April 18, 2021

The Third Sunday of Easter

1 John 3:1-7 | Psalm 4 | Luke 24:36b-48

The Rev. Bradley Varnell

In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus spends a good amount of time showing his disciples that he’s not a ghost but is actually a real person -  in the flesh! Important to this Jesus offers his hands and his feet to his disciples; he shows them the wounds of the cross which remain after his resurrection. It is those wounds which prove that he really is alive. Christian art since the very beginning has followed the witness of Scripture and almost always portrays the risen Jesus with the marks of his crucifixion. The calling card of the Risen Lord, we can say, is the marks of his death.

The fact that the Risen Lord keeps the wound in his side and the nail marks in his hands and feet tells us a lot about what resurrection isn’t and what it is. Resurrection isn’t erasure. The Risen Jesus isn’t washed of the marks of his crucifixion; he bears them in his resurrected body and will bear them for all time. The resurrection doesn’t undo the past, it transforms it – hallowing it, sanctifying it, redeeming it. The wounds of death are now signs of life, evidence not of death’s power to end, but of the depths to which God’s love will go for us.

1 John tells us that we have become children of God, adopted by him. We have been joined not into our own relationship with God, but Jesus’. We stand where Jesus stands, sharing his relationship with the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. Because we have been adopted by God, made a part of Jesus, so the author of 1 John says, at our resurrection we will be like Jesus. God has adopted us, and God will give to us the same resurrection which he has given our Lord. So too, our wounds, our scars will not be erased, but they will be transformed. We will not bear them as signs of sin’s power or death’s touch, but as tokens of God’s incredible power to turn all things to good. 

This isn’t the same thing as saying, “everything happens for a reason,” or “God’s got a plan.”  In a world of sin and evil not everything happens for a reason – sometimes evil and sin just happen. Horrors are committed, hurts inflicted. God does have a plan, but that plan doesn’t mean that everything that happens to us or our world is God’s will. To know God’s will, we must look at Scripture – and from beginning to end God’s will is for life! For our flourishing and our joy! God’s plan in the face of a world of sin and evil is resurrection – God will, in some way, take everything that has happened to us, take all our scars and marks, and knit them into new life.

I don’t quite know how that will work. There are some things in our individual pasts and in our collective, communal pasts that are just evil, that are reprehensible, where no good can be found. Luckily none of us have to know exactly what our future will look like, we are simply called to trust that we will be like Jesus, with even our past resurrected! The good news of the resurrection, in part at least, is the good news that nothing is lost to God. Nothing is left out of the realm of God’s redeeming, resurrecting power.

The other bit of good news of the resurrection is that we don’t have to wait until our deaths to begin living in its power. Jesus appears among his disciples and shares his life with them, he offers them his peace, and he continues to share his life and peace with us today. In our baptism we are baptized into Jesus’ death and resurrection, in the Eucharist we are fed the very life of Jesus, equipped by God’s grace to live the resurrected life now! We are invited today and every day to wade deeper into the life which God has given us through his Son. That’s why we gather for worship – to become a people who live not as people bound for death, but as people who have been given new life! Slowly but surely even now, on this side of death, we can begin to see the way in which God’s Spirit touches our pain, our wounds, our sin. Slowly but surely, we can begin to see little moments when resurrection bubbles up in our life, transforming our shames, our hurt into tokens of God’s redeeming power.

As we share in communion in the next few minutes, may we all receive it not just as a religious rite, but as gift of God’s transforming power. May we share in the body of Christ and be empowered to be just a little more like him. May we accept the presence of the wounded and resurrected Jesus in the Eucharist, and in turn offer him our own wounds to be touched, healed, and filled with his resurrected life. Amen.  

April 3, 2021

Easter Vigil

The Rev. Canon Joann Saylors

Mark 16:1-8

“Alarmed.”[i] “Frightened.”[ii] “Taken aback, astonished.”[iii] “Startled.”[iv]

That’s how various translations describe the women’s reaction to the young man they found waiting for them inside Jesus’ tomb.

It had been a task that was ordinary, domestic. I imagine the women as they awoke that third day before sunrise. Maybe they awoke without immediately remembering what was ahead of them. It’s possible that their first waking seconds were full of blissful ignorance, only to be followed by the heart-rending realization of what had happened and what they had to do. They gathered up their bundles, carefully prepared with the spices they had purchased, and set off together for the tomb. We don’t know how far they had to walk, or what they were thinking as they made their way, but surely they approached the tomb with growing dread and sorrow. They knew they would see the lifeless body of their beloved teacher, and they knew how painful it would be to touch his cold flesh, dress his wounds, and make him ready for proper burial. They’d done it for others in the past.

The women were ready for their heartbreaking and ordinary act of love, at least as ready as one can be. They were looking into the face of death, expecting it, preparing for it, ritually acknowledging it.  If anyone still couldn’t quite believe Jesus was gone, this painful but familiar act, customarily performed by members of the family, would settle it. Physical contact makes the reality of death inescapable. Their task was difficult, but it was, at its heart, ordinary. People die all the time, and we are constantly confronted with it. Death itself is not unbelievable, even when we are surprised by its timing. Death is all too real and all too present in our lives and the lives of our communities. We have come to know this, in the past year more than ever.

But the first sign that a new reality had subverted the women’s ordinary expectations came when they found that the stone blocking the entrance to the tomb had been rolled away. That was the moment when grief merged with fear, as it implied that the tomb had been targeted by grave robbers, or vandals, who might still be inside. As in so many places now and then, a small group of women out alone would worry about their safety.  We can only imagine what thoughts raced through their minds at the unexpected jolt of finding the tomb open. Then, fearfully and hesitantly entering it, the added shocks of encountering a young man in a white robe sitting there and finding Jesus’ body gone. Astonished, indeed.

The young man tried to reassure them. “Don’t be alarmed. Jesus isn’t here. He has risen! If you convince the disciples and Peter to go to Galilee, you will see him there. Just like he told you.”

That was clearly not as reassuring as the young man had hoped, because their emotions were amped up even further. The translations say it in different ways: they were seized by “terror and amazement.”[v] “Trembling and bewildered.”[vi] “Stunned.”[vii] “Overcome with terror and dread.”[viii]

That, my sisters and brothers, is absolutely the right response. Jesus had told them. As one New Testament scholar notes, “The resurrection was everything these women had ever hoped it would be, everything Jesus had said it would be.” But, he adds, “Sometimes the scariest thing in the world is to believe that your deepest, most secret hopes might actually be possible.”[ix]

Sometimes hope opens a door that you thought was long since closed. You’ve been disappointed or heartbroken; we all have. And maybe you worked through it, came to terms with it, forgave or let go, and put it behind you. There’s relief, even peace, in that. It’s a gift not to have to think about it anymore. So after someone or something breaks your heart, the possibility of opening yourself up to it happening again is scary. Vulnerability can be terrifying. Maybe Shakespeare was wrong – better not to love than to love and lose again.

When the one they all thought was the Messiah was tortured, crucified, and killed, the dream died, too. Perhaps that added to the familiarity of the task the women had come to do. For a people who had become used to being defeated and ruled by others, maybe disappointment itself had started to feel ordinary, something manageable. They had taken a chance. They had let themselves believe that the coming of their messiah was different, only to have their dreams dashed. Could it really be safe to hope again? Or was the possibility that Jesus was right, that everything had changed too bewildering and terrifying even to face, much less talk about?

They fled. And said nothing to anyone. Here ends the reading. And almost certainly Mark’s Gospel. We are left to consider their fear and vulnerability – and our own.

Like the women we live with the question of what comes next. Do we truly understand that Jesus’ resurrection was life-changing? World-changing? What do we do with that? Are we appropriately stunned by the depth of God’s love for us and for creation? Are we prepared to live with the fear of being vulnerable, naked before God, so that God can transform us? Will we recognize that our own grasping at the safety of hopes we can control blinds us to the chaotic and beautiful power of this mystery?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer coined the term “cheap grace” to define the grace we bestow upon ourselves, a way of taming the danger of what God offers us and what God asks of us. God’s grace is not cheap and it is not easily absorbed. We should be astonished and taken aback. Because it is when we believe that our deepest and secret hopes are truly made possible, when we are most bewildered, that we are most like those first followers of Jesus. It is when we are ready to become more like Jesus. And it is when we are equipped to see and be the light of Christ in a world that so often seems unremittingly dark.

It is fitting that our Easter Vigil liturgy began in darkness. When we come to Easter services on Sunday morning, the world is already light again. We can see spring all around us. We know the story ends joyfully. But we started here tonight, before all of that, in darkness drawn closer to the women in their terror and bewilderment at this holy Paschal mystery. But like the women, we didn’t stay there. We have also drawn closer to their courageous hope.

While Mark’s Gospel says that the women told no one, we know they did – or how else would we know the story? That update was included by the subsequent Gospel writers and even added to Mark’s later. The women overcame their fear. Just as the Pascal candle begins to light the path through the darkness, just as the sunrise begins to chase away the night, hope began to dawn upon the women. “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”[x] As their incredible story was told and retold, eventually the light of Christ shone brightly enough to let people believe it could drive away darkness and even death. On this night we hear anew the same story of God’s saving love, and light and alleluias burst forth to shine upon us – and the whole world. All of creation sings along.

Fear of the Lord may be the beginning of wisdom[xi], but perfect love casts out fear.[xii] And we have experienced perfect love in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God. So now our choice is what we do with this Good News. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. How, then, shall we live?

May we be blessed by God interrupting our ordinary and difficult tasks to shatter our expectations. May we keep meeting Jesus in Galilee. And may we share our incredible story with the world. Happy Easter. Alleluia and amen.

[i] NRSV, NIV.

[ii] 21st Century KJV.

[iii] The Message.

[iv] CEB.

[v] NRSV.

[vi] NIV.

[vii] The Message.

[viii] CEB.

[ix] Paul Wheatley, “Fear at the Resurrection,” https://livingchurch.org/covenant/2018/04/03/fear-at-the-resurrection/ (accessed March 31, 2021).

[x] John 1:5 (NRSV).

[xi] Proverbs 9:10 (NRSV).

[xii] 1 John 4:18 (NRSV).

April 2, 2021

Good Friday

Isaiah 52:13-53:12; Ps 22 ; John 18:1-19:42

The Rev. Bradley Varnell

“For this I was born, and for this I have come into the word: to bear witness to the truth.”

The passion of Jesus is nothing if it not a great, cosmic moment of truth telling. Earlier on in John, in chapter 12, Jesus speaks of his passion, his hour, and says “now is the judgement of the world…” In his crucifixion Jesus judges the world. Now, of course, as our story goes those who put Jesus on the cross, Pilate, the Romans, the Judean authorities, are the ones who seem to judge Jesus. They find him to be a political threat, a potential disturber of the peace. Passover is soon to occur, Jerusalem has swelled in size with pilgrims from all over the known world, and the folks in charge cannot have some would-be Messiah stoking flames of insurrection. Better for one man to perish than the entire nation.

So Jesus is crucified. Raised up with bandits and revolutionaries to die the kind of death so horrible that it wasn’t spoken of my polite, well-to-do Romans. Crucifixion was a way to make an example of someone. To show others what happened when you dared to make waves again Rome’s power. Crucifixion showed the judgement of Rome. Keep in mind that judgement is, primarily, about truth telling. A judgement is a determination. When we judge we say “this is how things are.” Rome, in crucifying Jesus, says “this is how things are: we are in charge. We are in power.” The religious authorities, in offering Jesus to the Romans say “this is how things are: this man is no all-powerful messiah.” They judge Jesus.

But here, on the cross, Jesus also judges. Here, on the cross, Jesus passes judgement on the entire world. Here, on the cross, Jesus Christ – the Word of God made flesh, God in human form – reveals the way things are: humanity is so enmeshed in sin and evil, so caught up with the forces of death, that God himself is killed. Remember all the way back in John chapter 1 John speaks about Jesus’ coming into the world. John writes “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” Jesus is the light of the World who shows us just how dark our world is – especially on the cross. On this cross we see how dark things really are. We see how far humanity will go to keep power, order, “peace” in place. We see how the innocent must die for the Kings of the World to stay firmly placed on their thrones. But the cross reveals more: not only is Jesus condemned by an unjust government, he is betrayed by his fellow countrymen, abandoned by his friends, denied by Peter, abused by the guards. At every moment in the story of Jesus’ passion we see how fickle human hearts can be! We see how the incredible diversity of ways we can fail to love.

The passion, in short, lays bare before us the reality of sin: ways of life, habits, attitudes, systems that all work together to create death – relational death, biological death, and even spiritual death. Jesus – the Word made flesh – is life itself. The word is the source of life, and to turn from the Word as humans did as soon as we could speak, is to unleash sin into the world. It is to turn to ways of existence that can only lead to death. Sin isn’t about breaking rules, sin is about living in such a way that only death can come about. The long story of Scripture is the story of sin’s infection of our world, of the way in which death has become so imbedded in God’s good creation that it is impossible to imagine existence without it. It is a testament to how deep the infection goes that we cannot think life without also thinking death. Creation was brought into being to enjoy relationship with God and to know God is to know life itself. This is the power of sin at work in us – that we die.

Jesus judges us on the cross. Jesus reveals the nature of our world. But it matters that it is Jesus that does it. If anyone else were to have died in this way they may well have exposed our sin, but they could do nothing to help us. That it is Jesus, however, means that our judge is also our physician. “The Word became flesh and lived among us.” From his birth in human history, Jesus Christ – God made man – took all that is ours and made it his own. Jesus united in himself God and humanity, Jesus brought us closer to God than we could ever imagine. The power and love and light of God pulsated through Jesus’ body and into our own. The Word stooped down to humanity, so that he might raise us up to God! What matters is that on the cross our judge is Jesus, the Word, God. God encounters death on the cross – relational death, biological death, and even spiritual death – and death could not contain him. The life of God bursts through to the other side of death. On Easter, Jesus Christ moves beyond death, beyond life afflicted with death into the life which God created all humanity for: the fullness of life with God, life that simply cannot be stopped by death.

The cross is our salvation because the cross has put death to death. The cross has opened for us a path from this life – with its sin and suffering – to life with God, to the promise of new life, recreated life. Because of Jesus, nothing is ever lost to death. Because of Jesus, everything that is, everything that God has created has a future.

Just today I was reading something which a professor of mine from seminary, Dr. Kavin Rowe, wrote that just gob smacked me. He writes, “there is no place in human existence where crucifixion does not apply and no place where resurrection is not possible.”  The death which Jesus meets on the cross is all around us in some way, maybe hidden, maybe not. The death of relationship, of our bodies, of our spirits. But because of Jesus, no death we meet, no death we encounter, no death which will ever touch us is the end. As sure as death surrounds us, so does resurrection. Amen.  

April 4, 2021

Easter Day

Acts 10: 34-43; Psalm 118: 1-2, 14-24; John 20: 1 - 18

The Rev. James M. L. Grace

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

In John’s Gospel we all return to Jesus’ tomb early on Easter morning.  We are there, in the dark, with Mary Magdalene visiting Christ’s tomb.  When she arrives, she discovers, much to her surprise that the stone had been removed from the tomb’s opening.  Upon seeing this, she leaves the tomb out of fear, and runs to Peter to tell him what she saw.

Then Peter runs to the tomb with another disciple, but John tells us Peter was kind of slow, and another disciple beat him to the tomb.  They confirm Mary’s description of the empty tomb, they see the linen which once wrapped the body of Jesus on the ground, and probably go into panic mode – thinking that the  tomb had been robbed, or worse, desecrated.  The disciples go home. 

But Mary stays by herself in the tomb, she turns around, and sees Jesus.  She doesn’t recognize him, mistaking him to be a gardener, but once Jesus says her name, she responds, rabbouni, - rabbi – teacher.  And she rushes to Jesus, and holds onto him, out of love, out of want.  Jesus offers this response to her: “Mary, do not hold onto me, because I have not yet ascended.”   In other words, Jesus says “you can’t hold onto me, Mary.”  What a hard thing to hear, and what an appropriate thing for Jesus to say. 

Do not hold onto me.  If I were in her shoes, I would want to hold onto Jesus and never let go. I would never want him to leave.  I so identify with Mary here, because there are things I hold onto tightly; desperately not wanting to let go of. 

One of those things I have held tightly to was my mother, who died in 2007.  A night or two before her death, I spent an evening sitting beside her bed.  My sister was there as well.  I don’t remember what we were talking about but I remember feeling so sad.  I knew what the outcome of this was.  I was crying, I was sad because I didn’t want her to leave me. 

My sister was getting ready to go home, and as she made her way to the door, I told mom, “mom I’m going to stay here with you.”  And my mother replied, “no – go…go with your sister.”  Those were hard words for me to hear.  I didn’t want to leave with my sister – I wanted to stay with my mother.  But that is not what my mom wanted.  She had work to do – to ready herself for the new life she was going to be stepping into in a matter of days, and my clinging to her was not helpful. 

As a young boy I remember losing my mother in a grocery store, and crying feeling like I lost her forever, when in reality she was just one aisle over looking for bread.  Leaving her that night felt like that.  I didn’t want to let go of her.  But letting go is exactly what Easter is about.  Easter is about letting go of our loved ones, because we trust them to God’s care, as Mary did so beautifully on that first Easter morning. 

There is a phrase we use in the church to describe this idea of letting go.  The church calls this kind of letting go a “paschal mystery.”  A paschal mystery is the process of letting go of what we love dearly for the sake of being born anew.  It is about trusting God that even when we let go, God will be there to uphold us so that we emerge even more alive than before. 

In a few days I will preside at my older brother Randall’s funeral in a nearby cemetery.  This is another paschal mystery, another painful letting go.  It is not accidental that the burial liturgy in the Episcopal Church is an Easter liturgy, a service that proclaims and affirms our Easter hope.  And my Easter hope is simple - we will be okay, even when like Mary, we must let go of what we love, because we let go in faith.  We let go in trust because we know God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. 

When we let go, we become less burdened and less burdensome.  We become light.  Angels fly, because they take themselves lightly.   Be light to yourself and to others this Easter.  Let go.  Let God.  AMEN.

April 1, 2021

Maundy Thursday

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

The Rev. Jeffery Bohanski

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit  Amen

Good evening.  Welcome to Maundy Thursday, the first night of the Triduum, or the three days leading into Easter.  This evening I find myself compelled to tell you that my husband and I love Maundy Thursday.  Maundy Thursday is the highlight of our entire church year! And for me to be standing here talking to you as a priest who was ordained just a month and a half ago makes this night even more special to us.

Victor and I love the pageantry of this evening!  There is the foot washing, the Liturgy of the Table, the stripping of the Altar and finally the preparation of the Altar of Repose.  Unfortunately, due to Covid restrictions we will not be washing feet nor will we have an altar of Repose this year.  But for us, that’s okay.  Because their return next year will make next year’s Maundy Thursday even more special.  Or perhaps, this year we can wash feet and have our Altar of Repose in a different way this year.

Victor and I also love the name we give this service.  Maundy Thursday.  You see, we grew up Roman Catholic.  Our families are accustomed to calling this evening’s celebration, Holy Thursday.  We often find ourselves explaining why we Episcopalians call this evening Maundy Thursday.  We tell people:

Maundy Thursday.  The word Maundy comes from the Latin word mandatum which is translated as command or perhaps mandate.  So I guess one could call this evening Mandate Thursday.

In this evening’s reading we hear God, Paul and Jesus giving mandates.

First, in Exodus we heard God commanding Moses and Aaron how and when Passover is to be celebrated.  For Passover is the night when God passed over the Israelites as God struck the land of Egypt with a plague. A plague which struck down every firstborn, human and animal, in the land of Egypt. That night, God saved Israel.

In the Epistle this evening, we heard Paul remind the Corinthians how, on the night before Jesus was betrayed, he took bread, broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you.” Paul goes on to say that after taking the bread, Jesus took the cup and said, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, do this, as oft as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”  Paul is commanding the Corinthians to celebrate Eucharist.

In John’s account of the Last Supper, we heard how Jesus showed his disciples how to be servant leaders.  Jesus poured water into a basin and washed the disciples’ feet.  When he was complete, Jesus told them he had done this as an example of how they will need to do the same.  Jesus added that if they were to lead as he led, they must serve. For it is in serving as Jesus had served that night that people would know that they were his disciples because people would see they love one another. 

Victor and I love the pageantry, the meaning of the word Maundy and the readings of the night.  But what makes Maundy Thursday the highlight of the church calendar for us is the vigil.  It’s the quiet waiting and the praying together that makes Maundy Thursday special for us. 

You see, it was on Maundy Thursday, twenty-six years ago, that Victor and I were healed.  Yep, we were healed.  We believe we experienced a bonified healing miracle.  We even have a couple’s counselor confirm that.

That year Victor and I found ourselves at the end of what we call our year from hell.  It was during the previous year that Victor’s father and best friend both died within two weeks of each other. Victor’s father died from an unexpected heart attack and his friend died from complications of AIDS.  In addition, that year, we knew of 22 other people dying. My Aunt Grace was included in that number. 

As one might expect, we found ourselves fighting a lot that year.  We disagreed on everything.  It got to the point where we were asking ourselves if it would be better off if we separated and went our own ways.  Thankfully, Victor had found a relationship counselor for us and I reluctantly agreed to attend the counseling sessions. 

Our faith has always been very important to each of us.  At the time, Victor and I belonged to Dignity Houston.  Dignity is the Roman Catholic counterpart to Integrity.  That year I found myself in charge of decorating the community worship space.  The space was actually a few rooms in a part of a strip mall on Yale Street.  I asked Victor for his help and he agreed.  We both decided to set our grievances aside during the Triduum in order to complete our decorating tasks.

After the Maundy Thursday Service, no one in our community felt comfortable leaving the Eucharist in our strip mall chapel.  So, Victor and I volunteered to bring the Sacrament into our home and return it for the Good Friday Services the next day.  

We set the Sacrament on our fireplace mantel, lit a candle to keep watch and we went to bed.  At about 3:00 a.m. we both woke up feeling drawn to the living room.  Together we sat in silence for a time.  Eventually we began to speak and to listen to each other.  As we spoke, we found all the bitterness, all the anger and frustration melt away.  We instinctively began using the tools of good communication skills we learned in our counseling sessions.  We found a renewed sense of love and peace settle in our home.  As time passed, we learned that not all our problems had been erased but we discovered we each had a new strength and peace that made our problems easier to deal with. 

A few months later our counselor told us that she felt we no longer needed her services.  She told us that when she first met us, she thought we would not make it. She wondered now what had changed.  We told her we had brought Jesus back into our home.  That was what had changed.

Victor and I often reflect back on those days and we are thankful.  Not a Maundy Thursday goes by where we don’t spend some time together in prayer.

As I’ve mentioned earlier, this year we are not going to be washing feet.  Perhaps we could demonstrate Jesus’ mandate for serving one another by simply wearing our masks in public.  I believe when we wear our masks, we show those around us we care and are concerned for their health.  We show we are trying to keep our siblings of God healthy.  Thankfully, I’m fully vaccinated but I know I can still carry the COVID-19 virus.  I wear my mask in public to keep others safe just in case I am infected and I’m unaware of it.

This evening, I invite you to find a place to have a quiet vigil of your own.  I invite you to sit quietly and ask Jesus to come and reside in your heart and home.   I invite you to reread these scriptures we heard this evening.  I invite us all to ponder the image of Jesus washing his disciples feet.  Notice that Judas was still one of the disciples during the foot washing.  That evening Jesus demonstrated love and a desire to cleanse everyone, even his betrayer.  I invite us this night to ponder who Jesus calls us to love and serve like Jesus served.  Served even Judas.

March 29, 2021

Tenebrae: Nocturn One

Lamentations 1: 1-14

The Rev. Jeffrey Bohanski

When I was a freshman in college, in what now seems a century ago, I attended a Wednesday night Bible study.  The program was led by the much-loved campus minister, Father Larry Burger.  Our group was made up of students from the university and a few Roman Catholic nuns from a nearby convent.  One particular Bible study in Lent stands out vividly in my memory.

That memorable evening we were having a discussion about a particular psalm.  The psalm number I don’t remember, but I remember telling the group that I didn’t like that particular psalm because I did not find it particularly uplifting.  I told the group I liked the parts of the Bible that made me feel good, made me feel happy.  It was at that point where Sister Ancelle, a nun who was well past retirement age and who was known to be kind, gentle and meek blurted out  in a not quite so kind, gentle and meek way, “That’s spoken like a young person who has not yet experienced life.”  Everyone turned their opened mouth heads to look at the kind Sister Ancelle.  With a deep breath she continued in her more usual kind tone.  She told us that in her life she had, at one time or another, felt all the words in the Psalms and in Lamentations.  She said she felt them when she entered the order, she felt them when her parents died, she felt them when she had to, under the vow of obedience, to leave one community which she loved and go to another community that needed her specific gifts of ministry.  She told us she felt these words at many other points in her life.

She went on to say that as she lived her life with these words, she became grateful to them because she noticed they gave words to her feelings.  She said she became grateful to them when she learned that Jesus used these same psalms and lamentations when he prayed while he was here on earth.  She told us that image of Jesus using these same words in his prayers that she used in her prayers brought her a closer connection to Jesus and closer to the Father.  She said she knew Jesus was with her and would always be.

As I have grown older and as I am nearing retirement, I’ve learned that Sister Ancelle was right.  These words have given words to my feelings.  I have felt not quite so alone when I’ve prayed the ancient words in Psalm 69:  “Save me, O God, for the waters have risen up to my neck.” Because I know I’m not the only one who has felt this way or will feel this way.   I have felt more comfortable with my anguish when I’ve prayed the words in Psalm 70, “You are my helper and my deliverer; O LORD, do not tarry.” because I know someone centuries ago once felt this way, wrote them down and we still use them today. 

Like Sister Ancelle, I know Jesus prayed these words.  A Christian cannot help but to read Jesus into many of the Psalms.  I know he felt every word in Lamentations on his Maundy Thursday. 

As it says in the introduction to this service on page two,  In the Service of Tenebrae, we are given an opportunity to meditate on the truth that Jesus truly was Emanuel, “God with us,” and that like us, Jesus faced the same emotional challenges that can bring us down.  Knowing Jesus used these words give me hope to make it through the times when I am down.  They give me the strength to make it to the resurrection. 

This week I invite you to join us to pray, to read and to feel these words of Scripture that Sister Ancelle and Jesus once prayed and felt.  I invite you to feel the pain of Holy Week.  I guarantee it will make Easter Day feel much more meaningful and glorious! 

March 28, 2021

Palm Sunday 

Isaiah 50: 1-4; Psalm 31: 9-16; Philippians 2:5-11; Mark 11: 1-11

The Rev. James M.L. Grace

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

 Love them or hate them, cars are part of living in Houston.  It seems that most of Houston is built around the whole idea of cars with our massive freeways which always seem to be under construction.  Hard to imagine living in a city this big without owning a car.   I am a proud owner of a fully depreciated 2012 Toyota FJ Cruiser that is dented and scratched with thousands of miles on my odometer.  I love my car. 

While cars were not around during the time of Jesus, transportation was arguably just as important as it is today.  In place of a car, horses or other animals were used for transportation.  In Jesus’ case, however, he did not ride a horse, but rather a donkey.  That might sound a little odd to you.  Why a donkey?  Donkeys are smaller animals; they do not have the strength of a horse.  Why ride a donkey if you could just as easily ride a horse?

It is like if someone offered you at no cost either a 2021 Cadillac Escalade or a 1971 Pontiac, you would probably go with the Escalade, right? 

As you might expect, there is a reason why Jesus’ mode of transportation into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday was a donkey.  And this is the reason: a donkey was a lowly animal of peace.  Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem riding a donkey was a sign of humility.  It also recalls a verse from the book of Zechariah in the Old Testament, Zechariah 9:9: which reads, “Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion!  Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem!  Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey.” 

The donkey was the preferred vehicle for the true king.  So, Jesus’ ride into Jerusalem upon a donkey was a bold political statement – everyone knew that him riding a donkey was no accident.  It was his claim as a servant king – riding into Jerusalem on a donkey to celebrate Passover.  He rode into Jerusalem from the East side, from the Mount of Olives.

 Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem was not the only one that day.  There was another.  This was a much grander entry of the Pontius Pilate, the appointed Roman governor of Jerusalem.  Pilate’s vehicle of choice was not the humble donkey, but a horse, and he rode into Jerusalem accompanied by his Roman army.  Pilate’s procession into Jerusalem was anything but humble.  Pilate likely had little interest in observing Passover. 

Rather, Pilate entered Jerusalem during Passover to instill a healthy dose of fear and intimidation to Jewish citizenry.  Pilate did not want an enthusiastic Passover celebration to stir possible insurrection against the Roman Empire, which was likely, given that Passover observed God’s deliverance of Israel from Egyptian slavery. 

Pilate’s procession had all the glitz and pageantry befitting a Roman official.  His procession was the Escalade, Jesus rode in on that ’71 Pontiac.  

I love the honesty of Jesus.  As a spiritual master, Jesus understood that there was no need for external, empty symbols of power.  He did not need a horse; he did not need an army.  He did not need any of the empty symbols of power and intimidation used by the Roman Empire.  He just needed a donkey.  And the donkey, the preferred form of transportation for a king in the line of David, was plenty.

The lesson here is obvious:  the power of God’s spirit is the greatest power in the universe.  Our conquest of each other, the conquest for wealth, all amount to very little in the end.  Although he was powerful, few remember Pilate.  For years, my father drove a 1983 Buick.  He literally had several hundred thousand miles on this car.  At some point the car became so old that the struts which supported the trunk of the car when you opened it wore out.  That was not a problem for my dad – he found a 2x4 which he could prop under the trunk to keep it open when necessary. 

Over time, the car really began to show its age.  This would later become problematic for my father when he would drive his car to work.  My father is a heart surgeon.  One day after finishing a round of surgery, he walked out of the hospital to his car which was parked in the “Physician Parking Only” section.  A tow truck was towing his car out of the parking lot when my father ran to the tow truck, trying to stop them from towing his car away. 

The tow truck driver explained to my father that only physicians could park where his car was.  My father explained that despite his car’s appearance, he was a physician, albeit one attached to a dilapidated, yet humble, vehicle.  The tow truck driver released the car and apologized for the misunderstanding.

Why drive a beat-up old Buick if you could afford something newer?  Why ride a donkey if a horse exudes more power gets you there faster?  I think the answer is humility. I think the answer is about not needing external validation.  Humility, friends, is the answer to most, if not all, our problems.  Ride on, ride on, ride on in majesty.  AMEN.

March 25, 2021

The Feast of the Annunciation

Isaiah 7:10-14; Luke 1:26-38

The Rev. Jeffrey Bohanski

The Lord be with you.

Let us pray.  Good lord, help us to remember you are with each of us.  Help us to say yes to your will.  Amen

In our homiletics classes at Iona we were taught to think about the subject we are going to preach on and ask ourselves what comes to mind about that subject.  For instance, when I think about The Feast of the Annunciation, it is easy for me to think of a Botticelli painting I once saw.  In the painting, Mary and Gabriel are alone in a small room.  Mary is on one side of the room and Gabriel is on the other.  Mary is portrayed as a white thin red headed woman.  She is wearing a red dress with a blue coat and there is a delicate gold halo around her head.   

Gabriel, on the other hand is portrayed as a scoundrel looking character crouching in the opposite corner of the room looking to me like he is ready to pounce.  Like Mary, Gabriel is white complexioned with red hair.  He is wearing a full flowing red garment that seems to be belted at his waste.   There are strong eagle like wings sprouting from his upper back.  If it was not for the thin gold halo above his head, I would not think he was an angel.  Mary has her hand up as if to stop Gabriel from speaking any further. 

Although this is a beautiful painting packed full of meaning, I don’t think it is what draws us to worship this evening on this the Feast of the Annunciation. 

I think today’s celebration is about Mary, a down to earth young, innocent girl who has the courage to trust Gabriel when he tells her “The Lord is with you.”  It’s a celebration of this same trusting young girl who said yes, to God’s plan.  You see, God’s plan was this:  God so loved his creation that God wanted to send God’s Son, God’s Word, into the world to love it and redeem it.  God wanted to show God’s creation how to love each other, how to serve each other and how to love God in the process.  All God needed for God’s plan to come about was for someone to say “yes.” Today we celebrate Mary trusting that God was with her and Mary saying yes to God’s plan. 

The Good News today is that this very important “yes” God needed was uttered by a young innocent trusting girl from a small simple town.  A town where someone would eventually ask, “Can anything good come from there?”

I believe that if God would come to a trusting young girl from a small simple town to make God’s plan come to fruition, there is hope for this simple Prius driving, gay bivocational priest like me.  I believe there is hope for us all.  You see, I believe it doesn’t matter to God which side of the border one comes from, what the color one’s skin is, one’s age or one’s weight.  It doesn’t matter to God what one’s sexual orientation is, what one’s gender is or what gender one knows one needs to transform into is.  It doesn’t matter to God which political party one belongs to or what one’s marital status is.  I believe God invites us all, like Mary, to trust that our loving God is with all God’s creation.  I believe this loving God invites us all to say “yes” to his plan to bring God’s Son, God’s love to where ever we find ourselves each day.

Like many of us, I find myself driving the streets of Houston in my daily life.  I often wonder how I can say “yes” to God’s plan when I am in traffic.  Perhaps it is by letting that driver next to me merge into my lane in front of me.  Perhaps it is simply by not blocking an intersection when I find myself stopped in heavy traffic so others can get through to cross the street.  Perhaps it’s about acknowledging the driver next to me is a child of God who is also trying to live out God’s call for him or for her.

Perhaps I can say “yes” to God’s plan of bringing God’s son into the world when I am walking down the street and I don’t cross the street when I see someone coming toward me who doesn’t look like me.  Perhaps I could say “yes” to God’s loving plan by simply saying hello to that person.  I believe by saying hello to someone I am recognizing God’s presence in that person and that God loves that person as much as God loves me.

Perhaps I can say “yes” to God’s plan to bring God’s Word, God’s love into the world when I encounter someone from the other side of the political aisle who says something I don’t agree with and give a kind response.  Perhaps I could explain my position and attempt to engage a respectful discussion.  Perhaps if I would find it impossible to have a respectful conversation, I could end it kindly, walk away and leave that person in God’s loving hands without going to social media to vent my feelings.

Today’s celebration is about what can happen when we, like Mary,  trust that God is with us and with others.  Today’s celebration is about, like with Mary, our saying yes to God’s invitation each of us has to bring God’s son, God’s Word, God’s love into the world.  This evening I ask us all to ponder what the world would look like if we all viewed ourselves and each other through the lens of God’s loving plans for God’s world that Mary saw on this day, this Annunciation Day.  Amen

March 21, 2021

The Fifth Sunday in Lent

Jeremiah 31:31-34; John 12:20-33

The Rev. Jeffrey Bohanski

In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Jesus said:  “My soul is troubled.”

These words give me hope.  These words give me peace.  These words give me comfort. 

These words of Jesus, “My soul is troubled.” gives me hope, peace and comfort because these words are words of a human Jesus.  I think it important to remember, Jesus was not only divine, but he was also human.  Recall, how a few months ago at Christmas we celebrated the Word becoming flesh, messy flesh like you and me.  Remember how we say:  “He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and was born of the Virgin Mary and became man.”  In a few days we’ll even celebrate the moment when Mary was asked to become the mother of the incarnate Word, Jesus, God made man, human.  These words, “My soul is troubled.” are the words of a human Jesus, a human like you and me.   

This past week I’ve been on Spring Break.  I’ve enjoyed the rest and solitude I was craving before the break.  The week before Spring Break when after I had completed  lesson plans, I envisioned myself floating off into a blissful break like a fully loaded cruise ship heading out to sea.

Unfortunately, that was not the way it happened.  You see, the Thursday before the break my coworkers and I found ourselves calling the parents of our face-to-face students directing them to come and pick-up their children because the school was closing the grade-level due to a possible exposure to a presumed case of COVID-19. We informed our parents that our afternoon classes and the classes of the next day, the final day before break, were going to be held 100% online and teachers were going to teach from home again.  We informed the parents in-person learning would resume the Monday after Spring Break.

One parent asked me in an email how long this year’s Spring Break would last.  It surprised me how quickly that email brought back the fears and trepidation I experienced last Spring Break when all of Houston was closed due to COVID-19.  I quickly responded to the email with my rational mind saying that the school was following district protocols that are aligned with the CDC to keep all children safe and I looked forward to seeing her child back in school the Monday after Spring Break.  That was my rational mind.

My soul was in a different place.  I found myself trapped in last year’s fears and worries.  I knew Victor and I were fully vaccinated so we would be fine.  I found myself wondering what if this was the start of something new?  What if…. What if…. What if….

That evening I read this Gospel we just heard.  I also read a commentary on it by N.T. Wright.  Wright said, and I’m paraphrasing, that when Jesus heard, some Greeks were wanting to see him, he recognized it as a sign that his hour had indeed finally come.  Human Jesus responded with a knee jerk reaction.  He responded with the words of a fleshy human like us:  “My soul is troubled.” I wonder if Jesus’ words were something more like, “Oh, good Lord, here we go!”  Unlike me who can get stuck in fear, Jesus got over his knee jerk human response quickly and remained firm with his Father, with his mission and with his conviction that God was with him and God would be with him through to the resurrection. 

So these words of Jesus, “My soul is troubled.” give me comfort.  They give me comfort because these words of Jesus show me Jesus understands my irrational fear that I experienced last week. He knows only too well what it means to be human.  They show me he is willing to walk with me as I work through my fear because his Father did the same with him.  These words give me hope and peace because as Jesus was able to be his human self with the Father, as adopted children of God through Jesus, I know we are able to do the same.  God, the Father will remain with us in all our humanity as he remained with Jesus that day. 

Life is hard.  This week I invite you to ask yourself what is making your life hard at this moment in time.  Perhaps, you are like me who struggle with fear.  Perhaps you struggle with addiction, illness, or loneliness.  Perhaps you are mourning the loss of a loved one, a loss of a dream, or a loss of a job. 

As I‘ve said earlier, a few months ago at Christmas we celebrated the Word becoming flesh, fleshy flesh, the first part of the Paschal Mystery.  Next Sunday we begin Holy Week with Palm Sunday.  It won’t be like it was before the COVID quarantine.  But together, we will walk with Jesus on the road to the cross, the second part of the Paschal Mystery.  I invite us all to bring that which makes life hard into Holy Week.  As we do, I ask each of us to remember that Jesus was fully human as well as being fully divine when he walked his path of Holy Week. 

I invite us all to remember how Jesus, being fully human and fully divine entered into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, how human and divine Jesus showed us how to be servant leaders and to share all one’s issues with the Father as Jesus did on Maundy Thursday.  I invite us all to remember how human and divine Jesus showed us all how to love, how to stand up to earthly power and how to fully give oneself in love on Good Friday.  I invite us all to remember how the human and divine Jesus died and was buried.  I invite us all to then celebrate how the new human and divine Jesus rose again on the third day.  I invite us all to trust that our hardships will one day be transformed with and through the resurrection of Jesus.

I wish everyone a blessed Holy Week.  Amen

March 14, 2021

The Fourth Sunday of Lent

John 3:14-21

The Rev. Joann Saylors

If you were to ask a random stranger to quote a Bible verse, any verse in the Bible, you’d probably get the same kinds of goofy responses the hosts of the late night shows get when they ask questions of people on the streets.  But if you instead asked them to name a Bible verse you’d have better luck.  Lots of those random strangers would come up with John 3:16. We see it in all sorts of places. Mostly not as a quote of the text but as that citation of chapter and verse. Just the name “John” followed by the number “3,” a colon and the number “16.” It appears on signs people post on their front lawns, billboards, printed on the bottom of paper cups and shopping bags.

It’s really popular in sports. Fans hold up John 3:16 signs at sporting events. Heisman Trophy winning football player Tim Tebow printed the reference in his eye black, initially in the 2009 college football national championship.[i] Tebow later claimed that "John 3 16" was Googled 94 million times during the game.[ii] He wore it most famously in 2012 at what became known as “the 3:16 game,” where Tebow threw for 316 yards in a playoff upset against the Pittsburgh Steelers. [iii] Not just football. Professional wrestler "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's marquee catchphrase ("Austin 3:16") originated as a reference to John 3:16. [iv]

On Amazon.com today, you can find books with 3:16: The Numbers of Hope, by Max Lucado or The Other 3:16s, by Malinda Fugate. Shoppers in the know don’t even need to hear “John” to get the reference.

It’s a significant verse. Martin Luther once called it “The Gospel in Miniature,” saying that the very heart of Scripture and the message of Christ is found in the passage. Beyond the citation the words are also familiar. I suspect many of us memorized the King James version in Sunday School or confirmation class: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” The very heart of our faith – that God loves the world so much that God gave us Jesus. The phrase “John 3:16” is a hyper-summarized citation of the Good News that may be simple to cross-stitch, but is awfully complicated to live.

John 3:16 is in the middle of a conversation between Jesus and Nicodemus, a prominent Pharisee who has sneaked out to meet Jesus at night, so as not to be seen. In verse 10, shortly before the passage that we heard this morning, Nicodemus has found Jesus’ teaching confusing because it demands that he let go of all that he has accomplished and understood. He will have to instead become like a newborn, ready to engage the world on completely new terms. And this new understanding then implies a need to change. Some things are hard to grasp, not because they have a lot of words or are conceptually subtle, but because they ask so much of us. We don’t really want to understand, because if we understand, we are called to be or do something different. We are called to believe.

God loved the world so much that God gave the Son so that we may believe and have eternal life. Is it something we really want to understand? What if it calls us to “believe” this Good News, that in Jesus “lifted up” – it can also be translated as “exalted” - God offers the world salvation rather than condemnation? We might say that believing simply requires us to agree intellectually that all of this happened in just the way the story describes. To believe in our minds that Jesus died and was raised to save us is easy to comprehend, and it requires almost nothing of us. But such an intellectual kind of belief isn’t really what God is asking from us, is it?

God is asking us to let ourselves be persuaded and then transformed by our belief. We tend to say “faith,” rather than “belief,” to mean that knowledge at the level of our souls, deeper than our minds. Faith changes us and how we live.

The people of God wandering in the desert with Moses sound whiny and ungrateful. “We detest this miserable food,” manna that God had provided. The psalmist also speaks unflatteringly of the people God has gathered. “Some were fools and took to rebellious ways; they were afflicted because of their sins. They abhorred all manner of food and drew near to death's door.”

They are us. And the God who loves us didn’t abandon them or smite them, and as far as we know, wasn’t even tempted.

Martin Luther once said, “If I were as our Lord God … and these vile people were as disobedient as they now are, I would knock the world in pieces.”[v] A very human response.

God, though, offered the means of healing. First, the serpent lifted on the pole to save the Israelites from poison and death from the serpents. And later, Jesus, lifted on the cross to save us from sin and death.

God loves us. And that is Good News for us, for all of Christianity, and for all of the world. God loves us. And God forgives us.

Our life as Christians is based on having faith in God’s love and forgiveness for each and every one of us. When we truly have faith in this deep and abiding truth, our lives begin to change. We strive to be the very image of God in which we are all created – by loving others as God loves us. We try to love as God loves – unreservedly and sacrificially. We take responsibility for our actions, and we seek healing for those against whom we have transgressed.  We admit we have done wrong, and we work to do better.

The God who loves every single person and creature asks us to do the same. The God who forgives, makes reconciliation the priority, and repairs the world’s injuries invites us to do the same.

We hurt each other all the time. We hurt others by our words and actions, and we allow others to be hurt by unjust systems and structures. And we are hurt by the world as well.

The work of repair is the work of the Church and the work of each member of it. We are partners in that work with many others outside the church, and we are not unique in doing it. The voice of the Church can be indistinguishable from those others in the task of repair of those systems. We all want to avoid doing harm and we want to fix what we have broken or the systems that break others.

Where the Church’s voice stands out from the world’s is in understanding the need for repair of relationships, and for forgiveness and reconciliation.

As Christians, we are called to forgive because we have been forgiven. And we will continue to need forgiveness.

I’ve been praying through the devotional guide produced by Episcopal Relief and Development this Lent. In Friday’s offering, Bishop Phoebe Roaf of West Tennessee speaks of forgiveness: “One aspect of lament is recognizing that everyone has sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Both victim and perpetrator are equal at the foot of the cross. This is a hard truth to acknowledge for those who have been victimized. The goal of repentance is not to blame the victim but rather to accept that brokenness is part of the human condition….Perhaps that is why Jesus instructed his disciples to ask for forgiveness and to forgive those who injured them in the Lord’s Prayer. If we desire forgiveness when we have fallen short, we are called to forgive others. Forgiveness doesn’t mean forgetting the incident or waiving your right to restitution. Neither does it entail allowing yourself to be repeatedly abused. What forgiveness facilitates is a release from the anger and pain so that we can move on with our lives.”

Lent is a time to reflect on where we have fallen short, and we are good at recognizing where we need to repent. But when we focus on what we have done to others, we can overlook the harm we do by refusing to forgive. Healing the world includes healing ourselves.

Being hurt by someone, particularly someone you love and trust, can cause anger, sadness and confusion. Dwelling on hurtful events or situations allows grudges filled with resentment, vengeance and hostility to take root. And we lose valuable and enriching connectedness with others. If we aren’t careful, we carry anger and bitterness into every relationship and new experience.

We stop being able to love others in the way God loves us, maybe loving anybody in the way God loves us. And that, my sisters and brothers, is death. The death that God sent Jesus to overcome.

In your Lenten self-reflection, take time this week to consider. What do you need to let go of? Whom do you need to forgive? Where is God asking you to repair a tear in the world by bringing reconciliation into your own relationships?

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

Let us live to make it so.  Let us love. Let us heal others. And let us forgive. AMEN.

[i] “John 3:16,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_3:16, accessed March 12, 2021.

[ii] “Tim Tebow Shares John 3:16 Story,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILz_9KRwzB8&t=18s, accessed March 12, 2021.

[iii] Wikipedia.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Martin Luther, “Of God’s Works,” CXI Table Talk or Familiar Discourse. Tebow later claimed that "John 3 16" was Googled 94 million times during the game. He wore it most famously in 2012 at what became known as “the 3:16 game,” where Tebow threw for 316 yards in a playoff upset against the Pittsburgh Steelers. Not just football. Professional wrestler "Stone Cold" Steve Austin's marquee catchphrase ("Austin 3:16") originated as a reference to John 3:16.

March 7, 2021

The Third Sunday in Lent

Exodus 20: 1-7; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

The Rev. James M. L. Grace

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

 “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.  You shall not bow down to them or worship them.”  Exodus, chapter 20, verse 4.    

I remember years ago in seminary; I had an exam in my old testament class.  The exam covered that first five books of the bible, of which today’s reading from the book of Exodus, is one.  I did not prepare for this exam as well as I should have, and certainly was not prepared for one of the questions on the exam which asked me to list, in order, all ten of the commandments. 

You would think that I would have known them, memorized them, committed them to my heart.  Alas, I could only name 6 of the 10.  That commandment about not making an idol.  I could not remember that one.  In one of my many less-than-astounding seminary moments, I received a 77 on that exam.  Not one of my better moments!

Some twenty years later, I recall that moment because of its irony: one of the commandments I could not remember to name on my exam (do not make for yourself an idol) was the same commandment I broke upon receiving my average exam grade.  How might I have broken a commandment, you ask?  It is simple. 

You see, back then, like now, there were many idols to which I would willingly bow down to.  In seminary, an obvious one was academic excellence.  I wanted all A’s.  There is nothing wrong with that, you might be thinking, that is what all students should want.  Heck that is what I hope my own kids get on their report cards.

There is nothing wrong with good grades, of course, but there is something wrong with them when they become idolatrous, when they begin to matter more than God.  In seminary, had I spent as much time in prayer as I did in study or worry about grades, then this would not have been a problem.  But it was.  And it was even more problematic because I could not see it. 

I got carried away with the competitive side of seminary – who gets the best grades, who gets placed in the best congregations, who gets the best hospitals to do their chaplaincy work.  “You shall not make for yourself an idol.”  Oh, the many idols I had.

Oh, the many idols we have.  We carry so many idols around with us, that even with limited seating in the church it is a sheer miracle all of us can fit in here with all the idols we bring in here with us.  I will just name a few to get us thinking about them.  How about the idol of your political leanings – how your views are right, and those who disagree with you are wrong?  How about the idol of your certainty – how right you are, and how knowledgeable and important you are?

People of course aren’t the only ones with idols.  Churches have plenty of them, too.  A very common church idol is tradition – not that tradition is necessarily bad – it isn’t.  But when a church is unable to turn its head from the past in order to engage the future, then that church suffers from idolatry of its history.  Do you know what the last seven words are of a dying church?  “We have always done it this way.” 

I will share one of my idols, and it is the idol of need for agreement.   I sometimes feel that a true sign that God is active in my life is if I am in agreement with others.  Of course this is not true.  Agreement becomes an idol to me when I assume agreement is necessary for progress.  It isn’t.  You and I can disagree and progress can still be made. 

On most weeks, I meet with a close friend who has very little in common with me.  We come from different ethnic backgrounds, our political views completely opposite from one another, and we of course both know that.  What I appreciate about spending time with this person is that in our conversation, I learn from him about his beliefs, he learns from me.  And it is not always easy.  He will say some things and I quietly think to myself “do you really believe that?”  He probably feels the same.  But as different as we both are – he reached out his hand to help me during a time of need.  I love this man.

The point is – talking with people who think differently reminds me to not craft idols out of my beliefs. As we move into the third week of Lent, I invite you to write down a list of three idols in your life that place above God. If you are honest, that should not take very much time at all to do. Pick one of those idols. Offer that idol to God in your prayer. Ask God for the strength and the courage to give it up, or at the very least to give you eyes to see it for what it is – an impediment, a crutch, something you do not need any more. AMEN.

February 28, 2021

The Second Sunday in Lent

Romans 4:13-25 | Psalm 22:22-30 | Mark 8:31-38

The Rev. Bradley Varnell

Jesus didn’t come into the world to start an organization, he didn’t come offering pithy teachings that we could incorporate into our lives. Rather, he came to inaugurate the rule of God in our world. Jesus’ mission is bound up with the kingdom of God coming to earth as it is in heaven. In his life – his teaching, his healing, his exorcising – Jesus brings the love of God to bear on the world around him. That’s what made Jesus so incredibly threatening. Jesus didn’t simply preach love, Jesus acted in love. Jesus allowed the love of God to impact the world around him. Through Jesus, the love of God made its mark on the world: causing the blind to see, the lame to walk, to possessed to go free. Jesus preached the kingdom of God in a world controlled by kingdoms of sin and death. Jesus was the crack in the foundation of the empires of Rome and Herod.

The disciples put a lot of hope in Jesus. Just before today’s reading, Jesus asks them “who do you say that I am?” Peter replies straightaway: you are the messiah. Now, there were expectations of messiahs. Messiahs were triumphant, they were winners, they cast off the enemy and liberated the people. If Jesus is the messiah, then Peter and the disciples know what to expect! Or so they thought. Today, Jesus teaches them what it means for him to be the messiah: it means he will end his earthly career in suffering and death. Jesus isn’t the kind of messiah they are expecting, and so Peter rebukes Jesus! The audacity!! You’re going to rebuke the messiah because you don’t like what he’s doing? It’s an impressive move on Peter’s part…and, I think, one that we should sympathize with. How often are we like Peter? Rebuking Jesus, or challenging Jesus, or just ignoring Jesus in favor of our own visions and fantasies of what Jesus should be like. The danger which Christians must always avoid is making Jesus into our mascot. The living Jesus is not someone we can conscript to support our own ideologies and prejudices, rather he is the living, free Son of God who demands that we become like him, not the other way around.

It is for this reason that Jesus lays out in stark clarity what it means for others to follow him. To be his follower is to follow in his footsteps, to tread a path filled with suffering and death. If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. If we want to call Jesus our Lord, our master, our messiah, then we must walk the walk. We must share Jesus’ vision of the kingdom of God and we must allow ourselves to be so given over to the love of God that it makes waves in the world. This is why Jesus must die in the first place. Jesus must die not because he is bound to some blind fate, but because the life Jesus lives, the love Jesus shares, the hope that Jesus inspires will always lead to suffering and death in a world filled with sin and evil. When love moves from mere sentiment to action, it’s always threatening to those who have closed themselves off to love, those who have traded love for power and security. Our world, simply put, does not easily respond to the free, life-giving, liberating love of God.  This love turns things on its head, it destabilizes us, it calls the ways things are into question, and challenges us to let go of fear in favor of love. The love of God does not remain in a box or in boundaries, it spills over! It makes a mess of the worlds we have so meticulously created – bringing in the outcast, the undesirable, enemies and friends!

If we want to be more than admirers of Jesus, more than members of his fan club, if we want to follow him, then we have to love so deeply, so fully, so recklessly that it will cause waves. We must become like Jesus. This will involve suffering – suffering with others and suffering for others. It will also involve death – the crosses we pick up are not the inconveniences of life, they are the deaths which the love of God leads us to. Deaths to self, deaths for others. Metaphorical deaths and physical deaths. To suffer and die is simply to follow Christ. It’s part of the package. It doesn’t mean it’s good, it simply means that that’s the reality of the world we live in. The Christian hope is for a day and time when death and suffering will be no more because the love of God will be all in all. The love of God overcomes suffering and death, not by avoiding them, but by exceeding them. In the words to his disciples today, Jesus says the Son of Man must undergo great suffering…be killed, and after three days rise again. Peter seems to have missed the “rise again” part, and so do we. Jesus can face the future before him, he can bear the costs of his mission because the God he loves and serves will not let suffering and death be the final word. So it is for us, the courage to love God and love others with the passion of Jesus doesn’t come from a belief that God will then protect us from the bad things, but from the trust that God will not abandon us to suffering and death.

The world does not need more members of the Jesus fan club or more admirers of Jesus. The world needs more followers. The world needs more people who are so committed to the rule of God in the world, to the healing and wholeness which the love of God brings that they are willing to venture to the edges of society to bring that message, that they are willing to confront the powers of the world, willing to accept suffering and death for the sake of Jesus and his gospel. This path will cost us our lives, but better to lose our life for the sake of sharing the love of God than gain a world that is so afraid of love that it would kill it. Amen.

February 21, 2021

The First Sunday in Lent

1 Peter 3:18-22 | Psalm 25:1-9 | Mark 1:9-15

The Rev. Bradley Varnell

Verse 1 of Today’s Psalm grabbed me. To you, O Lord, I lift up my soul; my God, I put my trust in you…at the heart of the spiritual life is this simple, yet incredibly difficult move: putting our trust in God. Throughout the story of Scripture what we see and hear over and over and over again is the struggle of God’s people to trust God fully and completely. To totally hand over their lives to God’s ways and God’s laws. The prophets speak out repeatedly against the people’s inability or unwillingness to remember that God is faithful, that God will keep God’s promises even when everything seems to speak against that. The story of Scripture over and over and over again shows us that God is trustworthy. One of the reasons Christians return again and again to the Bible isn’t because God is somehow stuck there, but because the Bible is a record of God’s people doubting the promises which God has made and God, time and again, showing up and keeping his end of the bargain. The Bible is a record of the trustworthiness of God.

Scripture also shows us what trust means. Often it seems we use trust and belief interchangeably. I trust in God because I believe God exists. But this isn’t how Scripture works. Most people in the United States – most people in the world – believe in God or some higher power. Yet how many of us trust God? How many of us move beyond accepting the existence of God and trusting that this God is who Scripture and tradition says he is? Belief doesn't always ask much of me. My belief in gravity doesn’t really make any claims on my life, doesn’t really guide how I live my life. It’s a given, I accept it, and I go on. Trust, on the other hand, seems to ask a lot of me. Trust makes certain demands – if I trust someone, I act in a particular way. If I trust John to print the bulletins, I don’t come up here on Sunday morning and print them off myself. If I trust my friends when they say they love me, I tell them when they’ve hurt me, instead of assuming that their desire is really to make me feel bad. Part of trusting someone is trusting that what they say matches how they act. And so, it is with God: the spiritual life is an invitation to trust that what God says matches what God does. It live in light of the fact that the God who speaks and acts in Scripture, in the people of Israel, in Jesus Christ is not a God who deceives us, but a God who only speaks the truth.

In our Gospel lesson today, Jesus is baptized, Mark tells us that “as he was coming up out of the water, he [Jesus] saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘you are my son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.’” Before Jesus was tempted, before he began his ministry in Galilee – he was baptized and heard God say to him “you are the beloved, with you I am well pleased.” Mark makes the point that it is Jesus who sees and hear this, not the crowd, not John, just Jesus. Jesus hears these words and immediately the Spirit drives him into the wilderness and the start of his ministry. Jesus spends 40 days in the wilderness tempted and tried. We don’t hear much about this period in Mark, but part of the temptations, as we see in Matthew and Luke, are temptations to cease trusting God and rely instead on his own power. Jesus withstands these temptations, spending 40 days living more deeply into the reality that he is the beloved. I like to imagine that Jesus spent all this time learning what it meant to trust that he really was beloved by God.

Jesus leaves the 40-days and immediately begins his ministry in Galilee preaching the Good News of God, healing and casting out demons. Throughout his entire ministry Jesus’ life is one long witness to what it looks like to trust, at the very core of your being, that you are beloved by the Father in heaven. Jesus is what it looks like to not simply believe in God, but to trust God. This isn’t always easy, even for Jesus. One of the most poignant, human points in the story of Jesus’ life is his prayer in the Garden of Gesthsemane. Jesus knows death is approaching, he prays to God to rescue him, but even though Jesus wishes his future could be otherwise, Jesus still trusts in God. The disciples, too, struggle to trust. As Jesus is crucified those closest to him flee in terror…yet at his resurrection Jesus doesn’t castigate them, rather, he invites them, once again, to trust in him.

Believing God exists can provide little comfort in the hard moments of life. What gets us through isn’t the knowledge that God is in his heaven, but that God has left the heights of his existence to journey with us when the power goes out and the water stops. The crucifixion looked like the end, but it wasn’t. Trusting God doesn’t stop the worst from happening to us, but it does give up hope, confidence that the worst doesn’t stop God.

Trust isn’t something we simply will, though. Trust is something we give ourselves over to. In many ways, trust is a gift from God, one that we have to learn to accept. Trust invites us to let down our walls and our guards and our need to be in control. Trust in the God of Scripture requires we cease trying to be our own gods. This Lent, my hope is that we all come to a deeper trust in God, that we allow the story of God revealed in Scripture to shape us to look more and more like Jesus – people who live out of trust in God, who allow that trust to unleash the love of God in the world. The greatest Christians living and dead aren’t the ones who have elaborate belief systems, or who know the most theology. They are the ones who have a quiet trust in God, a trust that enables them to move mountains. Jesus came, lived, taught, died, and rose again not to give us a nice theology we can think about, or a group of people to hang with on Sundays, but to show us what it means to live lives trusting that we are God’s beloved. That life of trust may lead to death – but the God we are invited to trust in, the God who calls us beloved, is not stopped by death. The life which trust makes possible is life without end, and it is this life that we are invited to. Amen.

February 14, 2021

Last Sunday of Epiphany

2 Kings 2: 1-12; Psalm 50: 1-6; 2 Corinthians 4: 3-6; Mark 9: 2-9

The Rev. James M. L. Grace

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

            I would not be surprised one day to find out that in heaven there is a large, warehouse-like room, like a Costco.  In this large heavenly storage room would be shelves as high as the eye can see stocked with the millions of purple boxes containing blessings that had gone unnoticed and unappreciated by all of us throughout our human lives.  Can you imagine how large a warehouse containing all our unnoticed and unappreciated blessings would need to be? 

            For me alone, it would look like the warehouse at the end of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, where a government employee boxes up the Ark of the Covenant for storage, wheeling it down an aisle of some nameless government storage facility.  That is what I imagine the size of this heavenly storage room must be.  Vast.  Never ending. 

             “The god of this world,” St. Paul writes, “has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.”  That verse comes from today’s reading in 2 Corinthians and is unique in this regard – it is the only place in the entire New Testament where Satan is labeled a “god of this world.”

            I am drawn to the image of blindness in the verse, this inability that all of us have to notice the blessings in our lives.  Several weeks ago, I was running in Memorial Park, and I ran beside two other people running together.  On one person’s running shirt were two words: “blind athlete.”  The person running next to the blind athlete was their guide – telling them essentially where to run.  They were running the Houston marathon.  Can you imagine the amount of trust and faith you would need to have as a blind athlete to run 26 miles?  I cannot. 

            And yet I am reminded that we are all blind.  St. Paul understood blindness.  He himself was blinded on the road to Damascus, only to have his sight regained when he learned that the love of God conquers all hate.  I am reading the Pulitzer Prize winning book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson for a future book club here at St. Andrew’s.  Wilkerson establishes a daring premise – which is that many of us are blinded to an American caste system “based upon what people looked like, an internalized ranking, unspoken, unnamed, unacknowledged by everyday citizens even as they go about their lives adhering to it and acting upon it subconsciously to this day.”  The invisibility of the American Caste system, Wilkerson argues, “is what gives it power and longevity.” 

Like the grit, tenacity, and faith of a blind marathoner, Isabel Wilkerson courageously has unveiled something my eyes were blind to.  The book and the runner help to refocus my vision on the unchanging truth that you cannot shut out the light of Christ.  It persists.  It runs, it writes, it will not allow for blindness.  St. Paul’s sight was restored to him after three days. 

During the Cold War, the East German government built a large broadcast tower in East Berlin, intending it to be a visual symbol of the superiority of their communist system.   Berlin residents on both sides of the wall, however, noticed something about the tower the architects never intended.  During the day, sunlight was reflected from the massive seven story, stainless steel sphere near the top of the tower.  More specifically, the sunlight was reflected as a bright cross visible for miles across the divided city.  Those living in West Berlin quickly dubbed the bright shiny Christian cross upon the East Berlin tower in communist as the “pope’s revenge” – a divine retaliation of the communist government’s practice of removing crosses from East Berlin churches and turning churches into museums of atheism. 

The embarrassed East German government tried painting the stainless-steel sphere on the Berlin tower to eliminate the cross, but to no avail.  When President Reagan spoke in front of the Brandenburg gate on June 12, 1987 demanding that Mikhail Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall, he spoke of the efforts to eliminate the unintended cross, saying, “there in Berlin, like the city itself, symbols of love, symbols of worship, cannot be suppressed.”  When I visited Berlin in 2018, I was happy to see that crosses returned to East Berlin churches, and a gleaming cross is quite visible on the Berlin Radio tower.

I want to revisit that vast warehouse, full of unclaimed blessings.  How much is there that God has provided for us – untold blessings, just warehoused away, collecting dust, because we are unwilling to open our eyes and arms to receive them?  What would it take to remove the veil from our eyes so that we might see those blessings, see them the way a blind athlete sees possibility in running a marathon?  What kind of vision would that require? 

It would require of us, like St. Paul, to ask that the scales be removed from our eyes – that we would see the bright gleaming cross of Christ shining above a godless land. 

I cannot say it any better than Alice Walker does in her novel The Color Purple when Shug Avery says, “I think it pisses off God when you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.”  Life is too short to fill a heavenly warehouse with more purple boxes full of unnoticed blessings.  Covid is not an excuse.  There is blessing in this world.  Find it, relish it, open your eyes to it.  Thank God for it.  AMEN.

February 7, 2021

The Fifth Sunday After Epiphany

1 Corinthians 9:16-23; Mark 1:29-39

The Rev. Jeff Bohanski

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen

Let me start this morning with saying that it is my honor and blessing to be standing here in front of you this morning on this, the second to the last Sunday of Epiphany, this Sunday that some would call Protodeacon Sunday.

As many of you know, an Epiphany is a sudden understanding of something.  Every Sunday in Epiphany we hear an epiphany story, a story of a sudden bright understanding of God or of Jesus the Gospel writer wants his readers to have. 

I see epiphanies happening in my first-grade class a lot.  My favorite first-grade epiphany is a reading epiphany.  It’s when a child suddenly and completely understands that letters make sounds, sounds make words and words have meaning.  The meaning of the word hits the child like a bolt of lightning.  The child knows he or she can read!

Over the years I have found that my favorite first-grade epiphany reading moment happens during the restroom break.  Invariably a child, usually a boy, runs out of the restroom and yells at the top of his lungs, exclaiming, “Mr. Bohanski, someone wrote sh… !”   I usually jump in before the child has a chance to finish the sentence and say, “Congratulations, you are reading!  But remember, just because you can read that word doesn’t mean you can say that word.” 

Today’s epiphany story happens in the first chapter of Mark.  That in itself is important because the author is laying the foundation for the message the author wants to give his readers.  Mark tells these healing stories in chapter one because he wants his readers to know now, in the beginning of the Gospel who Jesus is and what it means to be his followers.

Now let me recap the story.  The story takes place in Capernaum on the same sabbath day where Jesus had just healed a man with an unclean spirit.  He had given orders to an unclean spirit to come out and be silent.  After the healing Jesus and his disciples leave the synagogue and go straight to Simon and Andrew’s house where Jesus is informed that Simon’s mother-in-law is in bed with a fever.  Jesus goes to her, takes her hand and lifts her up.  The fever leaves her and she begins to serve them.  Later that evening more sick people in need of healing and people with demons in need of exercising were brought to Jesus.  The next morning Jesus was nowhere to be seen.  Finally he was found praying in a deserted place.  Many people are surprised at Jesus’ response.  He says, “Let’s go.  Let’s go do this somewhere else.” 

I believe, the author of Mark is first telling his readers that Jesus is God’s son, the one who demonstrates he has power over the physical world when he heals the sick, the one who demonstrates he has power over the spiritual world when he gives orders to demons and they obey him.  Mark wants his readers to know that it is this powerful Jesus who wants to come into their worlds, into their current state of life to lift them up like he did with Simon’s mother-in-law in her house and transform them.  No questions asked.  Jesus wants to encounter them.  Jesus wants to encounter us.

The second question is, what is a faithful Christian supposed to do?  This week I learned that when the author of Mark wrote the sentence, “She began to serve them.”, he used a word we translate as deacon.  So Mark is saying the faithful response to an encounter Jesus is to deacon, is to serve as Simon’s mother-in-law served.  As faithful Christians we are all called to serve one another, to deacon one another.  Be like Simon’s mother-in-law the first deacon, the protodeacon, the one who faithfully demonstrates she follows Jesus by serving others.

So this week, as I pondered Simon’s mother-in-law and how she served in her faithful response to her encounter with Jesus, I could imagine the rest of the people in the town of Capernaum who Jesus healed and exercised doing the same as Simon’s mother-in-law had done.  They were “deaconing”.  They were serving.  As the week went on, I began to see with my minds eye a town filled with joy, a town where no one bashed each other on Facebook but instead posted positive memes.  I could see with my mind’s eye a town where people were caring for one another despite their race, creed, sexual orientation, their gender identity or struggle with their gender identity.  I could see a town where no church would exclude a minister for being in a same sex relationship.  I could see a town where people lovingly listened to one another.  I could see a town where someone could express their grief and another would listen and be with that person in their grief.  As I envisioned this new Capernaum I thought, perhaps that is why at the end of this story Jesus says, let’s go.  These people of new Capernaum have got the message, others need to hear it. 

So this week, I invite us all to open ourselves to this powerful healing and exercising Jesus, who like with Simon’s mother-in-law, wants to come to us, take our hands and lift us up be in relationship with him, just as we are.  I invite all to, with God’s help, to serve, to deacon one another whether we are at home or at work.  Whether we are with people whom we agree with or with people we don’t agree with or we are with people who look like us or people that don’t.

Finally, I invite us all, me included, to love God and respond faithfully to God’s love by serving one another like Simon’s mother-in-law, the protodeacon did.

January 31, 2021

The Fourth Sunday After Epiphany

Deuteronomy 18:15-20; Psalm 111; 1 Corinthians 8: 1-13; Mark 1: 21-28

The Rev. James M.L. Grace

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

            Jesus healing a man with an unclean spirit.  What a strange story, one that in 2021 seems…dated, old-fashioned, am I right?  On December 26, 1973, a movie called The Exorcist opened in movie theaters across the country and as one critic wrote “all hell broke loose.”  The film’s story of young girl possessed by a demonic presence generated such interest amongst the American public that people stood in line outside movie theaters to watch it – even while braving 6 degree temperatures, rain, and sleet.  I didn’t see The Exorcist until twenty years after its release, in the 90s.  Years later when attending seminary in Alexandria, VA, I was walking through nearby Georgetown, where that movie was filmed, and I found myself carefully walking down those famous steps from the film’s ending.    

            The church in recent times has struggled with the concept of evil, in dealing with stories like that from the Gospel of Mark today.  Often the very concept of exorcism seems more an anachronistic embarrassment than valid ministry.  The Episcopal Church itself does not have a liturgy for exorcism. The closest the church gets are a few words on exorcism in The Book Of Occasional Services which basically amounts to “if you have questions, call the Bishop,” which I interpret as “no one really takes this seriously.”  

            Whenever afforded the opportunity to preach on the story about the possessed man in the synagogue whom Jesus encounters, I have opted out.  My decision to be silent on these and other Gospel stories dealing with possession was two-fold.  On one hand, I didn’t understand them.  Second, I wasn’t sure what to say about evil personified in spiritual terms as demonic or unclean.   I found it safer to domesticate these stories in some way – to strip them of their spiritual nature and seek medical explanations for the behavior people purportedly possessed with unclean spiritus exhibited.

            Rather than saying the man in the synagogue was possessed by the devil, I found myself more comfortable saying  “the man in the synagogue was mentally ill, perhaps schizophrenic, or bipolar, and Jesus healed him.”   That is a miracle to be sure – but it downplays any kind of outside spiritual forces.  I don’t believe that way anymore, and I want to be careful how I say this – but I do believe in possession. 

            Now, before you write me off as a lunatic – allow me to explain.  The power of possession is that it is subtle, and it is most powerful when we are not even aware of it.   Consider someone who is a narcissist.  A narcissist holds themselves in such high esteem that they literally believe they can do no wrong.  They are possessed with an untrue image of themselves – an inflated image which convinces them that they are better than everyone else.  This image isolates them, and the demon of their narcissism creates nothing but loneliness, pain, and sadness.  Because it is subtle, the demon of narcissism closes your eyes to that, while others see it clearly.   

            If that example of possession is not persuasive consider this one: an alcoholic, by definition, is possessed with a lie, one which states that they can control their consumption of alcohol.  Medical, psychological, and behavior evidence points to the contrary, and the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous says that left untreated, there are three outcomes for the untreated alcoholic: jails, institutions, or death.  Still not convinced possession is real?  

            I offer one final example.  In the twentieth century, a first-world country that identified as Christian (one half Lutheran and one-half Catholic) orchestrated the systemic murder of over six million people – including the developmentally disabled, lesbian and gay, along with countless members of the Jewish faith.  What force could possess Christians to commit such horror?

            Holocaust Remembrance Day was last week, and it brings its solemn message to us yet again: Lest We Forget.  Lest We Forget that we are not immune to outside forces which have the power to possess us.  All of us are possessed in some way.  The political divisiveness in our country boils down to an unavoidable truth which is that many of us are possessed with the idea that our political party is right and good, and the other is sinister.  How does this possession serve us?  How does it make us better people?

I conclude with an answer to the problem of possession and evil, and it comes straight out of the Bible.  It is not enough for us to merely stand against it.  We don’t just get to separate ourselves from it.  Instead, we look to Jesus on the cross, crucified.  Like Jesus we do not capitulate to the evil around us, but rather we absorb it.  We become it so that we can transform it.  That probably makes very little sense to you.  I don’t say that to be condescending.  Absorbing evil so that we can transform it doesn’t make sense to me either, but it is what Jesus did, and it is what I am trying to allow Jesus to continue to do through me. 

I hope you take an honest look at what might be possessing you – your cell phone, your social media, your job, even your religious beliefs.  Invite Jesus in and let Jesus draw what is unclean out of you.  Invite him to exorcise your heart.  A warning: it is never comfortable when we invite Jesus in and ask him to transform our heart.  But it is the only to live a life worth living, one that is free of possessions.  AMEN.

January 24, 2021

The Third Sunday after the Epiphany

Mark 1: 14-20

The Rev. Canon Joann Saylors

I am one of those people who tends not to notice visual details in the landscape around me.  When I’ve been out riding around with my husband in areas we go all the time, I can't tell you how many times I've said, "Huh.  When did that building go up?" or "Huh.  Where did that building go?", only to have him say, "They've been building that (or tearing that down) for eight months." 

 It will be happening right beside me, on the side of a familiar, well-traveled road, and I manage to drive by without even noticing.  I guess I'm so focused on what's coming up, whether it’s on the road or in my life, that I stop seeing what's around me.  Even the big things.

 I wonder how long Jesus stood there before he spoke to Peter and Andrew.  I imagine them hard at work, casting their nets, over and over.  Commercial fishing is back-breaking work, and dangerous enough to require all of your attention.  It's not like that image of a guy sitting on the end of the dock with a line in the water, eating a sandwich.  It's hard, physical labor, and if you don't catch, there goes your income.  So Peter and Andrew would have been completely absorbed in their task, and Jesus could have been there a long time, standing quietly, waiting for them to notice him.

 Same thing with James and John.  They were doing a different kind of work that day, mending their fishing nets.  It would have taken all their attention in a different way, looking down, tying knots, focused on details very close to them.  So Jesus could have stood there for a while, too, patiently, silently, waiting for them to look up and see him.

 And when James and John did look up, whenever Peter and Andrew noticed him, Jesus simply said, "Follow me."  That completely shook them out of their routine, brought them right into the moment and to what - well, who - was before them.  It had to. Because they left everything, nets, boat, father to follow Jesus. And both pairs, Mark says, did it immediately.  No taking time to think about it, no excuses for why they couldn't go, no calculating what going with Jesus would do to their income, or their dating lives, or whatever.  None of that. Immediately they left and followed him. I hope James and John at least said goodbye to their father.  Otherwise there he'd be, standing there, mouth open, staring after them and wondering what had just happened.

 Or maybe Zebedee had a sense of it.  Maybe he looked up and saw what his sons saw, heard what his sons heard, and gently pushed them toward Jesus.  Not counting the cost, not wondering who would help him fish, but encouraging his sons to be disciples, to follow their call.

 Once they looked up and paid attention, Peter, Andrew, James and John recognized that they had a new vocation and they embraced it.  Immediately.  That's not really like my conversion experience.  I didn't have a dream, or a vision, where I saw Jesus in front of me, inviting me to follow.  There was no "immediately" at the beginning of my journey.  I'd like to say there was no taking time to think about it, no excuses for why I couldn't go, no calculating what going with Jesus would do to my life choices. But that's not the way it happened.

 I mean, Jesus was right there before me; God was in my life in all sorts of ways. I just didn't notice until much later, in hindsight.  There were opportunities. My best friend in elementary school was Southern Baptist, and every time we went to her church, I was invited to come forward for a conversion moment. I went two different times, which you aren’t supposed to do, but there were no bright lights or scales falling from my eyes. Just pressure to fit in. Later, I was confirmed as a young teen, and, as an adult, I wandered in and out of lots of churches. But I was mostly focused on my life, my security, and my future.  It took me a long time to look up.

 I haven't seen any studies on this, but I think there may be more of us who come to follow Jesus like that.  I don't doubt the reality and power of the conversion moment, because I've talked with people who had them, but my experience has been that they are more the exception than the rule.  I think more of us take a while to get there, and move in a series of steps.  That kind of conversion is real and powerful too.

 Which is why I am grateful that the passage from Mark is grouped with the story of Jonah in our lectionary, because Jonah’s conversion is more of a process. Although, weirdly, the part we mostly remember from Bible stories isn’t in our lectionary at all. The book of Jonah begins with a section called “Jonah Tries to Run Away from God.” That’s where God tries to send Jonah to Nineveh, so Jonah jumps on a ship going the opposite direction. Which leads to God’s trying to get Jonah’s attention with a storm. His shipmates figure that out and, at Jonah’s instruction, toss him overboard. Interestingly, that is their conversion moment. Jonah’s comes after he is swallowed by a big fish, while he is praying inside its belly. Ultimately the fish spits him out, and we pick up the story today with God speaking to Jonah a second time, now that he is paying attention.

That long and epic voyage feels a lot more like my story was than any sort of “Come and see.” “OK,” “Immediately!” “OK.” But really, I’m not sure it matters. Because, perhaps disappointingly, we don’t get Brownie points for being the first ones to raise our hands with the right answer. Following Jesus isn't really about that moment of decision, after all. 

I’m not saying it isn’t important.  Making a commitment is essential, but it's just the beginning.  Following Jesus is a lifelong vocation.  The vocation that comes before all the others, and the vocation that shapes all the others.  It's the vocation that calls us out of our routines to see Jesus, over and over.  It's not one moment of yes, it's a whole series of yeses.  Yeses that wear away the bits of our lives that obscure the image of God in us.  All kinds of yeses, different for each of us.  Yes to speaking words of healing and prayer instead of hurt.  Yes to going far out of our way to deliver groceries to someone shut in.  Yes to carving out time from other possibilities for prayer and Bible study, or writing a note to a family who has lost a loved one.  Yes to working for justice or peace. Yes to whatever way God is calling us to serve.

 You've all said yes at least once.  You're listening this morning, after all.  I don't know if that was an easy yes or a hard one.  Yeses come in both flavors. And the way to get to where you can say yes to the difficult parts of following Jesus is to say yes first to the easy parts.  That creates a pattern or a habit.  First you see Jesus and hear the call, whatever it is, you discern that it is in fact God calling, and then you say yes.  You say yes again, and again.  Sometimes there are no’s sprinkled in there.  But you keep saying yes.

And God keeps offering more chances to say yes.  Every day I get more chances.  Some choices are easy – get up to pray or roll over and go back to sleep?  Some are more difficult. Like invitations to reach out to people who really frustrate me. Or examining myself instead of judging others, tempting as that is. But when I say yes. What seems hard becomes do-able and what seems insurmountable becomes surprisingly possible.

I’ve found that the wonderful thing about saying yes is that it makes Jesus easier to spot.  If anything takes me out of the distractions of worry, and fear, and self-sufficiency and makes God manifest in the world around me, it’s saying yes.  Over and over.  And it makes me much more attuned to what God is doing in the world, how Jesus shows up in the lives of people around me.  Not to mention my own life.  Often that happens when I’m looking where a friend or some other wise spiritual guide is pointing.  “Don’t you see?  That’s God working.”  The Holy Spirit is moving - in that funny coincidence you can’t quite dismiss.  God is there - answering your prayers, just in ways you didn’t expect.  Jesus is there - in that story all over Facebook that restored your faith in humanity after a really bad day.  Every single one of us has these moments.  We just need to look up and see Jesus.

As Church, we need each other to be able to do that.  No scientist makes a discovery without depending on the work of the other scientists who have gone before, and none of us becomes a better follower of Christ without depending on His work, and the model of the saints who surround us, in this realm and the heavenly one.  They are the ones who have gone before and will go along to help you see, and the ones to whom you will return the favor.  It’s what we promise at baptisms: to do all in our power to support one another in our lives in Christ.  Epiphany is a season celebrating God’s being made known, and together we can enjoy a life where we come to expect epiphanies all around us.

 It’s funny.  “Follow me” has come to be language we use for Twitter or Facebook when we want to know everything someone says, hear everything they want to share about their lives.  We get to choose who we follow, people who amuse or inspire us or people who reinforce our worst instincts.  Jesus doesn’t have a Facebook account, at least outside of memes, but he is asking us to follow him.  When the world feels so heavy, what with pandemics and politics and too much family time and anxiety about the future, don’t let cynicism or fear blind you. Don’t get so distracted that you miss seeing Jesus.  Because “come and see” happens all the time. Notice him there in front of you and say yes.  Then say yes again, over and over. 

Follow Jesus, and bring a friend along, because I promise, it’s the journey of a lifetime and a journey you won’t regret.  AMEN.

January 17, 2021

The Second Sunday after the Epiphany

1 Samuel 3:1-20 | John 1: 43-51

The Rev. Bradley Varnell

Holy God, your Word is life. Grant us to hear your word, that we may live. In your name we pray, Amen.

Samuel, a teenager at the most by this time in the story, is told by God what God plans to do to Eli and his sons because of their sin, blasphemy, and wickedness. God will bring an end to Eli and to his sons. They will no longer provide spiritual leadership in Israel. Samuel lays in the temple until morning, unable to sleep after hearing the shocking, sad news that the man who has for all intents and purposes raised him, who has taught him to minister to the Lord, who has enabled him to understand that the Lord was speaking to him will die. The burden of this truth weighs on him. Yet when Eli demands a report, Samuel doesn’t sugar coat things, he doesn’t hedge what God said, he doesn’t nuance it. “Samuel told him everything, and hid nothing from him.” Samuel shares God’s plan to bring the House of Eli to an end. Eli, to his credit, doesn’t hem and haw. He doesn’t fight, he doesn’t argue. He accepts that the Lord is sovereign, that the Lord is good. And the actions of the Lord, even when difficult, even when they reveal our failures and shortcomings, are nonetheless, good.

Samuel and Eli do not run away from the truth of God. Samuel speaks it and Eli hears it. There’s no hint of moral superiority or self-righteousness on the part of Samuel, nor is there any sense that Eli wishes to argue with God’s judgement. There is a radical, shocking willingness by both men to stand before the truth and with the truth in naked vulnerability.

The story of Samuel and Eli is one we would all do well to sit with for the next few days. It is a story of truth telling and a story of what is required to tell and to hear the truth. God comes to Samuel, but it is only with the help of Eli that he can answer God. God speaks judgement against Eli, yet this is only known through the voice of Samuel. The truth of God which both men encounter is only encountered amid their relationship with each other. Samuel needs Eli to hear the truth and Eli needs Samuel to hear the truth. Neither will know the word of God, neither will hear God speak, without the other.

The people of God have traditionally been in the business of the truth. “The truth will set you free,” after all. But in the last several years it has seemed to me that the relationship necessary for truth hearing and truth telling have frayed. Unlike Samuel and Eli, it seems that we live in a culture where we are more and more unwilling to hear uncomfortable truths and speak uncomfortable truths. One would hope that the church would be an exception to this, but I’m not sure that’s the case.

See, if we can take our story today as a guide, hearing God’s truth doesn’t come from an unbiased, unmediated third party. Unfortunately, God isn’t simply gonna relay a private message to you and I. God, rather annoyingly, is going to use other people. People like Samuel. Samuel was young, he didn’t know what the voice of God might sound like, he’s not the kind of person you would expect God to appear to. Yet…that’s exactly what happens. God by passes the elderly priest, and goes to the young man who can’t tell the difference between the voice of God and a call from down the hall. Sometimes we will be like Samuel. Called by God to speak a hard word to someone. And sometimes we will be like Eli, called to hear a hard truth from someone.

It seems that in the last little bit we have all become increasingly unwilling to hear hard truths and speak hard truths. We are so blinded by the rightness of our ‘side’, that the other can have absolutely nothing to say to us. We hear something that’s hard and our immediate response is to either dismiss it, nuance it, argue against it, or simply say we’re the exception. Instead of speaking the truth to those we know and exist in relationship with, we cut people out, or post snide memes and comments on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, assuming that that is sufficient to tell the truth.

But Samuel and Eli show us another way. Samuel and Eli speak and hear the truth in the context of relationships of care and accountability. They know each other. They care for one-another. Though it may be difficult, nevertheless, Samuel speaks the truth to Eli, and though he may want with everything in him to escape the judgement of God, Eli doesn’t hide from the truth.

Christians have been bound by our baptism to Jesus Christ, who is the truth. We have committed ourselves to living in the light of truth, and we can only do that if we live lives of humility, lives which are open to hearing and speaking the truth. The last few months have revealed a lot of truths, in my opinion. Truths about America’s racism, truths about the way in which our legal and justice systems continued to oppress black and brown folks, truths about the economic inequality that make much of our lives possible, truths about how deeply divided we are, perhaps to our very core, as a nation. We could all squirm from these truths, keep them to ourselves, or ignore them all together, but what Christ has called us to, what we see in the story of Eli and Samuel, is that we are to accept the truths we hear, as uncomfortable as they are. We are to share those truths. We are live in the confidence that God speaks in and through the most surprising voices, and we are to trust that God who speaks through these voices is Good. Change in Israel only comes when someone is able to speak a hard truth and when someone is able to hear it. May it be so for us. Amen.

January 10, 2021

1 Epiphany

Genesis 1:1-5; Psalm 29; Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1: 4-11

The Rev. James M. L. Grace

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

            Probably like many of you, I spent Epiphany (which was last Wednesday) closely watching the news.  With you, I watched as protestors pushed beyond barricades at the Capital.  Together we saw America’s constitutional process interrupted, the seat of our democracy desecrated, and the power of that democracy tarnished.  Capital police officers were clubbed, and one officer, Brian D. Sicknick (who supported President Trump) is dead.  The assault on our nation’s Capital and the disrespect shown inside its chambers was, to quote former President George W. Bush, “sickening and heartbreaking.”  Prior to January 6, I believe the last time there was an assault on our nation’s capital was during the war of 1812, over two hundred years ago.

            In the days since, I have wondered how this assault might have been handled differently, if the assailants were not largely Caucasian.  What would the response had been if the mob were undocumented Latinos, or a mob of African Americans?  Jimmie Briggs, a black author wrote of the assault in Vanity Fair, saying that “despite the mobsters extraordinary disregard for the rule of law, for agents of law enforcement, and for social norms regarding government, government property, and government processes, a near mythical graciousness was shown to the insurrectionists.” 

            Occasionally when I preach or write about political matters, I will receive an email or a call or a letter, asking that I limit my preaching to the realm of the religious or spiritual, and leave politics out of it.  With a moment like last Wednesday, my response can only be that either our faith has something to say to our world, or it does not.  Either as Christians we are called to make the world a better place or we are not.   Which is it? 

            What happened in the Capital was not a reasonable response to the concerns about a presidential election.  It was madness.  But it was also deeply revealing of how broken we are as a country, and how desperate our need is for God’s grace and wisdom.  The number of protesters taking selfie pictures of themselves in our nation’s capital is revelatory of the selfishness we as a nation are contending with. 

            As your priest, it has been challenging leading this congregation through a season of divisive politics the likes of which I have never seen before.  If we are to learn anything from the events of last Wednesday, I believe it is a lesson that we are all familiar and which we all neglect.  

            It is humility, and it is sorely needed on both sides of the political aisle.  And it is needed here – right now – with us.  A helpful litmus test for all of us to consider if we should be more humble is this – take your pulse.  If your heart is still beating, you could benefit from being more humble.  The left and the right sides of our political aisles simply cannot be reconciled to one another until both sides humble themselves to the point where they are willing to listen, to take the cotton out of their ears and put it in their mouths.    

Our printed national currency bears the motto “E Pluribus Unum” which translates to “out of many, one.”  That phrase is attributed to Roman lawyer Cicero who said that a Republic is made up of many diverse individuals who make up one unit.  Echoing this sentiment centuries later, on June 16, 1858, Abraham Lincoln, famously stated upon his acceptance speech as senator from the state of Illinois: “a house divided against itself, cannot stand.”  Spoken just three years before the Civil War, Lincoln’s words were as true then as they are now.

            Our democracy is fragile, and our arrogance is threatening its very livelihood.  As a nation, we must learn humility.  How do we learn humility?  Lots of ways – life experience, our children, conversations with those who hold different views than ourselves.  We also learn humility through prayer.  There is of course very little that any of us can offer that will change the outcome of events nearly 1,400 miles away in our nation’s capital.  But we can pray and we can vote.  We can use this moment in our history to return to God, to begin praying again.  Like some Episcopalians, you might find yourself saying “but I don’t know how to pray.”  That is fine.  That is why we have a prayer book.  You may have one if you do not own one.  Throughout its pages are prayers written for every circumstance in your life. 

            Prayer and humility over time, will open yourself to receiving God’s providence – the appearance of God’s care and direction.  Friends, we are in Epiphany, the season in which we proclaim the appearance of Jesus to all people.  The appearance of God’s care and direction, of Christ, is what all of us need.  Humble yourself.  Pray.  Use this time to reflect how Jesus is apparent in your life.  In a moment of a national crisis, where is the Son of God to be found?  AMEN.

December 24, 2020

Christmas Eve

Hebrews 11:1-2; Psalm 98; John 1:1-14

The Rev. James M. L. Grace

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

            While the Gospel of John is not my favorite Gospel (it is Mark, by the way), John’s Gospel has the best beginning of any Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.”  The only way to improve on that opening is if the Gospel writer would have instead written “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…”

            That first sentence (from John’s Gospel, not Star Wars) begins with the phrase “In the beginning.”   We hear that same beginning in another book in the Bible – the first book – Genesis, which begins like this: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” 

            So, we have two beginnings – one in Genesis, one in John.  In beginning the Gospel this way, the Gospel author is making a subtle, yet important point, and it is this – Jesus has existed since the beginning.  That means that Jesus existed as part of God before his birth to Joseph and Mary in Bethlehem.  In the same way that Jesus continued to live after his death, he was alive before his birth. 

            That is why this Gospel begins with the phrase “In the beginning.”  The author is saying that Jesus has always existed with God.  That is why John’s Gospel refers to Jesus as “the Word (with a capital w).”  The word “word” translates into Greek as logos.  That word sounds strange to us today. 

            But when the Gospel was written, the word logos was more familiar.  Logos meant more than “word.”  Logos meant something that was perfect, constant, eternal.  So, when John writes “In the beginning was the logos,” the author is saying that Jesus is this eternal word, who existed before his birth, and exists after his death. 

            John’s cosmic description of Christ was a bit controversial for the day, so much that the Gospel of John almost did not make it into the Bible.  There is no familiar Christmas story in John’s Gospel.  We do not hear about a manger, angels, shepherds, or wise men.  Instead, we get this grandiose description of Christ as God’s eternal word. 

            Tonight, we celebrate Christmas Eve and honor the mystery of Christ’s birth.  While Christmas celebrations seem normal to us today (even during a pandemic) Christmas has not always been celebrated. 

            It was not until December 25, 336, (about three centuries following the death and resurrection of Jesus) that we have an actual record of a Christmas service.  I do not believe this to be accidental.  Christmas became important around 336 because that was the time in which people were finally able, after much argument, to agree on exactly who Jesus was.  And who was Jesus, did they decide?  They decided that Jesus was fully human, born of a mother, and that Jesus was simultaneously fully divine. 

            To help solidify this agreement of the church, liturgies and services were formed to celebrate the birth of Jesus.  They called them a “Christ Mass,” from which we get Christmas.  One of the church leaders that attended these early church council meetings was a bishop named Nicholas of Myra.  Nicholas was known not only for his work in the church, but also for his habit of secret gift giving.   Bishop Nicholas of Myra’s reputation as a gift-giver earned him enough of a reputation that Nicholas (or Saint Nick as we might call him) became the prototype for that jolly man in a red suit and white beard who will slipping down your chimney tonight. 

            Today we celebrate Christ Mass. We hear that “In the beginning was the Word.”  God’s word is often called the Bible, but if we are to understand the Gospel of John correctly, the word of God is not a book – it is a person, it is Jesus the Messiah. 

            The gift of Christmas is Jesus himself.  It is a free gift, given not only on Christmas, but every day, because God’s word never ends.   AMEN.