. It is a banquet hall, full of tables mounded with wonderful food, and the guests are seated along both sides of them. The place is full. All these delicious dishes, mouth-watering smells, and abundance are there for the taking. But no one is eating. Each guest has a pair of chopsticks that are four feet long. Try as they might, contort their arms as they will, not one of them can manage to scoop up any food and get it into their mouths. The room is full of frustration and anger. We are then given a glimpse of heaven. It is the exact same set up: banquet tables full of food, guests lining them table, and even the four-feet long chopsticks! But this room is full of feasting, laughter, and happiness. How is this possible? Because each guest is taking his or her own chopsticks, picking up the food before the guest opposite and feeding it to them.

This story is, I feel, a profoundly powerful image of service, love, salvation and heaven all woven together. It is simple on the surface, but that is deceptive. There is a lot we can learn by contemplating it. In its own way, it is playing on the same ideas as the passage in the Gospel of Matthew where the sheep and the goats are sorted based on who gave food, water, clothing, compassion and companionship in this life to others and who did not. In today’s reading Mary reveals heaven; Judas reveals hell.

As we continue on our journey towards the cross, as we too set our faces towards Jerusalem, I offer you this story to contemplate this week. Rather than give examples of how I see this story lived out in the world, rather than offer more ideas about what it means, I will instead leave you with some questions or ideas on how to enter into it and allow its meaning to unfold for you. For the heart of faith is not having answers given to us. It is to come to our own understandings that are grounded in the story and life of Jesus as we seek to make them our own story.

So here are a few of them to prime the pump. What is the relationship between love and service? What does true service to and of others look like? What does it require of us? What is different in the heavenly banquet image other than creative problem solving? What changes in disposition and understanding does feeding one another involve? What characterizes it? What changes does it require of our own self-understanding? And of the nature of life with each other? And lastly, what does such loving service mean when the path it takes us on can lead to suffering? For this is the path Jesus is on and yet he keeps moving forward, not seeking death, but neither turning from such service to appease those who are threatened by it.

It is also the path that we are on if we, as Paul, want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection. It is not simply telling a story; it is discovering how we are to live it, constantly, knowing that Jesus is with us on the way, ready to go with us to the very ends of heaven and hell, ready always to love us.

March 14, 2010, the Fourth Sunday in Lent

2010-03-15T09:57:00.000-07:00

March 14, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Joshua 5:9-12, Ps 32, 1 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3.11b-32
4th Sunday of Lent, Year C

In Alice Walker’s beautiful and painful book “The Color Purple”, one of the many characters we meet is Shug Avery, a traveling blues singer. Shug has been estranged from her pastor father for years because of her decision to sing secular music. One morning, while she’s visiting her hometown, she decides that she feels like singing. She opens the local juke joint and begins singing her signature song. As a crowd gathers around the singer, the scene shifts to her father’s church. As he is preaching, sounds from the juke joint drift in through the open windows. Someone in the congregation prompts the choir to begin singing “God Might be Trying to Tell you Something”. As the choir gets louder, Shug hears and begins singing along. As the song progresses, she leads everyone from the juke joint (band and all) to the church. She walks up to her father and puts her arms around, whispering, “See, Daddy, even sinners have souls.” He returns her embrace as tears fill her eyes.

Shug Avery’s world is a long way away from that of the younger son we hear about today. Some parallels are obvious. Both children take paths that the world judges to be morally suspect. Both are distanced from their fathers, though we do not ever know how the father in the story in Luke felt about his younger son’s decision. He may not have had the hardness of heart that Shug’s did. Both children find a way to come home through the interaction of life and the involvement of other people, though the choir in Shug’s story is a far kinder opening than the younger brother’s working as an exploited field laborer. And both, upon meeting their father again, confess.

And it is on this aspect that I would like us to focus a bit more. So often we hear sermons on God’s unconditional grace and acceptance as embodied by the father. Which is true. Or we hear sermons on the older brother and how often we may indentify more with him than the prodigal, being prompted to not let our narrowness cut out God’s incomprehensible grace and realizing grace for one doesn’t diminish it’s presence for the other. Which is also true. Or we hear the invitation to come home to God if we find our lives seem to be more like that of the prodigal son’s and trust that we will be received. Again, true. All are certainly ways into this story and pointing to the many meanings therein.

To confess. To acknowledge. To, as the story says, come to oneself, to face oneself honestly. This is not a popular topic. Oh, don’t get me wrong. We love to divulge in our culture. Why else are the antics of our stars and shows like Jerry Springer so popular? But such divulgence of our behaviors, our wrongdoings, our shocking mistreatment of others is not truly confession. It is self-indulgent revelation meant to garner attention, fame, money and a sense of importance. Confession is none of those things. It is about self-honesty and repair. It’s about seeing where we have not acted as we ought to have; it is about claiming where we have misused our lives at the expense of ourselves and others. We don’t look to blame; we look to own and to amend. It is an intimate act done without ulterior motives of gain, except perhaps that of the peace and calm that come with acceptance and owning what we have done without excuse or justification.

Some cynical types take the prodigal son’s words as a calculated ploy to win his father’s affection and get back into to the good life. He doesn’t really mean it, they say; he’s just once again being the selfish young git trying to protect his own skin. Perhaps such a jaded reading is a symptom of our times. I may be naïve, but I take the young man’s words at face value. He could have simply tried this ruse when the famine hit rather than trying to eek out a living as a laborer. He could have gone home with his tail between his legs. But he doesn’t. He chooses to work in a dirty, bottom of the barrel job because he realizes he has gotten lost, that he has misused his father’s trust and love, that he has been selfishly living, focusing on his own pleasure at the expense of others’ souls and his own. He has a moment of clarity into his own nature. And he realizes that no one owes him anything; he has to find his own path back to wholeness and dignity. He can’t do it alone, but he also can’t expect that there aren’t bridges to mend and accounts to be reckoned. He faces the emptiness and inner darkness and finds the courage to say this is where I am and it is from here that I start. May God send me people to help me find my way back.

This is the first movement of grace, the whisper on the edges of our soul that reminds us we do not belong to ourselves, but to our family, our neighbors, our world and our God. We are part of something holy and beautiful and all too often we trample on it in search of self-centered gratification. But to step back and see our interdependence and our interconnection, our need for good relations with others and our own soul is the first step of the dynamic of grace. God implants this earning, this longing within us. We can muffle it well, but when we are ready for something new it sends forth a whisper of longing from deep within us.

The son prepares his speech. Note how he doesn’t cast blame or try to paint himself as a victim of circumstance. Rather, he comes clean and says basically, I messed up and I don’t expect you to take me back as before. I have to re-earn your trust; I have to grow and I have to make amends. And he goes through with this even when his father greets him with unconditional love and joy. The son could have not said his prepared speech; he could have chosen not to acknowledge his own realization and instead said, phew, dodged a bullet there, I don’t have to worry about saying sorry. Instead he still says the words, at least most of them, to his father even after this amazing reception. He does so, not to guarantee the continued good reaction of his father, but rather for the sake of his soul.

And this is the second dynamic of grace. It is always being held out for us, but we have to come to a place where we see our need for it. Only then can we truly receive it, experience it as grace. We have to acknowledge our utter dependence on God’s love and that even at our best we get lost. Our ability to experience God’s unconditional loving grace is directly related to our humility and willingness to always acknowledge that our lives and actions are always in need of scrutiny and the participation of God. This is the life of the soul, the soul that Shug speaks of, the soul given back to the son. For our souls to blossom, they need to bask in God’s grace, and God’s grace comes to us in direct proportion to our willingness to admit our dependence on God and each other. It comes as we keep our eyes always open with honest clarity on who we are and what we do, asking always for God to come in and make it truly good.

Even the older son needs to learn this. He has confused grace with reward for always doing the right thing. Grace is an earned thing. In his self-righteousness he is angry that grace is given to someone who hasn’t played by the rules. For him, it seems, grace is about fairness not love. He is the good guy, right, so why hasn’t he gotten special favors? In his own way, he is just as self-absorbed as his younger brother. In his own way, he too needs to recognize his need for grace, his need to confess his arrogance, his superiority, his feeling of entitlement, his belief in that it he himself who is the author his salvation.

God wants us back together with him and each other safe and sound. God wants us back together to celebrate, to move to a place beyond blame and retribution, into acknowledgement of our wrongs against each other that leads to healing not continued division. Confession is an act of profound liberation. It is freeing; it is a tonic to the soul. To confess is to strip away all that has accumulated on our souls and allow the light of God to shine in and continue to build us up. To confess is to remind ourselves of the deep truth that as long as we are human and part of this human enterprise, we will get out of alignment. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but rather something essential to know about ourselves so that we can keep turning to the center to find God. It is not to make us focus on our faults and shortcomings and feel guilty, dirty and rotten about ourselves; rather, confession is about reminding ourselves that at our core we are holy people called to live a life of fulfilling love for others and in so doing find our souls to be enriched and blessed.

Confession done from this place, I believe, is at the heart of our growth as people, our ability to forgive and the possibility to live in new ways. It is also the soil from which social justice sprouts forth and why such work is so hard. It is more than saying we are sorry as a collective; it is to take the next step to make amends and restructure our world from a radically new place. That is why it is easy for governments decades later to issue formal apologies, such as ours did only last year for slavery, but nearly impossible for them to make monetary reparations or work to change systems of power without tremendous pressure from the people.

This Lent we are invited to revisit the meaning and the sacred power of confession and its intrinsic link to grace. We are invited to see ourselves as all the characters in this story because we are all the characters in it, and to live out the dynamic of grace in within ourselves and towards others. It is about seeing that we have souls and to see that soul in all others—the Christ within, the holy spark inside, the connection to the unifying reality of God. It is about a season of reunification that can only come when we see the breaks to be healed, the division to overcome. It is about believing that grace is God’s first gift and purpose for us and being willing to let ourselves be wrapped in those arms of divine acceptance and joy.

Sundays, February 28 and March 7, 2010

2010-03-04T09:40:00.001-08:00

The Rev. Garrison did not preach on these two Sundays. Guest preachers were Nancy Gallagher on February 28, and Dave Beuerman on March 7.

February 21, 2010, 1st Sunday in Lent

2010-02-22T09:44:00.000-08:00

February 21, 2010, 1st Sunday in Lent
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Deuteronomy26:1-11, Ps. 91:1-2, 9-16, Romans 10:8b13, Luke 4:1-13
Lent 1, Year C

We gather on this first Sunday of Lent to start the journey to Holy Week, to the cross, and ultimately to the joy of Easter. But if the state of my soul is at all in synch with yours I come to this day with my attention divided and distracted. It has been a hard week for us here in this community. I suspect that like many if not all of you I have a heart that is bearing much sorrow. Death has been a main part of our life this week with the death of Bruce’s mother, Alice Sedgwick, and the death of Walter Close on Ash Wednesday late at night. While we grieve, we also trust in the words of the psalm we heard today: God’s angles have charge over us to keep us in all our ways, they will bear us up, we will be delivered because we are bound to God in love. These words live and hold true during our mortal life, during our death, and into our eternal life in God’s loving presence. It is a constant of God’s reality and a promise that is not broken. And while we ask our questions of why—because death is part of life—and think that it is not fair—no it is not—we cling deep down to a trust in the essential goodness of God and life. We hold fast to the trust that our lives through their great joys and deep sorrows are meant to aim towards God and be places where the kingdom and grace are found.

Which is not a bad way to view the weeks of Lent ahead. We are on a journey as we continue our growth in knowing God and following Jesus, of being persons shaped by a rich and active spiritual life. Much tempts us along the way to turn to other options: People who are skeptical of our faith and make us feel uncomfortable for having a belief in God; hurtful experiences at the hands of other Christians; hardships and sometimes overwhelming challenges in life; times of spiritual emptiness or despair; and so on. We can often find simpler or easier answers appealing and as givers of seeming security and certainty. Or, like Jesus, within our faith and life we can be tempted away from God.

One of the most overused words in our Church parlance at the moment is “discernment”. It’s a good word meaning thoughtful reflection and examination to do as best we can to discern, figure out, what is the godly, the good, path or decision to follow. At its heart it is creating the space to let God inform and direct us, even if the answer is surprising or still quite murky. God rarely sends telegrams or explicit instructions.

In the Gospel today we hear of Jesus’ discerning, discovering and reaffirming what God is calling him to do. He gets no direct instruction from God, no messages. He has to struggle and find his own way forward. He is tempted as we are to follow, using God as a justifying and legitimating factor, the desire for personal satisfaction and success, wealth, power, and the ability to meet others needs in sweeping fashion. All of this is done by appeal to God, to need, to talent, to control, to perhaps even serving good ends. Scripture is used to argue both sides…which is why we must read and pray so carefully with it. While our tests are not as dramatic as the ones Jesus experiences, at least not for most of us, we are still lured by the same things and have to untangle where our faith is truly calling us and where we are using our faith to support our own worldly desires, illusions, and at times sin.

I doubt that these temptations were as easy for Jesus to counteract as the story makes it sound. He spent forty days wrestling with them, and I think spent much time soul-searching, seeking and praying about what to do and how to do it. I doubt that the devil’s voice about turning stones into bread came as a rapid fire question to which he gave an immediate and fully formed answer, all within the space of a few moments. I think the process took some time, which is how truly discerning works.

What Jesus keeps coming back to as his touchstone, as his truest lifeline, is the foundational statement of faith and identity of the Jewish people, of his people. It is the Sh’ema. “Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” The Sh’ema is found in Deuteronomy and Numbers. Two of Jesus’ replies are quotes from Deuteronomy that immediately follow the Sh’ema. Jesus is holding fast to the deepest and most essential command given by God to the Israelites. In turning always towards God he is able to follow his path in a way that serves God first rather than other ends.

There is an important distinction between his responses and the devil’s invitations. If you notice, the devil always frames things to be about Jesus. He uses the word “you” all the time, makes it about what Jesus can do or be, even in very beneficial ways. And it’s all framed as what God can do for you, Jesus. And Jesus in his answers puts things back in the right order by putting God first, what he can do for God or what he shouldn’t ask of God. This is first and most fundamental part of following God—keeping God God and us us, remembering that what we do is for God’s glory and in keeping with God’s hope for us.

Does this give us set answers to complicated social, theological, ethical and political issues? No. But it does give us a very firm place to start from as we struggle to make our lives instruments of the kingdom. Looking to God’s vision of justice, mercy, forgiveness, peacemaking, caring, curing we put our ideas and agendas and philosophies into conversation with that vision. We can ask a variety of reflective questions to help us untangle to a greater degree our own wants from the vision held forth by God. Does this hurt people or support and respect them? If it seems a trade-off between groups is there another path we haven’t seen yet that can meet the needs of all to some degree? What is the selfishness or the preconceived notion at play? Where might this be about greed or power or control? If I do this and never get recognized can I be at peace with that, find joy and satisfaction in it? Do I do this for respect, status, honor, or is it stemming from a deep compassion for others no matter what people think of me or ascribe to me? Am I willing to accept loss and struggle, maybe even significant sacrifice, but still keep on working?

These are just some of the questions that can help us as we face our own temptations and seek as best we can to serve God rather than ourselves, especially ourselves with a holy veneer attached! Like Jesus we need to pray, to take time to scrutinize things, be patient and not jump to easy or familiar answers, and to simply be quiet to let God work on us. If we listen long enough, it is God’s voice that we will hear; the devil’s voice is compelling, but if we tell it to wait it is also impatient and will tire.

At the end of the day, however, we are humble enough to realize that even doing our best to follow and serve God we don’t do it perfectly. There is always more to learn; there are always things that happen that we didn’t intend. And that’s okay. That’s why God is God and we are human, able to be shifted and moved by the divine energy. But the even better news is that if we listen to and face the temptations we can bring so much light and love and hope to the world. We can take up the vision, the hope, the life of Christ and bring it to a world and its people that hunger and thirst for these gifts to feed their souls.

February 17, 2010, Ash Wednesday

2010-02-18T12:39:00.000-08:00

February 17, 2010, Ash Wednesday
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 58:1-12, Ps. 103, 2 Cor. 5:20b-6:10, Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

[Open with Guinness joke.]

I know that it is a bit unorthodox to begin an Ash Wednesday sermon with a joke, but the joke has a very serious point in it. It is the idea of loopholes. Lenten loopholes. Being able to stick to the letter of the season but not having to engage the spirit of it, not having to really pay it too much mind except for remember to not say Alleluia, not having it really hinder us or alter our day to day life.

Lent so easily becomes a caricature. It becomes about a personal matter of will power—giving up chocolate or not swearing. Now, this is not bad. Often there are habits we have slipped into or patterns of behavior that we know aren't really good for us or those around us. They hinder us. Sometimes the personal issue is truly profound such as confronting chronic lying, or making amends for a serious wrong, or addressing an addiction. Such things are sin in that they turn us away from God and the wholeness God longs for for us. Such things hurt and harm our relations with each other and in turning to a new path we very much are living into the meaning of repentance; that is, turning away from the forces of death and selfish ego and turning towards God and communion with one another.

Even deeper yet sin is a communal reality. It is a state we are in. We need only look at the world to see that. Even if we personally aren't oppressing a worker, or tipping social systems to our advantage at the expense of others, or misusing our power we are caught up in webs of relationships marked by so much domination, exploitation and misuse of other people's bodies and souls. It has always been so. If it wasn't, Isaiah would not have needed to write the words he did. Perhaps though the ramifications are more sweeping in the age of technology and global reach that we live in.

This theological idea that sin is a state we are in rather than just conscious or unconscious acts of individual volition is extremely important. Often this is what we Anglicans and Episcopalians mean by being marked by original sin. We are born into a world that preexists us, but that shapes us from before we are born. Babies born from mothers who lived in New York City during 9/11 and who suffered from PTSD have been found to be more agitated, anxious, with higher than normal stress hormone levels. All in response to the environment around them while still in utero. Sin, therefore, is a condition and reality that we must confront within ourselves and our world honestly and continually, seeking clarity on those things that draw us into sinful relationships without our effort, desire and sometimes even awareness.

Lent and the readings we hear today call us back to the eternal call to justice understood as the right way of ordering relationships and the distribution of the means of life—food, shelter, work, safety—in the way asked by God throughout the Hebrew Scriptures and in the life and teachings of Jesus. This is the prescription for breaking free, step by step, of the condition of sin. It is here that we find Good News. It is what God offers us with an open hand. There is certainly cross over between our individual sins and communal ones. And then there are areas that are primarily communal and in which we take part to a greater or lesser degree and ones that are very nearly internal and private. We are asked to look at the whole spectrum, but to always hold that our actions are tied up in and affect the whole; thus, the Biblical imperative to seek justice as described by the prophets such as Isaiah, Micah, Hosea, Amos and others. This is not just for the good of others, but for the our very own deep well-being.

The words of Isaiah pull no punches. We cannot simply focus on our own mistakes or approach Lent as a season of fasting from something we like or find pleasurable. He calls us to open our eyes wide and look at everything afresh. He calls us to question the official line, the accepted status quo, the economic and social schemas that hold sway and are portrayed as the right thing most especially by those who are in control of them. The questions he asks, the challenges he raises to his people and nation he raises to us. Are we a nation that practices righteousness? Do we forsake God's ordinances? Do we oppress our workers or those in other nations? And what are the justifications that we give for so doing? Are they valid? Are they honest? And whose voice is framing the response for us?

Since the image of feeding and hunger is so central in Isaiah I thought that it would be good to apply this to the world in which I leave, to put a specific to general ideas. What might be asked of us when hunger in the world is at its peak yet virtually ever country has a food surplus? What questions and new vision is being asked of a system of raising, buying and selling it bent on profits for a few that leaves so much of the world hungry in spite of the Green Revolution and years of aid, two things that ironically often contributed to the current problem both here and abroad. For instance, in the past two decades malnutrition and hunger have increased greatly in India (and other countries around the world), even with plenty of food on hand. 233 million people there do not have enough to eat and 46% of children under three do not get sufficient calories. India hides this by statistical sleights of hand that make the numbers look smaller by reducing what it officially considers the necessary daily caloric intake. The numbers look good, but the facts are going in the opposite direction and much is due to the increased use of land for exports crops for the West, reliance, often forced upon them, on seeds and pesticides from foreign companies such as Monsanto and Round Up, debt and lack of support for basic, domestic food crops. Small and mid-sized farmers here can not compete against subsidized agribusiness and hunger increases. Biodiversity shrinks. All of us, but the poor in particular have less and less healthy food available to them, especially in our urban areas. What does Isaiah's prophetic voice of God's vision to us mean today, here and now, in this place and time? What does it mean to share our bread with the hungry? To break the yoke of injustice? What is both the immediate and the wide-screen lens that we are asked to look through and respond to as people loving our neighbor as ourselves?

I don't have easy answers. I have lots of ideas, but no quick fixes. But I do know that the first step is raising the probing questions and looking for the deep truths underneath in these areas that are the very shape of our culture and our relationships, these areas that are about the bodies and souls of myself and my brothers and sisters made in God's image. I do know that we are meant to look at our relations with one another and see what they really mean in terms of flesh and blood men, women and children. I do know that we are to strive for the dignity of all, and that this affects both our small daily decisions and the way we engage the larger world. But we engage it starting from that vision of holy justice and righteousness drawn by Isaiah. We start by facing squarely the sin that infects the world and standing with Jesus to live into a different way of being with each other. It is about our faith being action of love for others not self-aggrandizing piety that is hollow and self-serving as Jesus so clearly says in the Gospel today.

So this Lent we are invited to look not only at ourselves and where our lives are affected in their interiority by where we have gone astray, but also how our lives intersect with the whole world, the web of creation that we are absolutely bound to and bound up in. We are asked to engage in sacrificial love for others that may lead us to hard places. But Jesus has gone already to the hardest place of all: the cross. In looking to his cross and the life that led to it we are given insight into how we are to live and to look at the world. Such living is what brings us close to God and God close to us. Such living is where we find eternal life and treasure beyond what the world of civilization can offer. It gives us hope, conviction, connection, love and courage. Truly gifts worth striving for; truly things worth living for.

February 14, 2010, Last Sunday after Epiphany, Transfiguration of Our Lord

2010-02-15T12:00:00.001-08:00

February 14, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Exodus 34:29-35, Ps 99, 2 Cor. 3:12-4:2, Luke 9:28-43a

This is one of those passages from Scripture where we encounter Luke as a master storyteller. In a few verses he draws on themes, images and ideas woven throughout his Gospel and even into the Book of Acts. He connects us to the entire span of Jesus’ ministry. And he leaves us with a powerful passage to ponder, one that is mysterious, transcendental, and not necessarily easily applicable to our daily lives.

In this passage we hear echoes of Jesus' baptism when the voice is heard from the cloud naming Jesus again as God's son. We are again aware of a period of silence and assimilation. After Jesus’ baptism he went into the desert for 40 days before beginning his ministry. Here they keep silent about what is said, probably because the disciples themselves still didn’t know what this all meant or where it was going. We are reminded again of the early followers of Jesus understanding him to be both a prophet and a giver and interpreter of the law as symbolized by his meeting with Moses, the foundational leader of the Hebrew people and the giver of the law, and Elijah, one of the greatest prophets of their past. Like Moses, Jesus encounters the holy on the top of a mountain and is transfigured by this event: their faces change, they shine as the stories say. And we are given hints of what is to come.

We hear hints of the end of Jesus’ life. As at Gethsemane, the disciples are sleepy and trying to stay awake while Jesus is occupied with prayer. They are in a more remote place, out in nature. We are told that Jesus is hearing of his coming departure from Elijah and Moses. It is critical to understand that the word for departure is the word we also translate as exodus. The exodus of the Hebrews from captivity in Egypt was their founding event as a people. Jesus is told he will taking his own exodus from Jerusalem, another unfolding of the work of God’s liberating action in the world. This exodus though is through his solitary death on a cross, an execution at the hands of power in the center of his homeland. It is a different view on the path through to freedom, and it will involve tremendous suffering and abandonment. It is a leaving and a breaking of the bondage of sin through sacrifice and transformative love; it is about the nature of liberation in the deepest ontological sense, that is, of our being. Yet somehow through this we will see and know God’s glory. It is the founding event of those who follow Jesus and form a community of faith based on his life.

What follows this passage of Luke is a story of healing, of casting out evil, which we heard today. The next eight verses include Jesus telling of his betrayal into human hands, in other words, his coming death. Luke is clear that those hearing it could not understand the meaning of his words—its meaning was concealed from them, which is a nice echo of the words of Paul to the Corinthians we heard. Until it is accomplished it is unintelligible. Then there is a fight among the disciples, something they seem to do a lot, over who is greatest and Jesus promptly puts them in their place by giving them a child as an example, a stark reminder that worldly power climbing and status have no place in the kingdom. Lastly, we hear Jesus give a radically inclusive definition of those who are his followers. John tells him that they had seen someone who wasn’t in their group casting out demons in Jesus’ name and that they tried to stop his unsanctioned behavior. Jesus replies that all who are not against them are for them. Period.

Then the pivotal moment of the Gospel arrives in Luke 9:51. The future revealed in the moment on the mountain is engaged. As the text says: When the days drew near for him to be taken up, he set his face to go to Jerusalem. It is decided. The die has been cast. Jesus turns towards his exodus with resolve and goes towards it. There is no stopping; there is no sidetracking; there is no reversal. From now on the entire rest of Luke is aiming straight towards the cross.

What do we do with a passage like this? Luke is trying to tell us something about who and what Jesus is. The event that he describes whether we take it as a depiction of actual events or a divine vision that was true within Jesus’ inner life is something for him and him alone. You and I will not have a comparable experience as we are not the Son of God in the way we profess Jesus to be. Luke wants us I suspect to use this story as a point of prayer and reflection. What does this story reveal about Jesus and who he is for us, what his life accomplishes for us?

The idea came to me that this is really quite a suitable story to hear just days before Lent starts. Lent for us is meant to be a period of reflection and transfiguration. It is a time in which we delve into our hearts and souls with intention. We set our own faces towards Jerusalem and the events that are to take place. We are invited year after year to live into the story of Jesus’ life and death and what it reveals to us about the way God is in the world, indeed what the very nature of God is. As Christians we hold that in Jesus we encounter God deeply and surely. His life is revelatory of God’s life and nature. This is deep and rich soil to till. It is not subject to blithe and easy answers, though God knows many are out there. It invites us into complex thought and thoughtful contemplation of eternal and essential questions and realities. What understandings may open for us if we sit on the mountain and gaze on the transfigured Jesus? What transformation within in us might it bring to birth? For surely that is part of this story’s purpose. And if we let this story work upon us what changes will be wrought in us? How will it mark us forever even as the Risen Jesus bore the marks of his crucifixion?

And perhaps part of this is helping us grow to see the transfiguring work of God in our lives on a daily basis and how everyday events, people and situations can be places of transformation. Perhaps this is part of why we hear the story of the cure of the boy right after they come down from the mountain. It is a transfiguring event in the lives of the boy and his family. It is also that to his followers who Jesus accuses of have too little faith. Maybe they are still keeping God small, within too familiar bounds and hindering God’s ability to work through them. Here is a story I heard that may capture some of what I am getting at.

A young and successful executive was traveling down a neighborhood street, going a bit too fast in his new Jaguar. He was watching for kids darting out from between parked cars and slowed down when he thought he saw something. As his car passed, no children appeared. Instead, a brick smashed into the Jag’s side door. He slammed on the brakes and backed up to the spot where the brick had been thrown. The angry driver jumped out of the car, grabbed the nearest kid and pushed him up against a parked car shouting, “What was that all about and who are you? Just what the heck are you doing? That’s a new car and that brick you threw is going to cost a lot of money. Why did you do it?”

The young boy was apologetic. “Please, mister…please, I’m sorry but I didn’t know what else to do,” he pleaded. “I threw the brick because no one else would stop…” With tears rolling down his face he pointed to a spot just around a parked car. “It’s my brother,” he said. “He rolled off the curb and fell out of his wheelchair and I can’t lift him up.” Now sobbing, the boy asked the stunned executive, “Would you please help me get him back into his wheelchair? He’s hurt and he’s too heavy for me.”

The driver hurriedly lifted the boy back into his wheelchair, then took a handkerchief and dabbed at the fresh scrapes. A quick look told him everything was going to be okay.

“Thank you and may God bless you,” the grateful brother told the driver. Too shook up for words, the man simply watched the boy push his wheelchair-bound brother down the sidewalk toward their home. It was a long, slow walk back to the Jaguar. The damage was very noticeable, but the driver never bothered to repair the dented side door.”

For this man, the dented door was the mark of his transfiguration. He was not the same man after this encounter as he was before. His world was rearranged and his vantage point reordered. What was once more important became less so. I suspect some veils were lifted from his eyes and his way of seeing things was never the same again. In a simple way and in the day-to-day working of life he encountered God through these two brothers and was changed. It was a beginning. And while I don’t like to use sentimental, chicken-soupy-for-the-soul stories like this to make a point, this is one that seemed suitable. It seemed to be akin to the healing story and that moments in which we meet God mark us indelibly. They are meant to transfigure us. We need to discover how to be aware to the transfiguring work of God. We need to be attentive as Jesus was in prayer. We are asked to live into the meaning of Christ’s life and death so profoundly that it leaves marks on us, marks that remind us of what we are and what we are meant to be. Proclaiming Jesus as our Lord does not leave us unchanged. Rather, it ought to change us profoundly. It is not a fact we accept in our heads and then file away, going on with our lives as usual. It is an understanding and awareness that molds us in new ways and invites us into new paths.

So as we set our faces towards Jerusalem this Lent, we are also invited to ponder the transfigured Jesus on the mountain. We can use it as a point of prayer to help us enter into Lent in a deeper way. And in pondering his transfiguration we can begin to see where we are being asked to encounter God in the sphere of our own lives and how that meeting will mark and alter us forever.

February 7, 2010, 5th Sunday after Epiphany

2010-02-09T09:18:00.000-08:00

February 7, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Isaiah 6:1-8, Ps 138, 1 Cor. 15:1-11, Luke 5:1-11
5th Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C

I was not someone who learned to swim easily. My mother was terrified of the water and I absorbed some of that fear. Even though my grandmother had a swimming pool and I liked splashing about in the shallows, I would go no further than where my foot could touch bottom. I spent a lot of time around the steps as you can imagine. It was a very small pool for me! But beyond that I couldn't go. It was deep down there and I had nothing to hold onto, nothing to make me secure with what I was comfortable with. If someone had tossed me in the deep end to teach me to swim I probably would have panicked and nearly drowned. It took many years for me to trust the deep water of a pool and that if I knew what to rely on I would not perish or sink.

The stories we hear today are about call. That is indeed clear. We hear of a call of a prophet inside a holy place; we hear of the call of the fisherman in the middle of their daily work. Both are calls to bring God's liberating word to people who are floundering, struggling, in need of freedom and hope, out there in the world. Both are shaped by a first critical step of leaving old patterns and expectations behind. If not, nothing will change. We will stay in the shallows and catch nothing, or we catch stuff that is useless or maybe even harmful. Small fish are in the shallows, not ones to live on. The sea tosses up the garbage and toxins onto the shores.

Quite often we hear sermons that talk about what call looks like and how to catch others. But perhaps we are jumping the gun a bit...maybe we are casting our fishing line with the wrong tie on it. Maybe our nets are a bit tangled. Before we can catch other people for Jesus and for God, and by catch I mean bring them into the joy of being liberated and freed and known as treasured of God, we have to be caught ourselves.

Have we been caught by Jesus? Have we let him guide us into the deep and unknown places of our hearts and lives? Have we trusted that he will be there to give us exactly what we need? Have we, like Peter, made the turn from calling him Boss to calling him Lord, or more precisely God? There is a world of difference between obeying a boss and following and surrendering to the holy.

Before we can bring others to Jesus or at least help point the way, we have to be caught up in him and by him. We are called to take the plunge into the deep of our souls and lives and trust that way down in the depths we will encounter God. We have to. For it is only there that we have stepped out of the shallows, let go of our certainties, and given up thinking we have the answers and solutions all sorted out. It is only there that we stop clinging to our rationales and justifications so that we can really listen, discover and face our truest selves and the possibilities that are out there. All we have left is God to rely on; there is nothing else. We give up expectation and control and strike out into a new world.

We see this in the response of Peter. Okay, boss, I'll do what you say, but you know we are fishing experts and know all about our trade. We've worked hard all night and come up with squat. Not sure what a carpenter knows about fishing, but hey, I'll do what you say because others seem to think your a big shot, but don't expect much. I certainly don't.

Peter gives just a wedge of opening to Jesus in his heart and Jesus comes in and breaks him wide open. The unexpected happens. Their needs are met and then some. And they don't sink, but rather Peter realizes that all his illusions have been tossed overboard. He is not obeying a boss; he is entering into partnership with God. God has come in and said if you trust in me you will have the riches of true life.

But even then, Peter wants to go back to the shallows. He clearly recognizes that he has just had a head-on collision with God, but he wants out. Leave me alone, he cries. I am sinful, I am not worthy. Go find someone else to fish with. I'm booked every morning from now until the end of the season---trout season, catfish season, salmon season, any season you can name—I'm busy! Jesus pays him no mind. He simply tells Peter he will be catching people. His life is changed and it didn't depend on any of the worldly status markers we use or even so called divine ones. He is a sinner. So what? Aren't we all? And God is reaching out for us all the same. God will reach us if we delve into our own deep places and draw us up into a new life, not perfect, but graced and freed to live anew. We see this too in the letter of Paul. A former persecutor of the Church, the least of the disciples, one who encouraged and presided over the stoning of Stephen, yet God called him and changd his life. We are picked as we are.

This is one of those great paradoxes of the life of the soul. When we allow ourselves to go into our deepest places and share them we often get the opposite of what we expect. We think if we really let it all hang out others will run screaming away. If others really were allowed to peek at our failings and fears and hurts they would find us weak, silly, not worth their time. But so often we find that such honesty is met with astonishing compassion, grace and forgiveness. We find that we pull up a net not broken but teeming with truly eternal life-giving gifts. Yes, such work can make us lose things in the world. We might lose a job for speaking our truth about justice or exploitation. We might lose a “friend” by sharing our pain. We might give up a way of relating to the world shaped by control and dominance, but we gain so much more. We gain integrity, we gain love, we gain the gift of true friends over false ones, we gain an ability to serve others first rather than striving to prove ourselves. And so it goes. And here is the truth of God: God never runs away. God says, yes, I know all that my dear heart, so let's get moving, OK? Where do you want to go from here? I have some ideas.

And where might this take us? Right out into the world we live in. If we are caught by Jesus, truly caught, we can see no other way than to want to feed the hungry, and care for the sick, and visit those in prisons of whatever kind, and work for peace, and if we have much to give it away and to let go of status for service. We begin to be open people, not hiding behind masks and personas. We are willing to be transparent and honest about our own struggles and need. We begin to build true communities. We start to really know what it means to be humble and non-judgmental of others.

When we can go into the deep and encounter Jesus, we are given the opportunity to truly let the image of God within us break free. Perhaps one way to think of this is in the words of Marianne Williamson made famous by Nelson Mandela:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually who are you NOT to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn't save the world. There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear our presence automatically liberates others.

In short, we are ready to give up the securities of the world for the risk of being the living Gospel because no matter how much we give up in worldly terms we know God is holding us in his net and the life we are experiencing is one that no one and nothing can ever take away. We've been caught in the deeps by Jesus. And we begin to know we can go into the deep without fear of rejection. Jesus net is always open and his arms are always spread wide to say come in. Here you are always wanted and always loved, no matter who you think you are. Trust me on this one.

January 31, 2010, 4th Sunday after Epiphany

2010-02-01T10:10:00.000-08:00

January 31, 2010
The Rev. Natasha Brubaker Garrison
Jeremiah 1:4-10, Ps 71:1-6, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13, Luke 4:21-30
4th Sunday after Epiphany, Year C

In thinking about what to say today I had the notion that I could do a great State of the Parish address—a little parody, a little humor, a little seriousness. But while that would have been fun, the moment requires that we look with both joy and focus on where we are as a parish and where we hope to go, where God is calling us.

Our readings today are about transition, challenge and change in self-understanding. The Gospel is particularly hard. It is an extremely charged and violent text. The Romans weren’t the first people that wanted to get rid of Jesus, neither were the local leaders. It was his peers and kin. On another day we will delve into this story of mob violence, rivalry and envy that leads his hometown to move from admiration to trying to instigate a group murder within minutes. Hurling Jesus off the cliff and to his death was the idea. And part of what is circulating in this story is the challenge to change, to seeing things in a different way, of calling people to adjust their perspective by calling out the old way of doing things that are taken for granted. So it is with Jeremiah. Jeremiah appeals to God that he is not ready for this new task. Who is he? He is just a young one! How can he be asked to move in this new direction, a risky and very public direction? He is resistant and who can really blame him!

In a very real way, these stories of transition and the various ways we respond to it fit well with our life here as a parish. We are in a time of transition as a community for a variety of reasons. For some of us, we may have thought that now that the rector search is over, in fact a year and a half ago, we have mostly left transition time and we are mostly going through the changes of getting to know each other and the inevitable adjustments that come with that. This is true. But our parish is by definition in transition. In all those books on congregation size and life we fit into the category called “transitional”. By our membership numbers we fall squarely into that class. By our Sunday attendance we are almost approaching it. Transition parishes are either growing or shrinking. They are at the edge of needing and wanting more staff and more resources, yet still operating out of older systems and funding (that worked well for a smaller size) realities. It’s a risky time in many respects, but it also a time of great opportunity.

The vision articulated during the search process was one of looking to growth and moving forward through this transitional stage of life. One such major leap was made before: moving from mission to parish status. Part of making this next leap is adjusting systems and creating the space so that growth can fit in.

Here is part of how our leadership is doing that. We are moving into changing our structures around our common governance. Our finance team is codifying its processes and has created input mechanisms for ministries to tell of their hopes and needs. We have created a property committee that has taken on the task of long-term planning, prioritizing and shepherding of major projects to care for and improve our grounds and buildings. On the one hand, projects and ideas that have been out there for quite a while are getting done in a more focused and organized manner. On the other hand, it means ideas and implementation flow through a new process. Our stewardship and development teams are looking this year at establishing year-round programs. Our vestry is taking on the work of supporting our 5-year vision, creating stronger ties between vestry and our ministries, and living into mutual ministry reviews. The way of doing business is being shifted outward into groups and teams, which is what we need, I believe, at our size and moment of life. Part of this is widening the circle of those invited into leadership, both long-time members and people newer to our community. New ideas and new perspectives, but also change.

One large transition and change that happened to us was in our music ministry. In taking our time, discerning as a community, not rushing into a quick answer we have arrived at a new configuration. It is even more a team ministry; it has been a reconciling time. We are blessed beyond measure with our music leaders, CORAME, choir, choristers and other musicians. They are integrating the common themes and responses to our questionnaire gradually and wisely.

We have added new ministry groups and a new Sunday evening worship service. Our Sunday attendance is up and so are the numbers of members. Much good ministry is happening in and from this place. We have much to offer and offer it we do, but we also have the charge to invite people in and share all the good things that are happening here at Resurrection.

Here are some of our challenges. We need to discover as a community how we are going to support more fully our nursery and Sunday School. Our teachers are wonderful and dedicated, but they are small in number and to prevent them burning out and feeling overworked we do need to expand the number of folks participating in this ministry. It’s a great work, teaching and caring for our youngest members. We say we want to attract families, and this is one of the critical ways we make that possible.

We need to look at our long-term financial health both in terms of assets in reserve and our annual operating budget. There is a trend of roughly the last decade where our numbers are growing but our giving is declining. This is not a sustainable pattern in the long run. In order to support and have our ministries grow into the future we are asked to find how to increase our annual budget by about $15-20,000, which for a parish our size is not a huge increase. I am confident that we can do this because we love this place and we know how much comfort, community and witness to the Gospel flows from it.

We need to look at increasing our compensation for our music ministers and hopefully increasing our secretary’s hours (we could certainly use more) and therefore pay. And we are going to enter into a period of invitation around whether we are a parish that works bests with a part time or a full time rector. As of April, I will be going onto ¾ time as our finances do not support a full time position. Since my maternity leave will coincide with the beginning of this shift the effects of it will likely be most noticed come this fall. The most obvious change is that I will be here 3 Sundays mornings per month rather than four. However, during my maternity leave and beyond I intend to still celebrate the 5:30 p.m. vespers with Holy Communion each Sunday. We will also be further developing our lay pastoral ministry, and I am very excited about this.

One of the main tasks of our leadership this coming year is entering into conversation about the clergy model we want and desire. Either model, part or full time, can work well in vibrant, growing parishes. It is an opportune moment to see how we want to shape our ministries. So you see, there is much room for creative and innovative thinking as we decide how we want to shape our life for the future.

There is so much that we can rejoice in about our life here. As always there are there things to do and new directions to explore. But most importantly we continue to be blessed in so many ways by each other and to be a place that seeks with warm hearts and intention to live out the Gospel in our corner of the world. And live it out we do, of that we can be assured. Amen.