October 9, 2016

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Pentecost – Proper 23

Jeremiah 29: 1, 4-7; Psalm 66: 1-12; 2 Timothy 2:8-15; Luke 17: 11-19

The REV. JAMES M. L. GRACE

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

In less than one month, our nation will have elected its next president, and soon thereafter at St. Andrew’s we will begin praying for our next president by name.  Whether that name is Donald or Hillary, is for the conscience of our nation to decide.   I don’t know about you, but recently I have heard many passing comments ranging from “I don’t see how she can vote for Donald Trump!” to “Is he crazy voting for Hillary Clinton?”  If you are a supporter of one candidate, the supporters of the other candidate are outsiders to you.  They are the people you don’t want to talk to because you disagree with them politically , and you don’t understand how they could possibly vote in good conscience for whatever candidate is their preference.

This ridiculing of the other – the person who disagrees with you, the person who annoys you, frustrates you – well, it is as old, if not older than, the Bible.  Ten people afflicted with a horrible skin disease see Jesus from afar, and they beg him to heal them.  Jesus does, because his ministry is one of reaching out to the outcast, of reaching across political religious boundaries because he had no use for them.  And so he heals ten people who society ignored and kept at a distance.  Out of those ten who were given a new life, a life free of crippling illness, one returns to thank Jesus. 

The one who returns is a Samaritan – a foreigner, an outsider.  A Samaritan in Israel was a like a lone Clinton supporter at an enthusiastic Trump rally.  No one wanted to hear from them.  And so this former leper outcast who was on the wrong side of the religious fence, crosses it and approaches Jesus, gets down on his knees, and says “thank you.”  The only one. 

A year and a half ago, St. Andrew’s started a third service called “Rhythms of Grace,” a weekly eucharistically-centered service for special needs children and adults.   Why does St. Andrew’s offer such a service?  Because in our society, individuals with physical or mental special needs are often relegated to outsider status culturally.  We are the only Episcopal Church in this Diocese that offers such a service.  As Jesus reached out to lepers, we reach out in our context, to people whose needs for community and acceptance are greater than we can imagine.

When we began the service, initially we did not have a collection taken.  The reason for this was simple – as a myself a father of a child with special needs I know all too well the daily cost of care in terms of specialized education, therapies, medical care.  I write the checks – I know what it costs.  And so I didn’t want to burden families coming to this service with already so much baggage and financial burdens with the guilt of putting some dollars in a collection plate.  

But my thinking around this began to change once I heard a former priest of this Diocese and now Bishop elsewhere issue a challenging and provocative statement about the collection plate.  He said that he would never preside over a Eucharist if a collection was not taken.  When I first heard the Bishop say that, I thought it was an awful thing to say, in effect tying a dollar amount to a sacrament.  How tacky, I thought.  How insulting to a person who had nothing to put into a plate. 

But then he explained his point, which was that in the Eucharist, God offers all of Him/Her self to us.  It is grace, it is mercy at its most profound.  The appropriate response to such a gift, the Bishop said, was to offer ourselves to God, to put a part of us on that altar.  That’s why the collection plates stay on the altar during the Eucharistic Prayer.  We offer a part of our selves, as God is offered to us – it is a sharing of ourself with God’s self – it is why we call it “communion” – we and God commune together.

So we put out a small wicker basket (our collection plate) at Rhythms of Grace.  I will admit, I was scared and apprehensive to do it.  I was embarrassed for the parent of a non-verbal autistic teenager to feel burdened with the responsibility for paying more money on an already strained budget where every dollar is stretched.  

But something happened, and the basket began to fill with cash and check donations.  And not just one week, but every week.  The money continues to come in.  I think it is because for some of these families, Rhythms of Grace is their church community.  They drive many miles past many other churches to come here, because they are welcomed, affirmed, and loved. 

And then, a parent who attends the service with her child approached Lisa Puccio with a request.  The parent wanted to know when our stewardship campaign would be, because she wanted to make a pledge to St. Andrew’s.  I think that goes down as a personal record for the first time someone has ever asked about when the Stewardship Campaign begins!  Usually the question is “When is it going to be over with?”  Our stewardship campaign begins today, and ends October 30th.  Over the next few weeks, you will hear from parishioners sharing their story in service, on videos, and on inserts in your weekly service bulletin.

Each story is powerful, and is one part of the story that you all tell about what God is doing in this parish, in your home, and most importantly, what God is doing in your heart.  AMEN.

September 11, 2016

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Pentecost – Proper 19

Exodus 32: 7-14; Psalm 51: 1-11; 1 Timothy 1:12-17; Luke 15: 1-10

THE REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

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

Theologian and author Diana Butler Bass shares this story of a conversation she had with her young daughter Emma, a few days following September 11.  She writes: " A couple of days after September 11 I was watching the evening news while setting the dining room table. The top story that night was a tape released by Osama bin Laden praising the attacks on New York and Washington.

We had tried to guard Emma from the pictures on television, but she had seen enough to know that some planes had crashed into tall buildings and that people had been killed. Emma came into the room as the Osama bin Laden video was being replayed.

She looked at the bearded face on the screen and asked 'is that the bad man? The bad man who killed people?' 'Yes that is the man who did these bad things. But you know what?  God still loves him and wants him to do good.  But he disobeyed God and did terrible things.'   'Why?' Emma asked.

Diana was silent for a moment, and then offered the best answer she could: 'Because his heart was full of hate, but God wants it to be a heart of love.'

Emma asked her mother: 'Will God change his heart? Can God change it to a heart of love?' 'We can pray for that sweetheart,' Diana said.  'We can pray that God changes his heart.'"

When Diana Butler Bass shared this story later in a sermon, afterward a parishioner grabbed her arm and said, "I don't want to forgive. I'm angry. I want to kill Osama bin Laden." While this parishioner's honesty was refreshing, her theology was deeply disturbing.

Praying for our enemies is central to our Christian life. Osama bin Laden, whatever horrible things he did, was a human being. The Bible tells us that all people are created in God's image and loved by God. Above all else, as Christians we forgive and we trust God to handle the rest.

To mark the fifteenth anniversary of the attacks of September 11, St. Andrew's in a spirit of solidarity and humility, is hosting a blood drive.  The decision to hold a blood drive at church on this day was not coincidental, it was deliberate. On a day we associate with death, grief, and loss - at this church we acknowledge all of those things.

But the Christian story reminds us that death and alienation are never the end. Death is only a prerequisite for a resurrection. So today this church, is practicing resurrection - we are offering a biological part of ourselves - our blood, our life - that will help someone else live.

Our response to 9/11 is not judgment, it is not political, it is courageous - because our response is resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus Christ which casts aside all death. If you want to join us in this courageous proclamation, the blood van is just outside the church door.

I conclude with an image this morning of what now is in place where the North Tower of the World Trade Center once stood. It is a memorial fountain, where 26,000 gallons of water are pumped every minute, as water falls over forty feet of recessed granite into darkness below. The image of the water continually falling into that dark vacancy is evocative. The water to me is an image of God's mercy, always flowing continually, no matter how dark the surface it lands upon.  God's mercy is like that flowing water, rushing into the darkness, transforming it and redeeming it, always. AMEN.

September 4, 2016

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Pentecost – Proper 18

Jeremiah 18: 1-11; Psalm 139: 1-5, 12-17; Philemon 1-21; Luke 14: 25-33

THE REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

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

His movies are violent, genre-defining, and culturally provocative. Well known for his satirical subject matter and non-linear story-telling, film director Quentin Tarantino has submitted some of the most interesting films in our culture’s recent milieu. Although his early films, including 1992’s Resevoir Dogs and his neo-noir crime film Pulp Fiction, and his martial art spaghetti western hybrid Kill Bill earned him much respect, it seems that it is Tarantino’s recent releases that have pushed the cultural envelope.

His World War II film Inglorious Bastards which tells a fictional alternate history of two plots to assisinate Germany’s political leadership received great accolades, but I feel that it was Tarantino’s highest grossing film to date, Django Unchained that has really shined a light on our nations uncomfortable history of slavery. If you have not seen it, Django Unchained is a western set in the antebellum era of the deep south, that follows a freed slave named Django (played by Jamie Foxx) who treks across the United States with a bounty hunter (played by Christoph Waltz) on a mission to liberate his wife from a cruel plantation owner.

The film offers everything you would expect in a Tarantino film, meaning there is no shortage of guns, violence, and colorful language. It is also very entertaining. Reception to the film was mixed, however. One reviewer wrote “Django Unchained is crazily entertaining, brazenly irresponsible and also ethically serious in a way that is entirely consistent with its playfulness.” Not all reviews were positive, of course.  Filmmaker Spike Lee said he would not see the film, saying “All I’m going to say is that it’s disrespectful to my ancestors.” Lee later tweeted: “American slavery was not a Sergio Leone spaghetti western.  It was a holocaust.  My ancestors are slaves.  Stolen from Africa.  I will honor them.” Aware of the controversy surrounding the film, I decided I would go see it, and I called the only person who I knew also was not working on a Monday evening who would see it with me – Bishop Doyle. And we went to the sold-out showing of Django Unchained, and were the only Anglos in the audience. Watching the film in that theater reiterated to me the reality that in the one hundred fifty years since the abolition of the slave trade, our nation’s complicated history with slavery still resonates with visceral power amongst us.

When I learned of American slavery in grade school, I remember first feeling ashamed because of the color of my skin. I later learned that not all slave owners were Caucasian like me, that there were some slave owners who were black and of Native American descent. But the majority of slave owners were white, at least that’s what my history text book taught me. 

It is when I read of slavery in the Bible though, that I become most uncomfortable. The story of the Hebrews liberation from slavery in Egypt ends with the Hebrews settling the Promised Land, who end up ironically becoming owners of slaves themselves. This biblical story of the slave becoming the slave owner is hard to swallow. But it is not just in the story of the Hebrews, slavery is in the New Testament as well: 1 Peter 2:18 reads “Slaves, accept the authority of your masters with all deference, not only those who are kind and gentle, but also those who are harsh. For it is credit to you, being aware of God, you endure pain while suffering unjustly.” This verse has been used many times by Christian slave owners to justify the practice of slavery. The damage this one verse has done in its use to justify slavery over time is unknowable, but it is palpable. We can feel it.

I am thankful that there are other places in the Bible where the issue of slavery is viewed differently. The reading from Philemon we hear today is one such testimony. It is a letter written by the Apostle Paul to a man named Philemon. In this very short letter Paul makes arrangements for the return of a runaway slave named Onesimus (a name which means “the useful one”) to his master Philemon. The letter is a diplomatic and eloquent request in which Paul strongly argues that Onesimus be unchained – freed, with no repercussions, “no longer a slave but more than a slave, a beloved brother.” Paul writes. The letter is a masterpiece of diplomacy.

It is unfortunate that we don’t know what happened to Onesimus. Was he unchained, emancipated? Or were his chains kept around his wrists, an oppressive reminder of his forsaken humanity?  We don’t know. The irony of Paul’s request to Philemon is that Paul wrote this letter not as a member of a free society, but as a prisoner, a man behind bars, a man chained. Paul was a slave to a cruel and inadequate justice system. But the truth that Paul knew then, and what he boldly compels Philemon to understand, is that in God, no one is imprisoned. No one is behind bars. With God and in God all of God’s people including Django and Onesimus, come unchained. 

It is through God, and God alone that we look to our wrists and discover that in the palm of our hand, we have always held the key to the shackles wrapped around our wrists. We just couldn’t see the key, because our hands were clenched, rather than opened. The key to our freedom is in our grasp. 

Country singer and songwriter Johnny Cash understood this so well. Himself a slave to alcohol and painkillers at different points in his life, was nevertheless aware of God’s grace. Cash speaks to the freeing nature of God in the title song from his album Unchained where he sings in a broken voice, “Oh, I am weak.  Oh I know I am in vain.  Take this weight from me, let my spirit be unchained.” AMEN.

           

 

August 28, 2016

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Pentecost – Proper 17

Sirach 10: 12-18; Psalm 112; Hebrews 13: 1-8, 15-16; Luke 14: 1, 7-14

THE REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

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

Roman Catholic priest, theologian, and author Richard Rohr writes the following:

“We are all addicts. Human beings are addictive by nature. Addiction is a modern name and description for what the biblical tradition calls “sin” and medieval Christians called “passions” or “attachments.” They both recognized that serious measures, or practices, were needed to break us out of these illusions and entrapments; in fact the New Testament calls them in some cases ‘exorcisms!’” Rohr continues: “Substance addictions are merely the most visible form of addiction, but actually we are all addicted to our own habitual way of doing anything, our own defenses, and most especially our patterned way of thinking or how we process our reality. By definition, you can never see or handle what you are addicted to. It is always hidden and disguised as something else. As Jesus did with the demon at Gerasa, someone must say, ‘What is your name?’ [because] you cannot heal what you do not first acknowledge.”

In several weeks I am going to travel to the Colorado wilderness with three other Episcopal priests and friends of mine for a week-long hike in the back-country. No electricity, no running water, no internet. I am starting to get a bit anxious. I am the first to admit, as Richard Rohr states, that I am an addict. I am addicted to my routine, I am addicted to technology, I am addicted to predictability. None of these things I will have during this time in the wilderness.

I am anxious about the trip, not because of the physicality of the journey, not about exposure to the elements, but about the drastic change in my routine this will cause. I imagine that one of the outcomes of this trip will be that it will shine a very clear light upon those things for which I rely too heavily on. Those things of mine that medieval Christians labeled attachments or passions. 

Anyone who has had an addiction or heavy reliance upon something that they have kept safely hidden in the dark, well when that is brought out into the light for all to see, well, let’s just say that it can be thoroughly humbling. What twelve step communities like AA label “sobriety” or freedom from addiction, is very similar to what the New Testament calls an exorcism. It is a literal driving out of something that controls you, whether chemical or psychological.

Any person in recovery, whether their recovery is from substance or emotional abuse, is often painful, difficult, and usually produces a lot of humility. What you will also hear from someone in recovery is that that humility they receive is a gift – it is a blessing. Humility is a usually a painful gift, it is a blessing that hurts – it stings a little. But I think that any Christian would nonetheless consider it a victory and an answered prayer every time one’s ego loses and God wins. 

The simple fact is that when we shine a light upon those things that we are addicted, well, they begin to lose their power. It often hurts, but in that wounding, there is always grace. 

I remember a time when someone confronted me with some things that were true about myself that I knew about myself, but I didn’t realize other people knew about me because I thought I did a good enough job hiding them. I didn’t.   The criticism this person offered was well stated, it was honest, and it was direct. But it was still criticism. And after the initial sting of that criticism wore off, I began to realize the blessing. And the blessing of that moment of my ego’s wounding was that I was now able to see myself from the perspective of the individual who confronted me.  And that gain of perspective that I did not have before, was very helpful. Painful, but helpful.  And in that moment, I felt a sense of grace, a grace bestowed on me because, for that moment, I was humble and open enough to receive it. So the criticism was a gift. The truth conveyed to me that day hurt, but it also set me free.

I hope this trip in a few weeks does the same. And maybe that’s why I’m a bit anxious. 

I am anxious because shining a light on our own addictions, our own pain, our own suffering, is a wonderfully scary thing to do.  Doing this makes us humble, and we realize that humility is a freeing gift that liberates us from those things which seek to possess us. 

So I am going to step into my anxiety, I am going to name it.  I hope you do to.  For what we bring into the light, God always redeems.  AMEN.

         

August 21, 2016

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Pentecost - Proper 16

Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17

THE REV. CARISSA BALDWIN-MCGINNIS

Exile is the expulsion from one’s homeland. Few in our church community may have had the experience of true political exile, and yet some may have. Even without having been dislocated from our nation of origin, most have had experiences of dislocation from our families, from our work, or even from an essential part of our self. Walter Brueggemann, Christian scholar of the Old Testament, reminds us that Jewish experience as reflected in Biblical literature is a repeated cycle of exile and return; disorientation and reorientation.

How can we recover from dislocation or fracture? How could a person - or a people - in exile put themselves back together after time apart?  Isaiah’s poetry offers a two-part roadmap from disconnection to reconnection; from exile to belonging. The sacred poetry tells us that the way to wholeness is through ritual. Two specifically are named. Feed the poor and keep the Sabbath.

The first instruction is clear and concrete. Offer food to the hungry, and you will find your own strength. Satisfy the needs of the afflicted, and you shall be like a spring of water that never fails. The remedy for disconnection and isolation is giving and caring. 

The Isaiah reading for today was addressed to Israel after it had returned from the Babylonian exile.  In that season there is said to have been disappointment as well as internal. While it might not seem obvious that feeding the poor could somehow rebuild severed ties between community members, this is Isaiah’s instruction.  Also, he says we must take our rest.

Sabbath, in Hebrew Shabbat, means rest or cessation. The habit of sacred rest is established in the book of Genesis when after birthing all of creation in six days God is said to have rested on the seventh. This divine habit is later bequeathed to YHWY’s followers in a time of exile.  Chapter 20 of the book of Exodus reads, “…the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns.” Rest as presented in Isaiah is the way to return from our expulsion. 

The closest that non-Jews in the West might come to understanding aspects of Sabbath would might be what we know as “time off” or “down time.” I remember a week of down time during my seminary studies. It was a week between spring and summer terms. I was in my home at my computer by an open window.  Just as I was appreciating the smells of spring, I heard a strange sound from the backyard.  Upon investigation I discovered my elderly neighbor had fallen from her wheelchair and could not get up. Thankfully, she was not physically injured, and I was able to return her to her chair.  I remembered wondering how long she would have been out there had I not happened to be taking my rest that day at home.

The rituals of giving to the poor and taking our rest may not be obvious solutions to social division or political exile. Yet, this is our spiritual instruction. It is through ritual that we reconnect as community or recollect ourselves when fractured or wounded.

“Rituals are the lenses through which we see our emotional connections to each other, to a culture, and to a higher power. They are symbolic expressions of our most sacred values.” These are the words of Becky Bailey who has authored a book of rituals to help parents build bonds of love with their young children. Parents and children need these rituals, because our lives move at lightning speed, and because in the natural course of development we sometimes struggle with or against each other. Bailey has offered adults and little people a way to come back together when they have gotten too far apart.

While the rituals recommended in today’s readings are specifically Jewish/Judeo-Christian, the wisdom of the instruction is universal. You can find the following in the Tao Te Ching:

Fill your bowl to the brim
And it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
And it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
And your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
And you will be their prisoner.
Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

May each of you find your personal path to serenity, and may we collectively identify our co

August 14, 2016

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Pentecost – Proper 15

Jeremiah 23: 23-29; Psalm 82; Hebrews 11: 29 – 12:2; Luke 12: 49-56

THE REV. JAMES M.L. GRACE

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

Often people will come to me with questions of faith that to them are insurmountable. Sometimes really tough questions. Questions about God and fairness. I recall one time when a person hoping I would have an answer to this particular question asked me this: “Where was the God of love and mercy during the holocaust when so many innocent people perished?” Sometimes there are questions where silence is the only is the only answer. I sensed this person wanted more, and so I shared with them a true story about how a group of rabbis imprisoned at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp asked the same question. These rabbis, along with so many others were forced to walk into the concentration camp at Auschwitz through the main entrance gate underneath a giant metal sign which read: “arbeit macht frei” translated into English: work sets you free.

These rabbis, forced to work in a camp where no amount of work would ever set them free, began a dialog amongst each other as they witnessed their brothers and sisters disappearing daily, never to be seen again. They knew, deep down, how it would end for them. The rabbi’s conversations grew in their depth and in their intensity, culminating into a trial, a trial where the rabbis placed God as the defendant. Tired of trying to defend God, tired of trying to speak for God, trying to make sense of a senseless situation, the rabbis finally threw their arms into the air and decided they would let God speak. They would let God answer the question so many of them desperately tried to do: where the hell was God in the midst of all this unjust suffering?

The trial at Auschwitz continued for several days, and the outcome of the trial was that the rabbis found God guilty on all accounts. From the perspective of a group of rabbis interned at a Nazi death camp, God was judged to be unfaithful to the promises God had made to the Hebrew people centuries ago. There was no way, in the midst of the suffering they witnessed day in and day out, that these rabbis could in their heart of hearts believe that God was loving and merciful. 

The guilty verdict issued, the rabbis back to their daily routine of forced labor and diminishing rations, the rabbis wondered what they would do next. What would they do? They and their guilty God? They did what rabbis do. They said their prayers. They prayed to God, guilty or not. Why? Why pray? I suspect they did this because deep down they knew something about God’s nature, something about who God is that many of us have forgotten. They knew that whether God was in fact guilty or not, the God to whom they prayed was a God who suffered and suffers still.

The idea of a suffering God is as wildly unpopular to us today, as it was when Jesus walked the earth some two thousand years ago. In our culture today, we associate suffering with weakness and vulnerability. We do whatever we can to avoid the sting of suffering in our life. For many of us, our childhood concept of God was a strong, confidant, authoritarian, and likely patriarchal figure in our lives. That image sustains us through our childhood, but as we grow older, that image of the strong “God” begins to crumble, and we see in its place not a confident deity, but penniless rabbi dying on a cross.

It’s embarrassing. It was during Jesus’ life for sure. When he proclaimed publically that he was God’s chosen, a messiah, people couldn’t believe him, because they looked at him and nothing about him fit their idea of what God should be. They expected a king who would be strong and mighty, who would free Israel from Roman rule. Instead they got a young rabbi who hung out with the outsiders, and who had no intention of any military insurrection against Rome.

For this self-proclaimed messiah, God’s chosen, life ended as a public relations disaster. He died a criminal’s death on a cross, his friends deserted him, and from an outsider’s perspective it appeared that his life was a failure. Except that it wasn’t. 

The book of Hebrews says this morning “[f]or the joy that was set before him Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame.” Jesus embraced suffering with joy. How many of us could say that we have ever joyfully suffered, let alone even thought it a possibility? If God is a suffering God, as the rabbis at Auschwitz knew, then that means that we no longer need to be afraid of the inevitable suffering we encounter in our lives. 

The gift of suffering is that our suffering connects us to God in ways words simply cannot describe. I know this to be factually true because I have heard from so many people in hospital rooms, assisted living homes, and on the streets who clearly are suffering, and yet they tell me they are blessed. And they tell me they know God is with them. It is the dying, the sick, the homeless, who become our saints, our icons, pointing out to us through their suffering that they are connected to God in a way our culture of acquisition, leisure, and ownership cannot and will not ever comprehend. 

The model of the life of the Buddha and the life of Jesus was to turn toward, not way from, suffering. The closer we come to it, the more we are convinced that we are loved with a love that is more dependable than even our own, prized more highly than ever we could prize ourselves, so that like Jesus we can be full of joy, strongly invulnerable in the midst of our vulnerability. 

People still come to me with questions about God that honestly are unanswerable. I admit that me explanation that “God suffers, too” is not very helpful to a person undergoing a crisis. Or is it?  For the rabbis at Auschwitz, it was enough for them to say that even though God was guilty, they never doubted God’s presence with them. That’s why they prayed after the trial.  For those rabbis, it was God’s suffering alongside them that preserved their faith.

This is not a wildly popular message, but neither is what we hear from the Bible today. These are hard, difficult truths to receive. And yet for any of us who has walked through the dark night of the soul, we know this is true. Through God’s strength, not ours, we can turn our faces towards suffering, we can befriend it, invite into our lives rather than push it away. 

Fear not.  God walks with you, suffers beside you, and carries you through darkness into light.  AMEN.

August 7, 2016

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Pentecost – Proper 14

Genesis 15: 1-6; Psalm 33: 12-22; Hebrews 11: 1-3, 8-16; Luke 12: 32-40

THE REV JAMES M.L. GRACE

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

About a year ago I woke up around 1 AM in Colorado, climbed out of bed, put my hiking boots on, a backpack, and a headlamp, walked out to the car, and drove to the trailhead for Long’s Peak in the Rocky Mountain National Park. I arrived at about 2:30, and started a gradual hike in the darkness, with the light of my headlamp to guide me along the forest trail.  It was cool, and quiet the way the world is early in the morning. By the time the sun rose, I was above the tree line and could gaze across the horizon for miles, looking out at other mountains, the city of Denver far below. 

As the sun rose, the winds started to pick up, and began blowing very hard. Soon the speed of the wind became so strong as make my two hundred pound body feel unstable, and it became obvious to me that I needed to turn around. Which I did – but it was hard. I swallowed my summit fever, and began walking down the trail, disappointed that I was unable to make it to the top. My feet began to hurt, which probably had something to do with the fact that my hiking boots were nearly twenty five years old. When I arrived back at the car, I took of my hiking boots, looked at my bruised feet, felt the tiredness and pain in my legs, and felt – disappointed. Something I had planned to do, and hoped I would accomplish, I was unable to do.

Last week, back in Colorado, I tried the same hike again. I woke up at 1 AM in the morning, drove to the Long’s Peak trailhead, attached my headlamp, turned it on, and began walking. By the time the sun rose, again I found myself above the tree line, gazing across the horizon before me. Beneath me was a blanket of white clouds extending as far as my eye could see, with the occasional mountain peak piercing through. It was quiet and beautiful.  Fortunately, there was no wind, and so I pressed onward from the point where I had turned back the year before. At this point the climb became physically very difficult, as I was now around 13,500 feet. If I had a nickel for every time I thought to myself “There is no way I can do this, this is stupid, I need to turn around” I would probably be a millionaire. It perhaps was not helpful for me to read the warning sign at this point on the trail which said: “this trail requires scrambling on exposed narrow ledges, loose rock, and steep slabs. A slip, trip, or fall, could be fatal.  Rescue is difficult and may take hours or days.” Not exactly a pep rally: “you’re almost there!  You can do it!”

My hike to the top of this challenging mountain became a prayer, not of words, but of steps. I found myself stopping, frequently, as I approached 14,000 feet. At each stop I would pray sometimes with a breath, sometimes with a thought, or sometimes with just another step higher. The journey became for me one of faith, a prayer each time my hand touched a rock to climb higher, each time my boot pushed upward. Finally I made it to the top of Long’s Peak, around 9 AM. You can get a really good cell phone signal there, and if you have really good eyesight, you can perceive the curvature of the earth’s horizon below. Upon the top of the mountain I felt humbled, small, and grateful.

While making the careful journey back down, careful not slip or slide on the rocks and boulders below, an older man, let’s call him sixty quickly darted from behind me and passed me down the trail.  He stopped, in front of me, and turned around and asked this question? “What time did you start your hike this morning?” he asked. “Oh, probably around 2 AM, I said.” He smiled, and the expression on his face suggested he wanted me to ask him what time he started his hike.  So I asked him, “What time did you start?” He said, with a smile, “6:15 this morning, about four hours ago. I guess we all have different paces.” I smiled, uncomfortably, and made the kind of sound you make when you are vaguely certain someone just insulted you, but you’re so high up you don’t really care, which is “whhhhh.”  The man continued to trot down the hill, like a mountain goat, and disappeared around the rocky bend. I remember thinking to myself, I just met an angel. 

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” writes the author of the book of Hebrews. As much as I felt my journey to the top of that mountain was a journey of faith, I would argue that a more true expression of a faith journey was my first attempt, where I did not reach the top. That first attempt, the one where I failed to summit, that was more indicative of the life of faith. The author of Hebrews reminds us that Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac, died in faith without seeing with their own eyes, the fulfillment of God’s promises to them. Abraham was promised he would have as many descendants as there are grains of sand by the sea shore, and that did happen, but well after he died. Moses, chosen by God to lead the people of Israel to a new land, was forbidden by God to enter it.  

We are all promised the top of the mountain, but that doesn’t mean we are promised it in our lifetime. Faith is complicated – the results of faith do not happen when we would like, and they are not beholden to our schedules. 

I think my experience in faith is probably somewhat similar to what you have thought or experienced in your own life.  For me, I have experienced a lot of uncertainty in my life. I think I have experienced enough uncertainty, that I prefer it to being certain about anything. I view my uncertainty as a blessing, a gift. Too many people, I imagine, believe otherwise.  Much of what passes for Christianity at least in America is this absolute certainty that we are right and that God is on our side.  Is God?

So, if you are uncertain, know you are in good company, for so was Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Moses. For faith to thrive, it needs uncertainty to grow. Uncertainty is the pitre dish where all good faith grows. That’s what gives faith energy, that’s what makes it vital, that is what makes it alive. 

As a Christian priest, I admit that I am not certain of very much. Certainty doesn’t really interest me. I was never certain I could reach the top of that mountain. It was the faith; it was the uncertainty that compelled me on a prayerful journey, step by step, that ended by God’s grace, and a whole lot of Powerade, Cliff Bars and water, at the top. I surrender my certainty about God, because that is something my small, feeble mind, will never achieve.  What I have in my convoluted, imperfect amalgam of faith and uncertainty, is to me, of much more value. 

Presbyterian priest, author, and memoirist Frederick Buechner writes that our uncertainties “are the ants in the pants of our faith.” My prayer for all of us is that we see God’s beauty reflected back to us in our doubts, and in our faith. That we me know and trust God when we are permitted to the top of the mountain, and that we know God more intimately when we our path to the top is blocked. For God is in all things: certainty, uncertainty, faith, and doubt. At the beginning, and at the end. AMEN.

July 31, 2016

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Pentecost Proper – 13

Luke 12:13-21

THE REV. CARISSA BALDWIN-MCGINNIS

In August of 2014 Roxanne Roberts wrote an article for the Style section of the New York Times titled, “Why the super-rich aren’t leaving much of their fortunes to their kids.”  In the article the popular music artist, Sting, is reported to be leaving little of his $300 million fortune to his five kids. Bill and Melinda Gates are said to have a plan to leave a mere $10 million to each of their three children.  This does not sound meager to us, but it is a small slice of the Gates’ total worth of $76 billion. Gloria Vanderbilt at that time had designated not one penny for her son, Anderson Cooper.  And Warren Buffet and his wife were quoted as follows:  “[T]he perfect amount to leave children is ‘enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing.’”

The article highlighted the fear that these parents have had of leaving their children so much money that they become impotent or incapacitated. A prevailing theme in their remarks was a concern that their children might not live up to the American ethic of hard work.  For people of faith we might express our concern as not wanting to deprive our children of seeking their spiritual purpose. This is what Parker Palmer calls “the birthright gift of self,” or whatFrederick Buechner describes as the journey to "the place where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need." The heart of the concern expressed by these exceptionally wealthy parents was one about vocation and formation of character.

In Luke’s gospel today, a man comes to Jesus with his own concern about inheritance. “Hey, Jesus!  Tell my brother to share the inheritance with me.” Jesus refuses to be seduced into playing the role of public arbitrator, and instantly proves himself to be instead the judge of the heart. “Watch your greed,” he warns. Jesus then tells the parable we all know by heart about the man whose crops were so successful that he pledged to build new barns to preserve his goods as if that might  somehow preserve his life.  But barns of any size can burn. Food stores can be spoiled. Wine can go sour. You and I might die before we can manage to eat everything in the refrigerator, freezer and pantry. There is no immunization from worry, and there is no immunization from death.

The question that preachers take up time and again related to this parable is this. Is Jesus teaching us about the goods and the stuff? Or is he teaching us about the attachment to the goods and the stuff? Most likely he teaches us about both. But the attachment can be as paralyzing as maintaining the stuff. The Venerable Zen Master Miao Tsan helps to make this clear in his recent book, living truth: the path of light.  When we identify a certain thing or worldview as our security, we form attachments to those versions of reality in a way that our minds become less flexible. He explains it this way.  People in one country may think they have the right to govern a particular piece of land outside their legal border.  People in a neighboring country may also feel they have the same entitlement. The danger is that war can erupt between the countries over the piece of disputed land, even if neither country really needs it. The Zen master writes, “The desire for happiness is universal, but it cannot be obtained through external means.”

When we hear Jesus’ words, we can see a certain pattern. Focus on earthly treasures for the self has an inflowing direction. Focus on being “rich toward God” has an outgoing direction. It is as if we are told to spend less time pulling all of creation unto ourselves, and more time pushing our all toward God. That is the purpose and nature of zakat, tzedakah, the tithe, the collection plate, and the ancient Jewish tradition of leaving a corner of the field from which the poor may glean and feed.

A living example that I will never forget came in a Bill Moyers interview of Farmer Worker Organizer, Baldemar Velasquez, in 2013.  Velasquez is a career-long organizer of migrant farm workers in the U.S. Toward the end of the interview, Moyers inquired if it were true that Velasquez had no pension; no retirement plan. Velasquez non-anxiously confirmed. As Moyers sat stunned, Velasquez stated the profoundly obvious. “No, I don’t.  And neither do the farm workers.” This kind of faithfulness and detachment is almost inconceivable in our culture.

Our effort as Jesus teaches should not go toward constantly approximating our life savings and sources of earthly security, but rather toward unceasingly approximating the one who in the book of Acts is said to know everyone’s heart.

The goal, brothers and sisters, is not the barn. The goal is to be rich toward God.

July 24, 2016

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Pentecost Proper - 12

Colossians 2:6-19

THE REV. CARISSA BALDWIN-MCGINNIS

Deep.
Deep in the center.
Deep in the center of the universe.
Deep in the center of the Universe is the Truth.
Deep in the center of the Universe is the Truth.  The Truth is sometimes silent.
Deep in the center of the Universe is the Truth.  The Truth is sometimes silent, and the Truth is in you.

Frederick Buechner wrote, “…you do not just live in a world but a world lives in you.  You are a world.”  He was writing about those of us who preach and those of us who listen to preaching.  We bring the whole world of our being to the speaking and to the listening.  To find sacred truth, he teaches, the preacher must preach out of their totality, and the hearer must listen from the depths of their full life and spirit.

Studying the letter to Colossians is one occasion in which deep, soulful listening across the chasm of time and space is required, because in it is depicted the mystery the meaning of Christ in one of the most powerful ways of all Biblical offering.

In this letter we hear told of the total collision between a justice moment with the Jesus moment, out of which is born the theological concepts of cosmic justice and also a cosmic Christ.  Today we hear about a Christ whom we receive and in whom we can root and build up our lives.  We hear about a Christ in whom we can come to fullness.  And we hear of a God “who is the head over every ruler and authority.”

This is not a Christ outside the world but in the world.  This is a Christ who is said to have been transformed into everything we despise about ourselves and others.  This is the Christform that supplanted the body, Jesus, somehow taking the form of all that we consider disgusting and then being nailed to the cross.  The God of Colossians displaces Jesus from the cross and replaces with human wretchedness in a way that conjures up the flood story of Moses and the arc.  The letter to the Colossians upholds that in nailing our trespasses to the cross, somehow God has defeated corruption at a cosmic level and for all time.

What does it mean to come here and be together against the backdrop of that kind of cosmic power and truth?  What does it mean to read the Bible, or to be the preacher, or to sit in the pews and for a few minutes be the listener?  Buechner would say that this is the act of letting our life experiences intermingle in overt and also completely hidden ways.  We come to church both guarded and entirely vulnerable.  We control what we share, but we bring all of who we are.  It is not possible to leave part of oneself at home.  We gather together in human form, messy, political, and yet in the theology of Colossians, completely well.

Deitrich Bonhoefferwrote that “In the presenceof a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner.”  These are the words of a man whose faith and world lens were very ‘Colossian.’  For him, the justice moment and the Jesus moment were one.

It is out of this cosmic collision, according to the letter, that we can grow a growth that is from God.  It is out of this cosmic Christ that we can be reconciled to ourselves, meaning we can remove even the divisions we drive into our own psyche, heart or mind.  We hate our bodies.  We are ashamed of our children.  We commit adultery.  We commit murder.  In the face of the cosmic Christ, even these sorts of divisions, offenses and traumas are inconsequentially superficial.

A wise and proven church leader said to me this week, “Evangelism is simple.  It is God present.”  The God from today’s reading is the God of mercy and forgiveness, a God said to have disarmed corrupt rulers and authorities in a way that has implication for all time.

Deep at the center of history was a moment of judgment that should have suspended injustice for all time.  It cannot be catalogued with power enough to do it service.  It might only be conveyed in poetry or more certainly depicted by silence.  As Fredrich Buechner said, “Truth itself cannot finally be understood but only experienced.”   And we experience it in community, in solitude and in public life.

Beuchner also asked rhetorically: “What is truth?” and he responded to his own question, “ Life is truth, the life of the world, your own life, and the life inside the world you are.”

Deep in the center of the Universe is the Truth.  The Truth is sometimes silent, and the Truth is in you.
Deep in the center of the Universe is the Truth.  And the Truth is sometimes silent.
Deep in the center of the Universe is the Truth.
Deep in the center of the universe.
Deep in the center.
Deep.

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.