July 17, 2016

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Pentecost – Proper 11

Genesis 18: 1-10a; Psalm 15; Colossians 1:15-28; Luke 10: 38-42

The REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

There are many things about the job of being a priest that I enjoy, but one of the most rewarding aspects of this vocation is the people I meet.  Over the past eleven years of doing this, I have met some really interesting people.  Some of the most interesting, and frankly captivating, people I have met are individuals who are well into their nineties.  At another church where I once served I got to know George McMahan, 95, who served in World War II. I remember going to George’s induction as the honorary leader of his Masonic Lodge – at age 94. We have several nonagenarians here at St. Andrew’s. There is Ruth Frenza, a member of St. Andrew’s Quilting Guild, who tells me all kinds of stories, one of my favorites being how her daughters used to babysit our current Diocesan Bishop, Andy Doyle, when he was still in diapers.  There is Addie Smith – who joined St. Andrew’s Church in 1955, and continues to serve as an usher, and leads monthly trips for our 50+ group all around the city of Houston and the state of Texas. 

I believe that if you are fortunate enough to make it into your nineties, the wisdom you have from your life experiences is deep, grounded, honest, and profound. I feel that these are the people who should be standing in this pulpit, not me.  Some time ago I met with a woman well into her nineties, at her home here in Houston.  She had no problem telling me at her house that she had little use for religion. “Well, I think it’s all pretty ridiculous, actually” she said.  “She continued, “all that bowing, all that kneeling, everybody looking at the priest thinking he’s special because he’s wearing that white dress.” After she said that, I remember thinking, this is one cool chick. 

I appreciated her honesty.  And though our opinions on religion may differ, or not, I share her disdain for the inflated egos of clergy, politicians, or otherwise. The Peruvian author Carlos Castaneda once said that “self importance is our greatest enemy.” He continues, “Think about it - what weakens us is feeling offended by the deeds and misdeeds of our fellowmen. Our self importance requires that we spend most of our lives offended by someone.”  I agree.

It is easy for me to point my finger at others and say “look how important they think they are! Who died and made them God?”  What is much more difficult for me is to look at myself in the same way. It is really unpleasant for me to have someone point out to me “Why do you think you are so important? Why do you think you are right all the time?” That hurts.  But it is true.  And this is an unsolicited appeal for the important work that therapists do – they help us see us as we really are.

The Christian path is, and will always be, a downward path of humility.  Christian life, particularly in America, is often dressed up as something else – a way to be prosperous, or successful, fit in – whatever any of that means. But those are lies. Christianity is not about puffing yourself up with your own success, your own talent, your own money. It is paradoxically opposite. By that I mean, as St. Augustine said long ago, Christians do not ascend through flattering our egos, our by maintaining an unrealistic sense of piety or self-importance. I honestly believe none of that matters to God. Christians don’t ascend, but rather Christians descend, they turn their gaze to the ground, to the earth, the Hebrew word for which is “Adamah” from which we get the name Adam. 

This is the paradox of the Christian life: Christians descend, Christians are humble, Christians are of the earth, not above it. Why is this kind of life by descent a paradox?  Because it is only by our descent, our humility, that we truly free ourselves to ascend to take flight. This kind of life is a paradox, one which the Bible honors with reverence. “Humble yourself before the Lord, and he will lift you up”  James 4:10“He has brought the powerful down from their thrones, but has lifted up the lowly.” Luke 1:52.  I could go on and on. The paradox is there. That is the truth that was conveyed to me by this women deep into her nineties.  It is the kind of wisdom I hope to attain in this life, and I was humbled and grateful to receive it that day in her home.

Those who humble themselves will be lifted up, not because God is pleased with a person’s humility, not because God requires it, not because our humility saves us.  We are lifted up when we descend, because in doing so we learn to take ourselves lightly.  

How many of us carry such heavy burdens, and have forgotten how to ascend?    A few days ago, I went to “Ifly” a place where you can do indoor skydiving.  It’s essentially a vertical indoor wind tunnel tunnel you step into and wind around one miles an hour propels you upward.  It’s a really strange feeling, and I was not very good at it.  I was flailing around, moving my arms about, trying to maintain my stability.  I was burdened by the weight of trying to do it right, which I couldn’t do very well.

In complete contrast to me, my oldest son, James, stepped into the wind tunnel and it was like he had always done this.  It was so natural to him.  His body was gentle, his form perfect to my eyes, the smile on his face stretching from cheek to cheek.  I watched as he ascended in that tunnel, floating to the top, because he didn’t struggle with it like me.  He floated – he flew high – because he knew how to be light. 

What a blessing it was for me to witness.  A boy, flying, like an angel, so naturally, so graceful.  For a moment I thought about that woman in her mid nineties, flying in that same wind tunnel.  A woman, old of age, who had spoken words of humility and earthiness to a young priest, now flying, rising, ascending.  Witnessing the miracle unfolding before her very eyes.  AMEN.

 

July 10, 2016

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Pentecost - Proper 10

Deuteronomy 30:9-14; Psalm 25:1-9; Colossians 1:1-14; Luke 10:25-37

The REV. CARISSA BALDWIN-MCGINNIS

I phoned a brother of the cloth yesterday, because I had been struck dumb by the week’s events.  “Friend, I need help.  How are you processing this week?”  He replied, “It seems to me that the whole world is groaning.”  With those words, he unlocked my mind.  His was a reference from Romans 8, which reads: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”  My Methodist brother spoke for my anguished and grieving gut, much like the newspaper headlines this morning speak for our shared agony.  The New York Times in particular reads at top in bold “America Grieves.”  Indeed, the world is groaning, and it feels in a way as though everything is at stake.

The isolated are tired of being forgotten.  The rejected are tired of feeling shamed.  The historically slaughtered are tired of being killed.  The historically privileged feel set up to fail.  The world would seem to be groaning as though deep at its core, it is begging us to renegotiate.

Oh dear God, how to ensure that this deep and sustaining pain we are feeling is the pain of labor and life to come?  How can we know if these are the pains of the end times or the pangs of new opportunities ahead?

Dominique Christina in a recent book of feminine archetypes introduces the myth of the Wombed Woman.  The Wombed Woman is the mother, the matriarch, the widest door, the best love, the first nourisher, the one who lays down facing death as she gives birth.  In so doing, she herself becomes an earthquake.  The wombed world would seem to be groaning in just such a way.

With so much killing and violence across lines of different, it would seem that we human beings have come to overall hate each other. But if we people are taken as one, singular human race, then the assessment changes.  It would seem instead that we suffer from a state of hating ourselves.  Perhaps we hate that we have bought and sold each other.  Perhaps we are disgusted by the ways we have sometimes used our land.  Maybe our stomachs and heads hurt from constantly overdriving everything, but yet we cannot seem to stop.  Like the mythical Hound of Hades, that three-headed dog that was said by the ancient Greeks to guard the gates of the underworld, we are faced with the question of which mouth of our humanity to feed?

We seem stuck, and the mystics of our tradition have their own word for ‘stuckness.  They call it sin.  And for sin our mystics offer the remedy of repentance.  Meister Eckhart in particular said there are two kinds of repentance.  One is of time and senses.  The other is supernatural.  The first always declines into greater sorrow and a deep lament that becomes despair.  Nothing can come of it.  Divine repentance, however, takes self-loathing and lifts it up to God.  The greater the sin and weakness, wrote Meister Eckhart, the greater the potential to bind to God in undivided love. [1]

God’s promise as delivered by Moses in today’s first reading from Leviticus is a speech that intends to inspire repentance and renegotiation.  The people Israel are a fallen, dejected, exiled and physically scattered people.  And Moses is trying to scoop them back up into the hands of God and a meaningful narrative of their divinity and spiritual prosperity.  They have been brutalized by the Babylonians.  Their land has been pillaged.  Their women have been raped.  They are beaten and dejected and seemingly detached from their God.  So Moses – in spite of their pain – calls their suffering sin and invites them to bind themselves anew to God.  It is a refreshment and renewal of the original covenant at Mount Horeb.  It is the half-time speech of half-time speeches.  Moses attempts not only to rebuild moral but also to call a people to save itself.

Anyone can go to the web to reference revered half-time speeches that inspire a team which is behind to make come back to victory.  In those speeches are heard similar appeals and themes as in this Mosaic narrative.  One theme that you will find repeatedly in those game-changing sports talks is the theme of heart.  They insist that making a comeback from pain and loss or mistakes and bad strategy – or sorrow and sin – requires the full force of the heart.  Now retired, former NFL player, Ed Reed, can be seen on YouTube in a video from his college career in Miami.  It is fourteen seconds long.  One assumes as the video begins that Reed’s teammates have just expressed genuine concern for an injury he has sustained.  He screams at them in anger from the deep core of his being as though they are missing the point.  He seems furious that they are focused on his impairment rather than their responsibility as a team to survive and thrive.  “I’m hurt dog!  Don’t ask me if I’m alright!  Hell no!  …. But I’m puttin’ my heart into this &*$%, so let’s go!”

If we as the human race have so come to hate ourselves that we are constantly and brutally killing each other.  If we have negotiated terms with one another and with God such that we have become this angry and this brutal, then let us put the whole force of our heart into a repentance that would bind us to the love that lays down with death in order to birth life through the force equivalent to that of an earthquake.  If we have to, in order to learn to love ourselves again, then let us renegotiate.  Let us renegotiate everything.

July 3, 2016

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Pentecost – Proper 9

2 Kings 5: 1-14; Psalm 30; Galatians 6 (1-6), 7-16; Luke 10: 1-11, 16-20

THE REV. JAMES M. L. GRACE

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

A fellow priest and friend, The Rev. William Brooks, was the chaplain at Episcopal High School here in Houston when I was a student there. I remember Rev. Brooks, whom we all called “Dub,” (he still goes by that name today) remarking on the kind of clerical collar her wore one day.  Dub wore what clergy shirt makers call a “tab collar” which is the kind of priestly collar worn by many Roman Catholic clergy – a small white collar inserted into the shirt, as opposed to what you see Carissa and I wear mostly, which is this white plastic collar that goes all the way around our necks that kind of looks like a dog collar.  

In any case, the tab collar worn by Dub Brooks was unusual to me, and I remember one day talking to Dub about it at Episcopal High School. Because it was white, and square in nature, Dub referred to his collar as a “projection screen,” as indeed it did mimic a miniature projection screen we all see in movie theaters, classrooms, and conference rooms. We have a projection screen in our parish hall upstairs.

I asked Dub, “Well, what do people project onto it?” And he said “Oh, all kinds of things. People project their concepts of God on me, both positive and negative. People project their opinions of the church and religion, both positive and negative.” Dub continued: “They also project their expectations on me. They project their expectations that I pray on their behalf, that I be spiritual on their behalf, that I do the work of God on their behalf.” That’s a lot to project on such a small screen, I thought. 

I’m not sure if I feel the same about wearing a collar or not. I don’t think I do. But I agree with Dub about the pressure projected onto him.  I think many clergy feel it to some degree. If I ever feel pressure or projection from others coming to me, my healthy response, which I confess I do not always do, is to surrender it to God.  All of it.  Surrender the compliments, the praise, the criticisms, the anger directed toward me.  I do so because the projection, whether positive or negative, whether complimentary or derogatory, is not really who I am. I am neither. A wise priest whom I admire once said “a person is never as good as others say they are, neither are they as bad as people say you are.”

I say all this because I believe this idea of surrender and release is at the heart of the Gospel reading we hear this morning. In the story from Luke’s Gospel, we are told that Jesus sends out seventy people in pairs to cure the sick, and to proclaim that the Kingdom of God is near.  Why? If Jesus is God, why does he need the help of others to carry out the ministry of healing? I don’t think Jesus does. I think Jesus could have easily done it all himself, if he is truly God. I think the reason Jesus empowers seventy people to go out into the word and heal it is to set an example for us, to teach us to be better than we are. 

Jesus is modeling servant leadership, raising up leaders, and empowering them to go out into the world. And those seventy are successful, and they return telling Jesus everything that they accomplish. The people Jesus sends out were not experts. They weren’t trained, they didn’t have degrees, they weren’t perfect, they had flaws just we do. They were regular people who were able to do the miraculous because of their closeness with God. That was it. That was all it took.

Today is Abundance Sunday at St. Andrew’s. Today we offer and surrender our abundant blessings to God at Eucharist in gratitude for all that God has done for us.  And that is part of the work in recognizing abundance, seeing it in our lives, and thanking God for it. But there is an equally important response to God’s abundance, and that is how we choose to steward God’s abundance in our lives. There’s that word: “stewardship.” I know, I’m not supposed to say that word except in the Fall during our pledge campaign, but I honestly I can’t talk about abundance without it. 

Like the seventy sent out by Jesus, we also are sent out. We also have work to do. Some of that work is here in the church, and much more of it is outside our doors. As we celebrate our abundance today, we do so acknowledging our responsibility to be good stewards. 

Today as you thank God for your abundance, and as we celebrate this weekend the abundance of the freedoms granted to us in this country, what is God calling you to do hear at St. Andrew’s? There are many opportunities: you could sing in our choir, you could serve at the altar, you could read the lessons on Sundays. You could host a coffee time (there are spots available in July!)  You could sign up to be a Lay Eucharistic Visitor and bring communion to the homebound. You could join our altar guild.  Serve on a breakfast team at Lord of the Streets, volunteer at the Heights Interfaith Food Pantry. You could sign up to be an usher or a greeter. You could volunteer at our Rhythms of Grace service and meet the delightful families that come there.  You could teach Sunday school in The Parlor. If any of those things interest you, let me know and I will be happy to assist you in getting involved. We all have a responsibility to be good stewards of God’s abundance here at St. Andrew’s and in our community.

I close with a story of a conversation I had with a member of another church (not here) who wanted to bring to my attention some concerns she had about the church and the programs offered there. I listened to her, aware that my clerical “projection screen” was receiving the full brunt of this woman’s projections onto me. I gratefully acknowledged the value of her ideas, and said “It is wonderful that you are so concerned and interested in this. You are the very person the church needs to head up this program! Will you take the job?”  Her reply was immediate: “Well…no. I don’t want to get involved. With all my commitments, and the hours I reserve for my family, I just don’t have the time. But I would be happy to advise you anytime.”  To which I said, “And that’s the problem. I already plenty of advisors. What I need is someone who will work.” 

 The harvest is plentiful.  I believe the laborers are many, not few.  What will you steward?  AMEN.

 

 

June 26, 2016

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Pentecost – Proper 8

2 Kings 2: 1 - 2, 6 - 14; Psalm 77:1-2, 11 - 20; Galatians 5: 1, 13 - 25; Luke 9:51 - 62

THE REV. JAMES M. L. GRACE

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

It was a hot and dusty day as a group of about twenty or so men and women walked through the desert sands. Stray dogs passed beside them, some afraid, some barking, some mangy.  The group walked with the mid-day sun beating down upon them, the temperature easily rising over one hundred degrees. The group was tired, dirty, and they needed rest.

The sand blew in the hot desert wind, continuing to blow into their faces as they tried to keep them covered with what little fabric they had. Finally shelter appeared in the form of a small village of ramshackle houses gathered together. 

Yet the moment this road-weary group stepped into the village, it was obvious they were not welcome here. The villagers peered out the windows of their tent dwellings, scowling at thirsty and tired group who had just arrived. This group had a leader, a man they called Jesus, and Jesus understood the nature of the village’s hostility to them. And so they left, continuing down the road in search of a more welcoming place.

Why the rejection? The answer comes down to simple geography. The village that Jesus and his disciples entered into, and were rejected by, was a village located in northern region of Israel called “Samaria.” Samaritans, the people who populated this area were hostile to the people from the south of Israel, like Jesus, who came from a region the Romans called Judea.  It’s simple prejudice.  Samaritans and Judeans don’t get along.  Why?

The source of the hostility between these two groups - and why should any of us be surprised by this – was religion. The Samaritans believed that the temple they built to worship God – a temple they built upon a mountain they called “Gerazim” – was the only temple in the world where they believed God was to be worshipped. The Judeans in the south disagreed, believing that the temple which they built first, upon Mount Zion in Jerusalem, was the true and holy dwelling place of God.  Judean theology asserted  this belief: many psalms in our Bible today proclaim that God dwells in the temple upon Zion, not some remote backwater place like Samaria.

Sadly, this story is not the first, nor is it the last example of religious hostility described in the Bible. After the rejection of Jesus by the villagers in Samaria, as they are walking peacefully away from the village, two of Jesus closest disciples, James and John, walk up alongside Jesus and say (in a very loose translation of the New Testament Greek) “Jesus, the Samaritan people back there in the village were real jerks. They should’ve offered us food, water, and a place to rest.  Because they didn’t, do you want us to just call down some fire from the sky to just burn the whole place up?  You know, to teach them a lesson?”

As ridiculous as the request of James and John sounds to us, they were actually referring to an event that happened in Samaria much earlier; told to us in the book of 2 Kings. 2 Kings tells a story regarding the prophet Elijah, who cast down fire from the sky upon several Samaritan messengers and the groups associated with them. James and John, the two disciples, were familiar with this story, and figured that if it was okay for Elijah, then Jesus would be cool doing the same thing.

Except he wasn’t. Jesus was not interested in raining down fire on anyone, Samaritan, Judean, or otherwise. Quite the contrary, Jesus tired of this deep-seated animosity between Samaria and Judea.  He’d had enough of people fighting over religion, using religion to justify hatred and prejudice against others. So Jesus rebukes James and John for even bringing up the idea. 

I don’t believe it is a coincidence that in the very next chapter of Luke from the story we hear today - after Jesus and his disciples are rejected by the Samaritan village - that Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan. It’s a familiar story to us – a man, walking on a road, is robbed and beaten by bandits, and left for dead lying in a ditch. A priest walks by, and ignores him. A Levite, a person who works in the Temple, kind of like an altar guild member, walks by, and ignores him. Last comes…a Samaritan, one of those awful people who worship God on the wrong mountain.  And the Samaritan stops, bandages the wounds of the beaten man, takes him to an inn, and pays the innkeeper to take care of the man. In telling this story, Jesus creates an opportunity for Judeans to think differently about Samaritans, to see them not just as a stereotyped enemy, but as friend and healer.

Take a moment, and think about a person in your life who you feel is an enemy. Maybe it is an ex-husband, wife, or partner. Maybe it’s your boss, maybe it’s me!  Maybe it is a person who robbed you at gunpoint. It could be anyone. Think and find in your mind an image of that person, who for whatever reason, has done you wrong, treated you unfairly.

Now imagine yourself beaten and robbed, and left to die in a ditch by the side of a road, and this person walks by – that person who hurt you, hated you, told lies about you, cheated on you – that person now looks at you lying helpless in a ditch with blood, sweat, and dirt on your face.  And that person, your enemy, kneels down beside you, looking at you – you think so that they can just spit in your face. But instead, they roll up their sleeves, extend their arm, and lift you out of the ditch, place you in their car, drive you to a hospital, and pay for your care. 

Is it too difficult to imagine?  Is it too unrealistic to imagine that the person who saves you from physical and spiritual death could be the very person you label an enemy? The former Archbishop of Capetown, South Africa, Desmond Tutu reminds us all that your enemy is God’s friend, just as you are. 

We might find ourselves tempted, like Elijah, James, or John, to rain down fire upon our enemies. It’s easier that way. Just rid them from our sight. But the parable of the Good Samaritan reminds us that sometimes our enemies are who we need the most, and that sometimes, by God’s grace, they are the only ones who will save us. AMEN.           

June 19, 2016

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THE REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen. 

Nearly seventy-five years ago, a great darkness fell upon Western Europe and slowly the world as Adolf Hitler and the Nazi political party spread their campaign of fear, tyranny, and death across Europe.  Anyone who has studied World War II history knows that Hitler’s bloodthirst was not limited to just those of Jewish descent, but extended to virtually any person who did not fit into his prescribed Aryan construct of human perfection. 

Gypsies, homosexuals, the severely ill, the developmentally disabled – all these people, and more, were victim’s of Hitler’s “final solution.” Why? Years ago I visited the National Holocaust Musuem in Washington, DC. At the end of my visit, I had no words to say. The pain I felt was gripping and claustrophobic. There is one picture that haunts me to this day. It is photograph taken of a naked developmentally disabled child being prepared for a gas chamber. As a human being, as a priest, as a father of a child on the Autism spectrum, the picture mocks everything I stand for. It will not leave my mind, remains today an icon of hell.

It was during this time, one of the darkest in recent human history (though there have certainly been others since), that a person unknown to any of us fled from terror and death in the city of Cologne, Germany. For an unspecified period of time, this person hid in a cellar of home. We know nothing of this person, except that they hid there because of what some American soldiers found written on a wall of the cellar in which this person was hiding: Underneath a star of David on the wall, the American soldiers found three handwritten sentences, comprising a poem which reads: “I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining.  I believe in love, even when I don’t feel it. I believe in God, even when God is silent.”

I did not know this poem existed until several days ago when I heard a choir sing them at a vigil for the forty-nine victims murdered at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. As the choir sang the words of this poem, a flood of emotions filled me, the emotions that all of us have all felt this week. I wept as I listened to this powerful statement of faith sung so beautifully. I was not the only one. It was there at the vigil where I found myself thinking about the Gospel story we hear this morning. A story in which Jesus reaches out to a man possessed in the land of the Gerasenes. Scripture calls this man the Gerasense demoniac – a man possessed by unclean spirits. He was clearly an outcast, a scapegoat, someone people kept away from as he was naked and lived in an unclean area where bodies were buried. No one wanted to reach out to him, to learn his story.

Contemporary interpretations of this story favor a reading that the man was not possessed by unclean spirits, but was rather mentally unstable, schizophrenic, bi-polar, autistic, or whatever. Who knows. What the story confirms is that this person who was cast out by the Pharisees and the religiously uptight, was embraced by Jesus. The man everyone avoided because of their fear, Jesus healed. Here’s the message of the Gospel: we are made whole not by clinging to our piety, not by going to church, not by clean living.  We are made whole by reaching out as Jesus did. By extending our hand to Gerasane demoniac in our life.

We have so many in our world today. All of us are informed – daily – about who the demons in our lives should be. Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump. The Islamic State. Liberals. Conservatives. Gays. Lesbians.  Blacks. Queers. Whites. Transgenders. Rednecks. Priests. Athiests. Racists. Bigots. Addicts. Who is yours?

The central tenet of Christianity is that Jesus died on the cross. And in his death, Jesus became our demoniac whom we crucified.  Jesus became our scapegoat, the victim, on our behalf. Jesus went to the cross carrying all our hatred, all our prejudice, all our hypocrisy, and bore it all. He did this not because he had no choice – he did it out of love, and out of humility. Jesus became the victim, the demoniac for all of us – for one reason: in his dying, in his becoming the victim on our behalf, there would never be a need for us to create a new victim.  Jesus became that for us. 

That means for the Christian, there is no longer a need for a demoniac. There is no longer need to demonize a person or group of people, political party, other people’s religious beliefs, race, sexual orientation, class. We forget this so easily. Which is why we are here this morning, to retell the story of Christ’s death, and final meal with his disciples. 

Today we break bread together in a church where every person is included, where no one is left out. We also leave today with a choice. We can leave with our prejudice, our hostility, our bigotry intact and we can walk right out that door back out into the world unchanged. And we will easily find another group or person that will became our Gerasene Demoniac. The one we avoid. Or we can reaffirm our life in Christ again, render to God all our brokenness, our failures, our need to point the finger at a Demoniac. We can leave all that in God’s hands (and God will freely take it!) and we can walk out the door changed. And we will know that God is truly within us when we roll down our window on a street corner to acknowledge the humanity of the person standing on the street corner begging for money. We will know we are changed when we hold the hand of a person crying, trying to understand the senseless killing of forty-nine people last week. We will know we are changed when we can look into the eyes of the Demoniac in our life – and see God’s face, God’s eyes, staring back at us. AMEN. 

 

June 12, 2016

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Pentecost – Proper 6

2 Samuel 11:26-12:10,13-15; Psalm 32, 11-14; Galatians 2:15-21; Luke 7:36-8:3

THE REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

While I don’t have a formal “bucket list” – a list of things I would like to do before I kick the bucket, I do have somewhat disorganized list of things I would like to do before I dies. Nothing on the list is eccentric, but there are a few things on it, one of which I actually was able to cross off the list over ten years ago.

 That item was a pilgrimage, not to someplace like Jerusalem, Canterbury cathedral, but nevertheless a place noted for its profound spiritual depth: Las Vegas.  Yes – the Las Vegas – home Caesar’s Palace, and so many other casinos and hotels.  While my wife and I were there, we went to the MGM Grand to see the musician Tom Jones. While attending a Tom Jones concert might not be on your bucket list, it was on mine.

So we went, and Tom Jones appeared in all his sequined glory, much to the delight of everyone in the audience. He sang his hits including “It’s Not Unusual” and after Tom Jones blew his final, sweaty kiss to the audience and bid us good night, I knew that I had witnessed something laughably cheesy, but also kind of endearing in its own unique way.

See music – whatever form it takes – whether choral, country, or Vegas lounge, has a way of lifting our spirits in a way words often fail to.  You know how you feel when you hear a song you like? You feel good, you are transported to a time in your life that you associate with that song that was positive and fun. 

I think that is one reason why music is woven throughout the Bible. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the book of Psalms, a literal collection of one hundred fifty songs written for a variety of circumstances and occasions. Psalm 32, the psalm we just said together a few moments ago, is called a “Maskil,” a word which means that the psalm has something very special to teach. The obvious focus of this psalm is joy of being forgiven.  The joy of having a burden lifted off your shoulders. That’s a special message – one so special, it is found all over the Bible.

How many of us today are carrying such heavy burdens. We hide it well. We dress them up, we put on a smile while inside we feel we are falling apart. We have lost our song. The author of Psalm 32 writes: “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.  For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.” These are the words of someone carrying a heavy burden, someone clearly in desperation. Something has happened to them – their life doesn’t make sense to them anymore, they are lost, they are confused. 

We have all had this experience of the rug being pulled from beneath our feet, where we are left there on the floor wondering if God cares, or is even listening. We have all felt the heavy burden of our secrets and our lies, and that burden can become so heavy, and yet we don’t even notice it, because slowly the burden just got heavier over time ever so slightly, not too much for us to notice, but enough to push us down.

The truth of Psalm 32 is in the following verse: “Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the guilt of my sin.” Can you imagine the sense of relief the author of this psalm felt when they finally admitted: “You know God, I have really messed things up lately. In fact I have done such a good job of messing things up that I wasn’t even aware of it. It is only when you relieve the crushing burden from my shoulders that in the absence of that weight, I feel so remarkably light.”

Have you ever felt that? Have you ever only realized the heaviness of a burden you carried around until after it was lifted from your shoulders? I had an experience of this years ago while hiking the Grand Canyon. Since it is a canyon, you begin the hike from the top, and you hike down first, and then at some point turn around to begin your climb out of the canyon. 

While on our hike back up the trail and out of the canyon, we would stop periodically for water breaks. I was carrying a daypack, and while drinking water from a bottle, my older brother very quietly would unzip my backpack and place a rock about this big in there, and zip up the back pack. It wasn’t too much for me to really notice, but it was enough for me to think to myself “wow, this backpack sure isn’t really getting any lighter. Oh well, maybe it will feel lighter later.”

My brother did this each time we stopped, probably about four or five more times, until at our last stop near the end of the trail, I said “Okay, what is going on with my backpack, why does it feel so heavy?” I opened it, saw the rocks, immediately knew it was my brother, and took all the rocks out. When I put the pack back on my shoulders – oh my goodness – how light it felt! The slow building, heavy burden, was instantly lifted from my shoulders, and I felt like a gazelle going up that trail with all that weight off my shoulders. 

That’s the secret this Psalm imparts on us. While the music that went along with it is long since departed, the truth remains. We often don’t know how heavy our burdens are until we feel the lightness and peace from giving them to God. That is what this altar is for. It is where we bring our weariness, our brokenness, our burdens – every week. That altar is there so that you can leave those things there. God is always ready to receive them.  We come to the altar with our burdens, our heaviness, we present them to God, and what does God do?  God gives us a gift – God gives us food and blessing for our journey. That is our song – it always has been. A perpetual song we sing of God’s mercy, and the freedom we feel when we release our burdens to God, and they float into the ether, like the florets from a dandelion go out into the sky on a windy day, rising, our burdens rise to heaven. AMEN.

           

 

May 29, 2016

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Second Sunday after Pentecost

1 Kings 8:22-23 ,41-43; Psalm 96:1-9; Galatians 1:1-12; Luke 7:1-10

THE REV. CARISSA BALDWIN-MCGINNIS

Every relationship is a blank canvas at first encounter.  The initial encounter might be a glance, a formal introduction, a handshake, a business transaction, a gesture, a child born, an animal saved.  But the instant the encounter begins, the canvas is marked, and the seam in time between when the canvas is blank and when the canvas has been marked is so fine as to be undetectable.  The transition from nothing to the beginning of all that will be is profoundly unattainable.  And yet – for an undetectable portion of a second - there was only possibility and probability.

Among the infinite outcomes of any human encounter is one pair of opposing possibilities: the scam and the generous gift. Scams are as probable as they are concrete.  Acts of help may be as exceptional as they are mystical.  Deceit runs easily across lines of difference, especially when the deceiver knows more about the wants, desires and weaknesses of the deceived.  Helping across lines of difference, on the other hand, takes strength of character and courage to embrace the unknown.

Imagine if you will, two young American tourists, as curious as they are naïve.  They have jumped the Mediterranean by way of ferry from southern Spain to Morocco.  As they go to board a train from Tangiers to Fez, these two travelers - holding general seating tickets - are brusquely ushered by a train attendant to a particular car and told that in the car were there assigned seats.  Conveniently there are two local men, much older and worldlier than the tourists.   The men convince the youth they must get off at the first stop in order to change trains, if they wish to reach Fez.  This was told to them even though the train they were on was certainly headed to the southern city already.

Imagine that these tourists went against their instincts, getting off in the next town only to be cajoled by the companions to get in a large van with them and four other large men awaiting them outside of the train station.  Frozen, these young travelers knew they had been had.  They looked to the train attendant for help, and he ushers them outside.  With tears in their eyes the youth resist getting into the van and are left on the side of the Moroccan highway.  A few minutes later the train attendant who had forced them out, waves them in and offers them hospitality for the night.  He will then get on the train with them in the morning to see them safely to Fez.  Had he done so in the presence of the criminal element, he would have pitted himself against a band of thugs that also outnumbered him.  He was wise to wait.  He was good to have helped.

“[The] kind of relationship on which helping is based...cannot be manufactured,” writes Alan Keith-Lewis.  “It begins at the moment that any two people meet.  It grows as they work together, but it cannot be forced or hurried.”

In today’s gospel we hear a story of a mystical encounter between two men who will never meet: Jesus and the Centurion.  The latter sends representatives, emissaries, go betweens.  They are Jewish elders rather than Roman soldiers.  He was wise to send the ones who would be more naturally received.  The Centurion’s request is for healing of a highly valued slave near death.  Jesus is willing to go to the seat of the occupier of his homeland to offer this healing.  The Centurion likely knows what a social, political and soul challenge that would have been for Jesus.  So he sends a second friendly delegation to relieve Jesus of the burden of crossing that threshold of difference.  The request is that Jesus would heal the slave remotely, and it is said that in fact the slave is healed.

This and other stories of remote healing are the scriptural compass pointing us in the direction of intercessory prayer.  We need not know how or why, but we know that those intentions travel their mystical paths and have unknowable impact.

Fr. Greg Boyle of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles talks about the phenomenon in helping relationships when the line between the helper and the ‘helpee’ becomes blurred.  Not only does the giver end up transformed in the mutuality of the relationship, the two are mystically one in friendship and relationship.  Once two subjects who now occupy a single canvas.

Holy Matrimony is a helpful example of this kind of mystical union.  Obviously, it is set apart from other relationships for its particularities.  But the premise of the unifying connection is present in all relationships of mutuality and particularly in helping relationships.  In their book about making marriage work, John Gottman and Nan Silver emphasize the importance of allowing one’s spouse to influence oneself.  They imply that in marriage we must be both impressionable and impressive as we blur the line between giving and receiving.

Every helping relationship has the sort of atomic makeup as has a marriage.  Though the kind of mutuality and helping relationship as in today’s gospel are rare, marriage and helping relationships are made even in wartime.   “Mercy is a precious commodity in the midst of war,” writes a small town Presbyterian pastor[1] as he reflects on this Memorial Day.  Ultimately, mercy and meaning are what we seek on days like Memorial Day when we celebrate those who have died against difficult, dignified, complex or even uncertain backgrounds.  We reach out over the seam of time in honor of their lives and the meaning and value that they give to ours today.  It is our own mystical gesture of mercy.

As we do, may we pray remotely to the master of remote healing and repose:

Give rest, O Christ, to your servants with your saints, where sorrow and pain are no more, neither sighing, but life everlasting.

 

 

[1] hisharvestfield.wordpress.com

May 22, 2016

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Trinity Sunday

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15; Psalm 8

THE REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

There is so much great television out there recently – so many shows that speak brilliantly about the human condition.  Mad Men, Game of Thrones, Twin Peaks, Breaking Bad, Battlestar Galactica, The Sopranos, The Walking Dead, the list goes on and on.  A show from several years ago that drew me into the midst of its complicated narrative was the show entitled “Lost.”  “Lost” was about many things: love, relationships, physics, time travel, good and evil, faith and reason. 

I was curious about the characters and wanted to always learn more about them and their motives.  The setting for the majority of the show was the stunningly beautiful Hawaiian island of Oahu, but as beautiful as the setting was, what kept me coming back was not just the setting, not just the characters, but rather the unexplained mysteries of the show itself.  Bizarre, unexplainable things routinely occurred on this show that simply couldn’t be explained.

When “Lost” finally ended six years ago, there were some who were pleased with how the show ended.  And there were also people who were upset with the ending and found it disappointing because it didn’t tie all the loose threads together.  There were still mysteries left unexplained that the viewer had to consider themselves.

For me, I personally enjoyed not having the mystery revealed entirely, because if a mystery is unveiled completely, it is no longer mysterious.  Revealed mystery becomes something boring: a fact, something we can pick apart and measure.  But if it remains mysterious, then it remains aloof, and that always seems to be more interesting. 

Such is the case with the mystery of the Trinity, which we honor today.  The Trinity (God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit) has been dissected time and time again.  Many thick, heavy books have been written in dense academic language with fancy Latin words to try and explain what exactly the Trinity really is.  My experience of these books is that they all tend to be rather dull and boring.

We aren’t meant to treat the Trinity as a biologist treats a new species.  The Trinity is a holy mystery that reveals God’s rather peculiar mathematical sense – in this case that God + Jesus + the Holy Spirit does not equal three, but one.

Centuries ago, the Italian mathematician named Rafael Bombelli discovered imaginary numbers, which are numbers that technically do not exist in our world, but must exist somewhere because there are certain mathematical equations that can only have imaginary answers.  If that doesn’t make sense to you, don’t worry, it doesn’t really make sense to me, either.  But I will share one equation that has an imaginary number, and that is the square root of negative one.  If I try to get my calculator solve that equation, a message pops up on the screen which reads “invalid input for function” meaning there’s no real answer.  The answer exists out there somewhere, but it is unknown, it is a mystery.

Jesus says to his disciples in the Gospel today “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.”  In other words, there is a lot out there that we don’t know, that we cannot know, because our minds are simply too small to comprehend such things.  Our minds are too small to understand God’s math, how three is really one. 

When I was in seminary, I remember being told by one of my professors that by the time I graduated, there would still be so much I wouldn’t know or even comprehend.  He went on to say that the purpose of seminary, and really of education, was not to discover all the answers – it was to learn to ask better questions.

I’m not sure how satisfied I was with my professor’s comment, but I know in my heart that he was right.  There is so much we want to know, that unfortunately, we never will.  The renowned Anglican theologian and former atheist C.S. Lewis writes that the most frequently used word in heaven is probably “aha!”  It is his belief that when we are in that special presence of God in the life to come, we will understand things we do not understand now.  Perhaps all mysteries will be revealed at that point.  I have to wonder, though, if finally receiving the answers to our deepest questions will be nearly as satisfying as the pursuit of the mystery itself.  I wonder if we will like the answer we receive that day, or if we might think we were better off not knowing?

True wisdom, I believe, is seen most clearly in the ability of a person who can live with mystery in their lives and be okay with it.  To be comfortable with not knowing all the answers, to live into the words of the prophet Isaiah to whom God says “my thoughts are not your thoughts nor your ways my ways.”  AMEN.

 

May 15, 2016

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The Day of Pentecost

Genesis 11:1-9; Psalm 104: 25-35,37; Acts 2:1-21; John 14: 8-17, 25-27

THE REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

The story we hear this morning about the Tower of Babel in the book of Genesis is a story about, yes, the building of a tower, but there is much more to it than God frustrating the efforts and arrogance of the tower’s builders. Yes, the tower the people planned on building which was to be very grand and serve as a monument to their collective ego was never finished. But I feel there is more to this story than the mythical origins of different languages, and a lesson of our true place in the universe, valid though those points may be.

The story of the Tower of Babel isn’t just meant to answer the obvious questions of why there are so many different languages in the world. It does do that – demonstrating how God got all the builders to speak different languages so that they wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other as they were building.  No longer could the builders just say “put that brick there, and use mortar here.” They could be, but it was pointless. And so the project stalled, not for lack of energy, desire, or even resources, but because they couldn’t understand each other.

Many of us today are the same. We might speak the same language, we might live in the same city, we might attend the same church – and yet we don’t understand each other. We could magnify this to a macro level and see the same thing in our country: we more or less speak the same language, and yet we are polarized – we don’t understand how someone could vote for one candidate other than the one we want to support. 

The story of the Babel tower explores the shadow side of this inability to understand the other – it goes with courage into a darker place, and in my opinion, the Babel story is the Bible’s attempt to explain the origin of war. It explains our fear of the stranger and our judgment and hatred of people different than us. The Babel tower explains our suspicion, hostility, and distrust of people different than ourselves.

Because even though the confusing and scattering God does at Babel is meant as a grace to save us from our own pride and arrogance, I don’t think we received it as grace. At Babel God creates tribes with different languages and customs. And the human response to that was to create tribalism. It didn’t take long for the energies and ingenuities we’d spent on baking bricks and cutting stone we soon devoted into making weapons. And if you feel that America is somehow immune to this, then look no further than the presidential campaigns we are currently immersed in, and you will see tribalism run rampant. 

But Babel is not the end of the story. The end of the story comes with Pentecost, in which the Holy Spirit descends upon a crowd of scattered tribes and people. Just as God comes down at Babel to confuse their speech, the Holy Spirit comes down at Pentecost to fill people with praise. And though they each speak in a different language, they understand each other. There is no more confusion. There is no distrust, there is only perfect communion with God and each other. God heals the wounds of Babel not by creating a common language, but by creating a people diverse in language and custom, but without fear. A people who, remember what was forgotten at Babel: that we were made to praise God, not to build towers to the heavens. 

You were made to embody God’s love to the world, not wall yourself off from it. You were made to serve in God’s name, not worry about making a name for yourself. You were made to point toward God’s future, not to try to secure your own. God heals the wounds of Babel not by creating a new language. God heals the wounds of the world by creating a people who are God’s new language.  And that is you!  AMEN.   

 

May 5, 2016

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Ascension Day

Acts 1:1-11; Psalm 47; Ephesians 1:15-23; Luke 24:44-53

THE REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.

Several years ago, my wife and I went to see the last installment in director Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, entitled “The Dark Knight Rises.” An embarrassing detail to this story is that I actually fell asleep during most of the movie, in spite of the high volume action scenes. My slumber during the film was interrupted, during a scene in which I remember Batman was at the bottom of a well-like prison that was seemingly impossible to escape from.

I learned after the movie that Batman was down there for a period of months, until the other prisoners in the deep well empower him to climb out of the pit in which he was imprisoned. Now I have only seen this movie once, actually I’ve only seen part of the movie once, but nevertheless, the scene of Batman’s ascent out of the prison was powerful for me. He tries many times to climb out of the prison, but fails.

Only with the clamoring of the other prisoners whose repetitive mantra of “Rise! Rise” is Batman able to climb out of the pit and go on to do whatever he was supposed to do, which I can’t tell you what it was, because I fell asleep again after that point.

I have been thinking of that scene a lot this week as we prepare for this day, the fortieth day of Easter, Ascension Day. Today we mark the ascent, or rising, of Jesus to Heaven, an event depicted on the cover of your order of service by the African artist Jesus Mafu. Like the ascent of Batman, the Ascension of Jesus was not easy. First Jesus was crucified, and then he died.  His corpse lay cold for three days, until the angels spoke to him saying “Rise!” and Jesus climbed out of the pit of death, risen.

Days later, Jesus ascended to heaven. The term “ascent” is somewhat archaic word for us.  Centuries ago people believed heaven was literally up in the clouds somewhere. Today, those who believe in heaven would likely say that heaven is all around us, it is present in us, it is also beyond time, rather than just up “there” somewhere. Yet language is limited, and sometimes we just have to say in words what sometimes is better stated in art.

The point of the Ascension of Jesus is that it is not an event that is reserved for him alone. The Ascension is something all of us will do. For some of us, it is something we have already done.  The Bible speaks of Jesus coming to earth in order to show us what it means to be divine.

In other words, we ascend, with Jesus, to heaven and we are drawn into the heart of God – we become a part of God, and God a part of us in a way that is distinctive from our reality now.

That’s a complicated way of describing the Ascension as it applies to us. It is less an “ascent” and more of an encapsulation, God and you, joining together, with no separation. Heaven is the universe as God intends it to be, and our Ascension, that is our entry in this new reality.

John, writing the book of Revelation on the Greek island of Patmos, describes heaven as a city in which there is no temple, there is no church, because there isn’t need for one. God and all of creation are ascended together, and there is no need for an intermediary, there is no need for a church or clergy, for God and creation are united as one. On Sundays in heaven you don’t need to go to church, you get to go out and have brunch, or sleep in, or binge watch a show on whatever heavenly video streaming service it there. The point is – in heaven, the church is out of a job!

If we are carefully observant in our lives, we are often afforded glimpses of Ascension. In a few moments, all of us will physically ascend these stairs to receive the Eucharist, that sacred meal which is a preview of the bountiful life that is to come. As we rise up these steps, we are to be reminded that we are stepping up to a higher place, a divine place, where we physically and spiritually commune with God – where God feeds us.

But it is not our time to yet to remain there.  We will walk down steps again, we will descend, we will get in our cars and drive home and we will still have all the regular problems of our lives. But we would be mistaken to assume that in spite of that, heaven is no longer our reality.  If Jesus taught us anything, it is that heaven is everywhere. Heaven is where we ascend , but we can also find it at the bottom of the pit. I can tell you that for me personally when I have gone through times of personal, emotional, and spiritual anguish, as painful and as unpleasant as those time have been, I have also ascended out of every one of those experiences holding on to a piece of heaven I don’t believe I would have received otherwise.  

Some of us might feel as if we are at the bottom of a pit with no way out. There is a way out.  There is always a way out.  We rise.  We ascend triumphantly taking the hand of our Savior who goes before us.  God’s hand in ours, the congregation of angels surrounding us, repeating the mantra “Rise!” and we find our place next God’s – heaven in our midst.  Brothers and sisters – all of us – we rise together.  AMEN.

May 1, 2016

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IV Easter

Acts 16: 9-15; Psalm 67; Revelation 21:10, 22-22:5; John 14: 23-29

THE REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.

Music has always been a big part of my identity. The first album I ever owned was a Neil Diamond cassette tape I bought when I was eight years old – it was the one with his hit song “Coming to America” which made quite an impression on my third grade self. As years passed, my musical interests diversified and arguably worsened in junior high as I embraced the 1980s hair metal scene, with bands like Bon Jovi, Van Halen, Ozzy Osbourne, Motley Crue, Poison, Warrant, the list goes on and on. And, yes, a lot of those songs appear with some regularity on my music feed today.  In the 1990s and college, I grew to love artists like Nirvana, Public Enemy, Dream Theater, Johnny Cash, John Coltraine, Tom Waits, Miles Davis, Willie Nelson, Muddy Waters, Stevie Ray Vaughan. You name it, I probably listened to it, and probably still do now.  

Which is why the last six months, musically, has been really tough for me.  We have lost so much talent in such a short time: Merle Haggard, Prince, David Bowie, Glenn Frey of The Eagles, Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire, Lemmy Kilmister of Motorhead. I think I have spent the past six months in a lull, a state of perpetual mourning at the talent we have lost.

There is one songwriter, who thankfully is still with us, Bruce Springsteen. Currently Bruce is touring behind an expanded rerelease of his 1980 album entitled “The River.” The title song from that album, “The River,” is one my favorites of Springsteen.  It is a somber song, one that Bruce describes as written for his brother in law and sister. Speaking about “The River,” Springsteen said “My brother-in-law was in the construction industry, lost his job and had to struggle very hard back in the late 70s, like so many people are doing today. It was a record where I first started to tackle men and women and families and marriage.”

The image of a river is a timeless one indeed.  There is something about the nature of a river, its slow meandering pace, or its quickly cascading rapids, that adequately sums up the nature of our lives. The author of the book of Revelation writes about a river – a river of the water of life – described as bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God right through the middle of the city of new Jerusalem. It is a poignant vision the author sees. As strange as this vision might seem to you and me, it was actually firmly grounded in the prophetic scripture of the Hebrew Bible.

The Biblical prophet Ezekiel writes in chapter 47 of Ezekiel of another mystical vision where he sees another river – this river flowing from the beneath the temple in Jerusalem out through the north gate, to the outer gate, and on.  People reading Ezekiel would have understood that the flowing water of the river, flowing out from the temple, was God.  

Another prophet from the Hebrew Bible, Joel, prophetically wrote about a time when “a fountain shall come forth from the house of the Lord.” I say all this to establish some context for how we understand this vision of a new Jerusalem in Revelation. It was not an original vision the author of Revelation had, but one that goes back to the Hebrew Bible.

What does it mean? The river is God’s timeless, ever flowing presence that is not limited to a church, temple, or building. The river flows out from the temple into the city. It is a reminder to us that the church is not in here. Church is how we live our lives as we, like a river, flow out of this temple, and into the city around us.  

We are the river of this church, flowing out into the city, helping those who we can help, loving those whom God has called us to love, which is everyone.  

It is interesting to me that Springsteen, John of Patmos, and the prophets of Israel, all wrote about a river during times of hardship.  Springsteen wrote during the economic recession of the early 1980s. John of Patmos wrote Revelation during a time of Roman persecution of Christians and Jews in the first century after Jesus’ resurrection. The prophet Ezekiel wrote during the painful exile of Israel at the hands of the Babylonians in 587 BCE. The prophet Joel wrote at an undisclosed time, but nevertheless it was a time of foreign invasion. Amidst all this hardship over centuries, we return to an image yet again – a river of the water of life.  

2016 is an uncertain year to say the least. We are in the midst of an election cycle that has been anything but predictable. We have seen tremendous economic volatility, and we have all seen as a community what thirty dollars for a barrel of oil does for those working in that industry. In the midst of all uncertainty, the fear of jobs lost, and the hope for new opportunities to come, we find ourselves here – back at the River.  

It is in this church where we drink from the river of the water of life, where we find rest and assurance that in spite of what happens in the world, the river of God’s presence flowing from the temple out into the city will never dry.

How do we respond to the river of life that always flows no matter what happens? We join together and we sing. Our hymn might be “Purple Rain,” “Hotel California,” “Mama Tried,” “Home Sweet Home,” or “Texas Flood,” it doesn’t matter. The saints who showed us through music that God’s river is ever flowing, they now join their songs with others in heaven. Their songs join with all the others – flowing into the River, which flows out of heaven and is here now. AMEN.

April 24, 2016

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Easter V

Acts 11:1-18; Revelation 21:1-6; John 13:31-35; Psalm 148

THE REV. CARISSA BALDWIN-MCGINNIS

A lamp am I to thee that beholdest me.
A mirror am I to thee that perceivest me.
A door am I to thee that knockest at me.
A way am I to thee a wayfarer...

These are words attributed to a risen Jesus by second century communities said to have followed  Jesus and specifically by following John in whose name the fourth gospel is titled. These words are actually lyrics and part of a hymn known today as the “Hymn of Jesus,” and which may have been sung in a small part of the early church. It comes from the apocryphal Acts of John.

The hymn is a sort of code of spiritual truth, revealing that the depths of the soul and the Divine await us, if we choose to pursue them.  Listen again:

A lamp am I to thee that beholdest me.
A mirror am I to thee that perceivest me.
A door am I to thee that knockest at me.
A way am I to thee a wayfarer....

I do not know why, but these words comfort me in this city where storm water runoff of unthinkable proportion has soaked us, overwhelmed our homes and in some cases taken our lives. The “Hymn of Jesus” has nothing to do with solving the major and complex problems we are facing as a city today, and yet somehow it offers assurance akin to that offered by the Celtic Encircling prayer attributed to St. Patrick:

Christ be with me, Christ within me,
Christ behind me, Christ before me…
Christ beneath me, Christ above me,
Christ in quiet, Christ in danger…

Jesus does not say, “I am a life raft for the one who is stranded. I am a Wet Vac for the one whose roof is leaking. I am a rain-absorbing prairie where there is too much cement.” Rather, we rely on each other for such relief.  But when one pursues spirituality as the double helix of everything real, that person’s ability to be strong, patient or resilient is greater especially in times of trouble.

Ironically, this weekend begins the Jewish observance of the festival of Passover. This is of course the festival of freedom. In this week, the story of the Hebrew’s escape from slavery in Egypt to the freedom of the wilderness will be told to the young and old alike. Children will be at table. Families will invite guests for seder suppers. The story of Moses leading the exodus, including a parting of the Red Sea, will be primary. Jews don’t tell these stories to themselves and their children every year to foster some belief in miracles that will deliver safety or justice, but rather they do so in order that the faithful will take courage in times of great challenge.

Prophets are people – regular people - who are given special courage. The nature of that courage is to lead in times of challenge while listening always to the Spirit but with an ear to the ground. A woman with just these qualities who was called Moses by many in her day showed great skill, faith and courage as she guided the enslaved of this country from a place where they were property to a place where they were persons. Her name was Harriet Tubman, and claimed to have lost not one single passenger along the Underground Railroad. She is said to have explained her effectiveness in guiding people to safety in this way. She would listen to the voice of God as she was led slaves north. She would only go where she felt God was leading her.

We learned this week that Tubman’s image will be added to our currency, specifically the twenty-dollar bill. We learn this at the same time that day in and out on any given news outlet we are bombarded by presidential campaign rhetoric that is loaded with fear and hate based on race and nation of origin.  How is it possible that we would move both forward and backward at once? Both truths are true about us.  It would seem that now is a time in America of political overwhelment.

A lamp am I to thee that beholdest me.
A door am I to thee that knockest.

Perhaps it is the intimacy of these assertions by Jesus that makes makes them reassuring. John’s gospel for today in which Jesus’ instructs his disciples to love one another as Jesus’ loved his own conveys that same sense of intimacy. It is an intimacy that will withstand loss and travesty.

To understand this love, let me offer this. One bit of wisdom from the east is that a guru or teacher must love their disciples from the beginning and at all times. However, no love from of the teacher or master can be expected up front from the students. It must come in time. So, to take up Jesus’ invitation that his followers love one another as he loved them, imagine you are the teacher here today and that the rest of us are your students. Imagine committing to sending loving intention to each and to all, the same and at once. Now, let us actually do it. Close your eyes or keep them open.  No one will be looking at you. And for the next period of fifteen seconds, send only intentions of general wellbeing and love to the entire body of us present.

That was not so hard, was it? I do believe that this is what Jesus did at all times and that this is what Jesus was instructing his friends to do. And though it sounds very hard, it in itself is exceedingly simple. You just did it. As an effort, it takes less labor and energy than just about anything else you are likely to do as a member of this church community. I imagine that being one of Christ’s own and loving one another as Jesus loved his followers is to undertake this kind of prayer of love soberly, honestly, and with only positive intention.

Imagine holding this community daily in that intention. Now, imagine widening that circle of community to include the entire, water-soaked city. Imagine doing that once a day for one minute. Now imagine broadening that circle to the entire nation so at war with itself about who we are and who we want to be. Imagine doing those things and trust that the result will be good. These prayers may not change the state of the world, but try it and see what they do to you!

April 10, 2016

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III Easter

Acts 9: 1-20; Psalm 30; Revelation 5: 11-14; John 21: 1-19

THE REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.

If you read much of the Bible, you might quickly find that it is full of irony. One very good example of irony in the Bible we hear today comes from the book of Acts, involving a man named Saul. Saul has this dramatic, mystical, experience of Jesus while he is walking on a road to the city of Damascus, which in modern day Syria.

The reason why Saul is heading to Damascus is because he was intending to capture, imprison, and potentially murder heretics. Heretics, by Saul’s definition, were schismatic individuals deviating from what he considered true faith, or right belief. These heretics were following a man named Jesus, who Saul considered to be a false messiah. On his way to Damascus, Saul encounters a bright light, and hears a voice speaking to him, a voice, ironically, he believed to be Jesus himself. The voice says “Saul, why do you persecute me?”

The light blinds Saul, and unable to journey by himself, Saul is led by the hand into the city of Damascus where for three days he is without sight, and neither eats or drinks. Meanwhile God speaks to a disciple in Damascus named Ananias, and God tells Ananias to go to Saul and restore his sight. Ananias balks at this request because of Saul’s notorious reputation. God tells Ananias: “Go, for he is the instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel.”  

Saul’s sight is restored, and later God gives him a new name, Paul. Paul becomes an apostle and author of at least eight epistles in the New Testament. The change Paul goes through is radical, especially considering in the previous chapter of Acts, which includes multiple stories of Saul entering the homes of Christians, and dragging the men and women out of them and forcefully and violently throwing them into prison. You get the irony? This is the person God chooses to be his apostle: a man who espouses hate toward Christians, and is even complicit in the murder of Stephen, the first martyr in the New Testament.  God looks at Saul and says, “He’s good for the job.” That God chooses Saul is more than just ironic – it gives all of us hope. Because God does not choose the perfect. Throughout the Bible it is the flawed, broken, human people whom God favors. That’s good news to me.

Most of us here this morning would probably not say that our introduction to Christianity was as dramatic as Saul’s. Probably for most of us, our embrace of the Christian faith came not in a sweeping moment of conversion, but rather the movement and flow of a lifetime. At least that is the case for me.  

And yet, I also believe that all of us at some point have an experience of Jesus similar to Saul’s. If we are honest with ourselves, and courageous enough to look inwardly upon our soul, we will, hear the question asked: “why do you persecute me?” Who is asking that question? Perhaps it is the child within you? Perhaps it is the voice of a conflicted conscience? Or maybe it is the voice of God?

It’s up to you to figure out the identity of the voice asking you that question. Many people go their whole lives without having to unveil the identity of that voice. These people do so because facing the person who asks you “why do you persecute me?” takes great courage.

For the few who discover the person asking the question, there is often pain. It is most painful when we discover that the voice asking the question “why do you persecute me?” is not God, it’s not Jesus, it’s not our brother or sister, mother or father, son or daughter. It is your voice. Why do we persecute ourselves? Why do we persecute each other?

I have no satisfactory answer to either of those questions, except to point to the person persecuted on our behalf. The author of the book of Revelation points to a lamb that was slain (or persecuted) and yet is alive and able. The lamb is Jesus of Nazareth, persecuted, slain, and yet also intensely alive and placed upon a throne.  We persecuted a God who created us, redeemed us, and promised us eternal life. We persecute each other, and we persecute ourselves.  

That is the irony – the irony God understands. Because God knows there is more to our story than that question alone. God sees well beyond the persecution, embracing it, transforming it, redeeming every act ever committed by any person against themselves or each other.  Ever sin, every moment of anger, ever bullet fired, every life lost – it is all absorbed into God and redeemed, forgiven, and renewed.  

Persecution itself, is consumed into the holy fire of God, burned and recast into humility and compassion, so that all persecution, all evil, all pain, is wiped away and a new earth and a new heaven are born.  

This is what God does.  God assumes the pain, the suffering, the tragedy, the persecution – transforms it, and like a dove, releases it anew to fly.  

Listen to that voice with you, because the question you hear is not one to be afraid of. “Why do you persecute me?” is a question all of us must answer on our own, and the irony of course is that we often persecute ourselves in order not to answer that question because we just don’t know any better. But God does. Because in and through God, all persecution ends, the wounds on the lamb are healed, and all welcomed into the Kingdom of God. AMEN.

March 27, 2016

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Easter II

EXODUS 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14, 1 CORINTHIANS 11:23-26; JOHN 13:1-17, 31B-35; PSALM 116:1, 10-17

THE REV. CARISSA BALDWIN-MCGINNIS

If you are like me you have a million things you feel you want or need to keep track of.  We have so many tasks and to dos that remembering them all requires supernatural power or a very effective system of personal organizing. We keep up with things like phone calls, errands, pet medicines, tree trimming, retirement planning, replacing our tires, calling mom, calling kids, job searching, signing up for health insurance, renewing the bus pass, etc. White collar workers have reports and deadlines. Parents have children’s recitals and birthday parties.  We have things to file and cars to register. We deal with our debts and manage our savings.  In the modern world the to do list is infinite.

One guru of personal organizing says that the remedy is to write it all down. David Allen advocates compiling and listing everything, including the things we will never get to. He tells us to write everything down, because otherwise the mind is cluttered.  If our minds are cluttered trying to keep track of everything, then they will not be free to undertake their best work which is to generate insight and creative vision.

Throughout time the spiritual traditions have looked to meditation and contemplation for this kind of mental and neurological housekeeping. We sit in silence and attempt to master the art of letting our neurotic thoughts race around without attending to them. The better one becomes at ignoring those infinite, pesky, random thoughts, the more frequently important matters surface. One might experience a sense of peace where there had been anxiety.  One might receive an insight about another person with whom there has been conflict.  Solutions to hard problems can arise, and even the mundane in need of attention may make itself known.  Have you ever been in meditation and out of nowhere remembered that it was your brother’s birthday, or that you had an annual medical appointment that escaped your calendar?  This is how the unitive, integrated brain works.  Head and heart and neuropathy are given what they need to function as one system. The benefits unto us are innumerable.

The psyche has a way of bringing up what is important given half a chance, and the spiritual life is about noticing when that happens. Beyond tracking tasks and to dos, our deeper systems of remembrance track profound incidences, especially loss. We may not remember consciously the anniversary of a loved one’s death, but on such occasions we are likely to experience waves of grief, sadness or irritability. We will begin to make connections if we pay attention and show curiosity about those feelings. “Of course!” one might discover. “It is almost the anniversary of the hurricane that crushed my living room.” Or, “Oh my. Tomorrow is the death anniversary of my best friend.”

The question from today’s gospel – particularly Thomas – is how will they remember their leader, teacher, friend and guide who was no longer counted among the living. Thomas’ seeing-is -believing attitude is most unsatisfying perhaps because it hits too close to home.  But when Jesus invites Thomas to place his finger on the wounds in Jesus’ hands and to put his hand into the master’s side, he invites us all to take the spiritual high road. Even though the text does not say so, it seems somehow as though Thomas actually does place his fingers in the wounds and touched the raw, tender side of Jesus. Jesus was willing to be held by others in order that they would trust their own power to effectively teach and heal. What an intimate act of remembering the man, and what a powerful act of re-enfleshing one who had died.

Today we literally ‘re-member’ our congregation through the sacrament of Baptism. With water and anointing oils, with singing and prayer, we say to our new additions, “Welcome!” If we are in relationship with them and they with us, over time we will not be the same. We are enfleshed with new flesh. We have parts of our church body we had not before, and the whole is changed. The message that we remember on this day and that we promise to send and resend to our new companions is that the power of the divine is both inside and all around them.

There is a saying in the Gospel of Thomas that puts it quite directly.

(God’s) imperial rule is inside you and outside you. When you know yourselves, then you will be known, and you will understand that you are children of the living (God). But if you do not know yourselves, then you live in poverty, and you are the poverty.

We come together to know and be known. We do so inside of a spiritual tradition that upholds a deep, psychic path to knowing and being known. We know and are known through honest relationship, and we know and are known through contemplation and prayer. The promise is that in the midst of our neuroses and in spite of our mortality, we can know consolation, deep friendship, renewal and a sense of peace.

On this day of baptizing and re-membering we say to our newest members and potential friends, “Welcome. May you come to know the ways of God which are already both inside and all around you.”

March 27, 2016

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Easter

Isaiah 65: 17-25; Psalm 118: 1-2, 14-24; 1 Corinthians 15: 1-11; John 20: 1-18

THE REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.

Recently I came across a poem written by a contemporary Presbyterian minister named Kara Root.  The honesty of her written words struck me as apropos for Easter Sunday, as her untitled poem explains why she needs the resurrection.  She writes: “I need the Resurrection because my sister is sick and can't afford insurance, because I've told a weeping Haitian mom, ‘No, I can't take your son home with me.’ Because I've been rushed off a Jerusalem street so a robot could blow up a bag that could've blown up us. I need the resurrection because I've exploded in rage and watched my children’s tiny faces cloud with hurt. Because evil is pervasive and I participate. I need the Resurrection because it promises that in the end all wrongs are made right. Death loses. Hope triumphs. And life and love Prevail.”

Kara’s poem summarizes our Easter faith, punctuating it with a deep seated reality we might not always associate with resurrection. Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, in his Easter Message this year, points to this earthy reality of resurrection when he says that “the world does not need another fairy tale.”  

Today we gather in this holy place because resurrection isn’t a fairy tale. It is who we are, it is our story. As Kara mentions in her poem, all of us need it.  Personally, I need resurrection because without it, my life doesn’t make any sense. If there is no resurrection, then for me, my life is devoid of meaning and purpose.  It is my very ground of being – everything depends on it.

We need resurrection because without it, we have no answer to the suffering and pain we see on a daily basis in this world, whether that is recently in Brussels, or in our own city or even in our own homes. Without resurrection, there is no hope, there is no purpose, there is no point. That said – how many of us tomorrow will live our life as if resurrection is just a fairytale?

How many of us tomorrow will return to our places of work, or to our families, treating the resurrection as a quaint notion from a long ago time that no longer means anything to us in the busyness of our lives?  How many of us will forget in twenty-four hours how central the resurrection is?

I have a theory – and the theory is that as much as we talk about resurrection in the church, we do so to keep it at a safe distance, to domesticate it. And when clergy like myself are successful at domesticating resurrection, then we are successful in making it appear boring and forgettable, at least until maybe when a loved one close to us dies.  

I have buried enough people in my profession to see this happen again and again. There is something about being at a cemetery when you see a casket lowered into the ground or an urn placed into a columbarium that brings curiosity about the resurrection to the surface. Many times people, after watching their mom or dad or brother or sister lowered into the ground have asked me “Where is mom now? Is she in heaven?” They ask me because they expect I have a definitive answer, which because I am human, I don’t.  

Of course I understand why we ask those kinds of questions – we are desperate in such moments for some sense of closure when a loved one dies. We want to know that they will somehow be okay. I get that.  But the question of where someone goes when they die, and yes my answer is heaven, it is not a question I find captivating anymore. Here’s the question I want to ask: not is so and so in heaven – but rather, are we now?  In other words the question I want to ask is “what does the resurrection say not about the dead – what does it say about the living? What does it say about us today?”

My answer is that it says everything.  Because Christ transcended death and now lives, our lives are – ontologically different. Our lives are given meaning and purpose not only because of Jesus’ resurrection, but because his resurrection is our resurrection. We live and never die because Jesus lives and the tyranny of death is overthrown.

It is not a fairytale – it is our story – the story of God reaching into this world bringing life without end for all people. That means you. That means God gave you life, a life that will never end, though one day you will die. But your death is not the end, it is merely a birthday into eternal life. The resurrection of Jesus means that you have already been resurrected.

And because you are resurrected, heaven is all around you. Heaven is here, it is in your home, it is in your car, it is in your place of work. Heaven is in your friends, heaven is in your family, heaven is in your irritating boss at work, and heaven is in your enemy. Everything is resurrected, everything is new.  

Christians call this new life “Easter.” And because it is not just one day a year, we celebrate Easter every Sunday in this church. We do so because we need the resurrection. We need the Resurrection because it promises that in the end all wrongs are made right, that death loses, hope triumphs,  and life and love prevail.” It is anything but boring. It is anything but a fairytale.  It is God’s gift to you, today, and always. Never forget that. Happy Easter. AMEN.

March 25, 2016

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Good Friday

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

THE REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.

The garden was beautiful. It was a sunny afternoon; the tree branches were swaying in the gentle Mediterranean breeze. The smell of fresh rosemary added to the ambience of a quiet, lazy, summer afternoon. The garden itself is in the city of Jerusalem. It is a quiet, reflective space adjacent to a nearby mountain slope. The mountain is really more of a hill, and at least when I saw it some twenty years ago, the rock face of the hill was nestled over what appeared to be a bus station. If you looked at the rock face of the hill at a certain angle, you were able to see two areas carved into the rock that appeared to resemble eye sockets. Beneath these two holes was another one which resembled a nose, and beneath that, a horizontal indentation that appeared to resemble a mouth. Taken together, the eyes, the nose, the mouth – they resembled, in somewhat of a crude fashion, a human skull.  Immediately I thought of the word Golgotha, which we hear today was the Hebrew word for a place of the skull.  

As I looked toward the rock wall which actually resembled a skull, my gaze drifted toward the top, above the bus station or whatever it was, above the appearance of a skull, and I stood, and looked. And wondered. Where there was now grass atop the hill, were there ever three crosses, upon one of which hung the Son of God?  

It’s hard to say, we don’t know, we have no way of proving. Not far from this rock wall in Jerusalem, if you followed the path through the garden, it lead you to another rock wall, distinctive from the one I just described.  Carved into this wall was a cave-like structure. Upon entering it, the guide told me it was likely a first century tomb where a body was placed to rest. Outside the tomb, there was a small, unique carving beside the entry, which appeared to be an anchor, however in the middle of the anchor was a cross.  The anchor was also upside down –the arms of the anchor, rather than being at the bottom, were at the top. In Christian symbology, the anchor represents hope. The upturned anchor carved outside the opening of the tomb conveys a sense of hope as well – perhaps a way of saying that whoever was in the tomb was no longer there. They had risen. They were in heaven.

This garden I speak of in Jerusalem is called the Garden Tomb. I visited it some twenty years ago.  The tomb and the corresponding skull like rock face were only discovered in the late 19th century. While it seems this tomb dates from the time of Jesus, was it the tomb where Joseph of Arimathea placed the body of Jesus? We don’t know. Perhaps it was.

But even if it wasn’t, the close proximity between that rock hill and that tomb in the garden teaches us something critical for Good Friday. The skull on that rock wall and that tomb teach us that just as the resurrection is impossible without the cross, the cross has no meaning without the resurrection. The story of a Jewish man being crucified is not good news, nor was it exceptional for the time. Many others died in a similar way. What makes the death of Jesus different is that Christians see the cross through the resurrection. There is no way for us to ignore Easter Sunday and think only of Good Friday.

And so the cross and the empty tomb go together – they are the same story. The risen Christ is the crucified Christ, his wounds clearly visible. But the crucified Christ is also the risen Christ. Yes, the cross is an instrument of death, yet for us it is also the tree of life. That is why today is Good Friday.  Death and Resurrection, the cross and the empty tomb, are not separate things – they are two different sides of the great Paschal mystery we honor this week. Death and life are one and the same, redeemed by the cross, and perfected by the tomb whose stone was rolled away. There is no empty tomb without a cross, no cross without a tomb whose stone was rolled away.  

Before leaving the Garden Tomb in Jerusalem, a person gave me a gift – a small sprig of rosemary which grew in the garden. I placed it in my pocket, and carried it with me for the rest of my journey through Israel. The sprig of rosemary flew back to the United States with me, and I placed it in a scrapbook of my journey where it remains today. When I peel back the clear plastic scrapbook page under which it is placed, it still offers up a fragrance of a garden next to hill and a tomb. The rosemary offers a fragrance of sacrifice, of grace, of and forgiveness.

There is no end to God’s love. In a world ravaged by violence and suffering, God entered as a vulnerable infant, who grew into a man whose life ended violently. Today we look around our world, we see suffering and bloodshed in Jerusalem, in Brussels, in our own city. We witness death in hospital rooms, prisons, and in long term care facilities, and we might be tempted to believe that the rosemary in the garden has died. That it no longer offers its fragrance of grace. In the face of death and intolerance we might believe that the carving of the anchor was washed away, covered up, and that the skull on that mountain cleared away and in its place nothing but more concrete and metal and a larger bus station. It is easy to believe such things.

We stare out into a dark abyss demanding an answer from God that death, sickness, disease, and addiction are not bereft of meaning. We find ourselves dead and hanging on a cross, our bodies placed inside a dark tomb. And in the darkness of that tomb we believe hope has died. There is no breath of life, no smell of rosemary. And yet there is also a stirring within us that compels us to protest against this reality.  We get up and in the darkness find the stone and with all our might we press against it, summoning our strength against the principalities and powers of this world. After great exertion, the stone begins to move, and a beam of light, like a flame, enters our tomb and as our eyes adjust we see the garden in all its beauty.  We smell the flowers, we pick the rosemary, and we know death has lost the power of its tyranny. We kick over the anchor, turning it upside down, so that it points to our future – it points to heaven. We are alive.  It is a Good Friday. AMEN.

March 24, 2016

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Maundy Thursday

Exodus 12:1-4, (5-10), 11-14, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 13:1-17, 31b-35; Psalm 116:1, 10-17

THE REV. CARISSA BALDWIN-MCGINNIS

This particular holy night of storytelling and prayer is rife with emotion; grief, sorrow, detachment, mutuality and love. The Buddhist monk and teacher, Tich Naht Hanh, reminds us that our strong emotions are best used as fertilizer for our spirit. He teaches that in meditating on our passions – even anger – rather than bracing against them or attempting to deny their existence, we can become more centered and reconciled. We must acknowledge these invisible forces of emotion in order to negotiate a peace with them.  We must show them a mutual regard, so that they do not rule our lives, and also so that we do not attempt live our lives without feeling.

If we can master the habit of demonstrating mutuality with our emotions, then I imagine we may begin to show suppleness as we face one another. But we are programmed to be defensive against our needs and our feelings. We pretend we are indifferent and fully self-sufficient, which is of course the lie that leads to loneliness and social fracture. How often we reject help. How often we refuse hospitality. So how can we then have the capacity to provide help and hospitality, not having accepted assistance in times of subtle or even desperate need? The culture of self-sufficiency is a fantastical foundation on which little stands and from which so many people fall.

So tonight let us be students - disciples - who come to learn to wash and be washed; to give and to receive. Like Peter we may come with discomfort.  Peter seems to reject hospitality provided by someone so great as Jesus.  Or perhaps more deeply Peter resists this sacrament as the portal to all that lies ahead for Jesus and the disciples. It is as though Peter was digging in his heals against what was foreboded. Peter it seems went rigid in the face of what must have been overwhelmingly strong emotion; sorrow, fear, uncertainty, grief, unworthiness.

And so like Peter at the insistence of Jesus we practice this night  revealing one to another, the base part of ourselves. We present our feet for washing as a sign of a covenant of mutuality and the preferential option for intimacy and love over separation and fear.

In 2003 Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and his wife Leah, American Christian evangelicals who had taken on New Monasticism as way of life, joined a Christian pilgrimage to Iraq. The went in order to be a sign of love to the so called ‘enemy’ and to take a stand against the war. After their mission ended as they were leaving Iraq by way of caravan, the last car in the queue hit a piece of shrapnel and crashed into a ditch. None of the preceding cars noticed. So they kept on, unintentionally abandoning the last car and its passengers in the middle of the desert. Mercifully, an auto full of Iraqis stopped, pulled them out of the ditch, and drove them to a hospital. There the doctor declared to the American patients, “Three days ago your country bombed our hospital. But whether you are American or Iraqi, Christian or Muslim, we will take care of you because we take care of everyone.”

In a state of extreme human defensiveness, this radical principle of hospitality and care will not prevail. So we must allow our emotions life and make them to serve as fertilizer for our souls.

In January of 2006, I myself traveled to the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan to learn about ways that Christians and Muslims were practicing intentional reciprocity. Their habits turned out to be simple. Anglican priests reached out to neighboring imams just to talk. They talked about things like the weather. Later they might progress to topics such as wives and children. The only theological discourse ever undertaken was an embodied exchange of radical hospitality. The imams invited the priests to Eid prayers. The priests invited the imams to Christmas and Easter services.  At such times simple gifts might be exchanged. These were modest yet powerful acts of intimacy in lieu of separation; a preferential option for friendship instead of fear.

William Willimon “…Ministry begins in the heart of God…” When we cross lines of difference – global, spousal, or filial – it can feel like we have entered the heart of God. Those brief moments in which we feel we have entered the heart of God are moments in which we would wish to reside forever. It is a sensation like that described by the poet who speaks of a waterfall:

Christ look at you pouring from the rocks.
You’re so cold you’re boiling over.
You’ve got stars in your hair.
I don’t want to be around you.
I don’t want to drink you in.
I want to walk into the heart of you
And never walk back out.

Oh that we could enter the heart of Divine and never leave. Oh that Peter could have remained at the dinner party with his beloved teacher and feasted forever. Oh that we could put violence and terror back in a box, but from a box they were not born and bred. No, these tragic vices come rather from the heart. When we reach for a balm in the face of attacks such as the one that befell humanity in Brussels this week, we must reach for the divine impulse of love in the world and do everything we can to enter and remain there.

Howard Thurman wrote “There is a universal urgency for both personal and social stability.” Jesus tonight invites us to seek our stability in radical acts of vulnerability and service as well as friendship and love. We must learn to be at once powerful and powerless, active and passive, guest and host. We must choose to love in lieu of slaying and to serve in lieu of sacrifice, exchanging our very selves across lines of any and every difference that separates.

“It’s time,” wrote a singer songwriter from Austin, Texas “It’s time to make the world a better place. Let your love put your fears to waste. No matter who you are or where you’re from. Its time to get together and drop the Honeybomb.”

You are invited into the sticky, sweet mess of mutuality and love that may not dismantle bombs but which does dismantle fear and terror. Come to the table. Before that wash and be washed. Embrace your vulnerability and practice compassionate care of another’s physical base as a symbol of his or her most base and basic need.

Nico Alvarado’s “Time Riggins Speaks of Waterfalls” published in Best New Poets 2014 by University of Virginia Press.

March 20, 2016

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Palm Sunday

Isaiah 50:4-9a; Philippians 2:5-11; Luke 22:14-23:56; Psalm 31:9-16

THE REV. CARISSA BALDWIN-MCGINNIS

Terry Tempest Williams retells this story of musical revolution in her recent book “When Women Were Birds.”

“On Friday, August 29, 1952, a pianist named David Tudor stepped onto stage at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, NY. He sat down on the piano bench, closed the black lid over the ivory keys. And clicked a stopwatch he held in his hand. During this time he was turning the pages of a silent score. He stood twice, to open and close the piano lid between movements. After four minutes and thirty-three seconds, the pianist stood up to receive applause. The audience was stunned.”

Today we reenact two tributes to the power of silence. The first is Jesus’ procession to Jerusalem, and the second is his execution.

To help us understand the silence of the passion and procession, I want to share with you another story from Jewish history that some have likely never hear. It comes from the Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus. It goes like this:

“In the dark of night, Pontius Pilate processed with any number of other Roman troops from Cesarea to Jerusalem. In the dark of night what they carried were effigies of Caesar to be installed throughout Jerusalem.  In the dark of night they installed these ensigns throughout the city to mark that Roman law would now supercede Jewish law. As you will remember Jews were forbidden from the manufacture of any image of God.  Any such illustration would be unthinkable. To assert furthermore that the human Emperor, Ceasar, were God was not just a political affront but the worst of blasphemies.
Having awakened to find the newly installed ensigns and becoming deeply disturbed by them, it is said that the Jews went in multitudes to Cesarea to intercede with Pilate to remove the images. They remained for days, and on the sixth day Pilate ordered his soldiers to carry concealed weapons. He assumed his judgment seat located in an open place in the city. The Jews gathered around Pilate, and then Pilate signaled his troops to surround them.  Pilate then threatened the protesters with immediate death if they did not agree to stop their disturbance and go home. In response the Jews are said to have thrown themselves upon the ground, and laid their necks bare, insisting they would take their death very willingly rather than have the wisdom of their laws to be transgressed.
The silence must have been deafening, for the historian Josephus reports that Pilate was deeply affected by their firm resolution to keep their laws inviolable, and commanded the images to be carried back from Jerusalem to Cesarea.”

Josephus then tells another story of non-violent protest by the Jews that does not end so well. After that the historian offers a single, short paragraph about Jesus the Christ. He is described him as a “wise man,” “a doer of wonderful works,” a “teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure” whom Pilate condemned to the cross.

Can we hear then, today’s story of Jesus’ procession into Jerusalem as part of this pattern of creative, non-violent protest? Can we imagine Jesus and the disciples ironically imitating Pilate’s procession of effigies as if to say, “You want to see a procession of the image of God? We’ll show you a procession of the image of God.  This man! The Lord needs a colt to ride!  Get him a colt!”

Luke says some of the Pharisees warned against this protest and procession. Surely they were warning against retaliation from the Romans as well as the blasphemous implication that Jesus was the image of God. But Jesus pushes back.  His words convey this message. “When they have silenced these disciples and they have defeated us all such that there are no more humans to speak truth …Even these stones will shout!”  This is Jesus’ teaching that when deceit reigns there is a capital silencing of truth’s defenders, then silence itself will stand for truth.

The contemporary philosopher Slavoj Zizek says that “…emancipation remains the most daring of all ventures.” Mohandas Gandhi would likely translate Zizek to say that “The pursuit of Truth is the most daring of all ventures.” For Gandhi wrote, “I used to say that though God may be Love, God is Truth, above all… I went a step further and said that Truth is God.”

Sometimes it is in silence that we can hear our deepest personal truth. And sometimes it is the truth of another that we hear spoken in total quiet. Sometimes injustice takes itself so far that there is not a voice left to be heard in which case the silence itself becomes deafening. We can hear in today’s gospel the ineffable truth that is heard in the silence that follows a human’s last breath, be it a beloved grandmother, Jesus the Christ, or a prisoner executed by the state. The silence seems to shout.  

Jesus, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. Pilate condemned him to the cross. We say that at this event darkness came over the whole land and the sun’s light failed.

The silence must have been deafening.

March 13, 2016

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Lent 5

Isaiah 43: 16-21; Psalm 126; Philippians 3:4b-14; John 12: 1-8

THE REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. AMEN.

Several years ago I went with my family to go watch “The Lego Movie.” I grew up playing with Legos, my wife grew up playing with Legos with her three brothers, we have three boys, they all love Legos, so the movie was an obvious choice for us. While the film is clearly geared to children, there was also a lot in it for adults. The story in the film involves a cast of actual Lego characters living in a Lego world, and tells of their quest to prevent the evil “Lord Business” from using his weapon the “Kragle” to permanently freeze the Legos.  The “Kragle” is actually krazy glue, with a few of the letters missing.

Lord Business’ purpose in freezing the Legos is simple: he wants to control them. To aid him in his quest for control, Lord Business creates evil robots made out of Legos called Micro Managers, which have multiple red eyes and black square heads. The job of the Micro Managers, as their name implies, is control. The Micro Managers ensure that all the Legos are in the right position and acting "perfectly" so that when they are kraglized, or freezed, they look normal.The Micro Managers also take apart any creative, unusual models and rebuild them specifically according to the instructions.

I recognize that if you have never played with Legos, or seen the “Lego Movie,” none of this probably makes any sense. Nevertheless, I was intrigued with film, specifically the Micro Manager characters, because in the past I have worked for a real life micro manager, and you probably have, too.  In the real work world, a micromanager is a manager or boss who closely observes or controls the work of employees. Employees, including myself, generally do not respond well to micromanagement  the very act of a supervisor closely monitoring the work of an employee  implies that the supervisor has little, if any, trust, in the employee. Working for a micromanager was unsettling for me, and I made a promise to myself that one day, if I ever had people working for me, I would never be one myself.

Whether that is in fact true or not, any of the staff members at St. Andrew’s could tell you. I don’t believe that I am, at least at church. But what I have discovered about myself over time is that as negative an experience I had working for a micromanager, and as much as I vowed never to be one myself, I have alas, discovered yet again, my own hypocrisy. I might not be a micromanager at work, but I have learned that I can be one with those closest to me. I can be a micromanager in my marriage and in my family.  

I am doing my work on this in therapy, and through it I have discovered that as a child, I learned from one of my parents that love and approval were conditional. That means that as a young child age my understanding of love and acceptance was one where I felt affirmed and loved when I did the right thing. I felt those good feelings when I got good grades, when I behaved, when I didn’t get in trouble at school. Those things – the good behavior, the good grades – I learned at a young age, were what I needed in order to feel loved and accepted by one of my parents. It was a conditional validation – validation was given when I met the criteria.  Much later I learned that this was a kind of micromanagement and control.  

The tragic story of our lives is that what we often internalize as children, we tend to recreate in our adulthood.  And so I see in myself as a parent the very things I vowed as an adolescent I would never do.  So I am praying for a renewed heart. I am praying for the capacity to love as God loves – with no conditions, no assumptions, no need for control.  

The Bible is full of stories about God’s reckless love that is freely given, without counting the cost. Today we hear about a woman who takes a container of costly ointment and pours it upon the feet of Jesus.  Immediately she is criticized, or micromanaged by a disciple who says it is wasteful to use that ointment when it could easily be sold and the money given to the poor. The disciple is right – you could sell the ointment and give the money to poor. But where the disciple was mislead was in the fact that you cannot control love, and you cannot control the sacrifice a person makes to love. You cannot micromanage relationship. Jesus understood this, and rebuked the disciple. If anyone was worthy to receive this gift, it was Jesus.  

The stories of this kind of love without abandon in the Bible trickle down into our own church community – this parish – and we are empowered to live in a way that doesn’t seek control, but seeks love. A love that involves sacrifice, because if love is anything, it is sacrificial. St. Andrew’s is considering plans to build a new building on this campus, an act that would involve sacrifice on our part, as it would be costly, the least of which is financial.  In my early years as a priest, I would quietly scoff when I heard of churches wanting to do such things like we are considering – building a building. I would scoff, because like the disciple in the Gospel today, I would say to myself, “take all that money to build a building, and give it to organizations helping the poor. Why do you need another building?”

Fast forward a few years, and now here I am standing before you saying, “we need a new building!” The hypocrisy, or change of heart, or whatever you want to call it, is not lost on me. And yet as I read this Gospel story of unconditional love sacrificially given, a haunting question keeps reoccurring in my mind. Is Saint Andrew’s worthy? Are we worth the cost? Are we worth the sacrifice?  

Can we set our internal desires to micromanage, to control – can we set those aside, and with open hands pick up a container of costly ointment and anoint this community, this city? Will we do so without desiring control, without counting the cost, freely giving, anointing all that is holy, for you are worthy to do so. This is what God is calling you to do. We are worthy. AMEN.