Sunday, June 23, 2023

Proper 7

Mark 4:35-41

The Rev. Francene Young

Earlier this year in March, I was invited to present at a conference for SENIORS called “Abundant Living.” The conference is a collaboration between our Camp Allen and the John Sealy Center on Aging at the University of Texas Medical Branch (or UTMB) in Galveston. It was started 21 years ago by the Rev. Helen Appleberg. Each year there is a conference theme. This year’s theme was Joyful Living.

In my interactions with the participants, I came to realize that most of them remained JOYFUL and JOYFILLED despite the challenges and stresses they have and in many cases still face.

More than anything else in our lives, stress causes us the most serious hazards to our health, our peace, our relationships, and our ability to live life to the fullest. Stress inhibits our ability to handle the unexpected and closes us off in our interactions with others. It can keep us in a state of “fight or flight,” which means what it sounds like. Instead of engaging in life and loving, we will either “fight” it or we will “flee” from it. In doing so, we will make every situation worse, and will isolate ourselves even more. Stress can close us off from life in ways that make our journey one of terror instead of one of adventure.

In a sermon by Pastor Lori Wagner, she suggests we need to increase our “joy ratio.”

In her sermon, Wagner cites Psychologist Barbara Frederickson says that every negative emotion we experience is best countered by three positive emotional experiences. This is called the “joy ratio.”

This 3:1 ratio can help us to stay healthy, calm, and resilient through life’s challenges and storms.

Now Joy is not the same as happiness. Joy comes from a feeling of satisfaction with life, a feeling of being blessed. The more we live out of a feeling of joy, the more our physical and emotional health, our relationships, and our motivations and ability to deal with life’s unexpected challenges will improve.

But experiencing joy is not the same as having mountaintop moments of happiness, taking vacations, or inserting more “down time” in your day. It doesn’t mean “not working.”

Joy is not all about play. Joy is a frame of mind, or more accurately, a frame of spirit, in which you feel a sense of joy no matter where you are or what you are doing.

When you live out of a place of joy from the depths of your spirit, you feel joy in your work, you feel joy in your time with others, you feel joy in your challenges. You even can feel joy in moments of hardship. Joy comes from a sense of “deep satisfaction and calm” that runs deep below the surface of your psyche.

WHY AM I TALKING ABOUT JOY IN THE MIDST OF A STORM??

Barbara Frederickson, who has done extensive research studies on the effects of living out of a sense of joy, tells us that joy, whether from optimism, positivity, laughter, inspiration, gratitude, or relational engagement can entirely change the way we look at ourselves and the world.

Joy literally changes not only our point of view but our entire physiological, psychological, and spiritual make up.

Joy has the power to shift our minds and hearts in a way that

1) opens us up to see things differently. As our vision or perspective changes and widens, so does our awareness, our ability to see possibilities, to be more creative, and to change our sense of value about difficulties and impediments.

2) Joy can also help us see things in a more unified way, see ourselves as part of a bigger picture, and help increase our trust of ourselves, others, and the world around us.

Whether our joy erupts from gratitude, positivity, feeling at one with our surroundings or with our creator, or a feeling of peacefulness and contentment, the more we experience joy in our lives, the more we will see our lives in terms of a grand, exciting adventure rather than a series of hardships and difficulties.

As Jesus assured us, it’s all in the way we “see.” So, how do you “flip your ratio” from stress to joy? From fear to joy?

That’s where Jesus comes in.

In our scripture for today, Jesus had been speaking and teaching from one of the disciple’s boats. When evening came, he asked them to start rowing to the other side, so they, along with other boats, set out across the Sea (Lake) of Galilee. Meanwhile, exhausted from the day, Jesus lay down on a cushion in the boat’s stern and fell deeply asleep.

When a storm rose up, the disciples began panicking. The wind whisked the boat about and waves beat against it, so that the boat was taking in water. Jesus continued sleeping. I love this, don’t you? I mean sleep at the wheel. I can’t imagine Jesus snoring (but I digress).

Meanwhile, the disciples were becoming more and more distressed. At last, they woke him up, incredulous that he was sleeping through the storm and not equally distressed.

Jesus calmed the wind and sea, and they experienced instant calm. He then said to them, “Why are you afraid?” “Where is your faith?”

The disciples still had not come to a point in which they were sure of who Jesus was, secure in what he could do, and unsurprised at the power of God that flowed from his presence. To them, he was still just their teacher.

Now, this is important for us to understand, just as it was important for Jesus’ disciples to understand.

We don’t gain assurance in our faith from believing that Jesus was merely a talented teacher, a good person, a gifted prophet, or a wise leader.

We gain assurance and experience joy like no other in our lives when we suddenly realize who Jesus is –Son of God, Lord of Lords, imbued with all of the creative power of our Creator God, the Saving Grace of the Son, and the continuing authority and change agency of the Holy Spirit. He is the incarnated King of all creation. And he is present with us in our “boats.”

Storms are frightening. But our peace does not come from an absence of storms. It comes from the presence of Jesus within us and around us as we sail on through. Discipleship is a risky business. When we sail the open seas as a disciple and apostle of Jesus, we will encounter storms. No one lives a stormless life. But Jesus is our calm in the midst of the storm and our joy in the midst of the wind.

Sometimes, in our lives, we fear that Jesus does not hear us, that somehow, he is “asleep” to our experiences, our challenges, and our pain. But he is there, and he does care. What we cannot control, he will help us maneuver through. This is cause for joy.

In one of the prayers for Misson in our Evening Prayer service, there is a request to “shield the joyous.” It reads:

Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen

We pray to SHIELD THE JOYOUS… I offer a suggestion on how you might shield your joy through the storm…

Many of you know I like music. And you might be anticipating that I will again break out into an off key song at any moment. Well, I do believe there is a song for just about everything.

I recall as a young girl, I was always humming; humming my way through the ups and downs. I still do it today. I hum so much, I have to tell myself to shut up, be quiet and listen.

BUT I WANT TO OFFER YOU A COUPLE OF SONGS TO HUM WHEN YOU FEEL AS IF YOU ARE LOSING YOUR JOY and you need to Shield your joy

“You’ll Never Walk Alone”, most of you know that one.

“Lean On Me” when you’re not strong. I’ll be your friend..

“You’ve Got a Friend” Call Out my name and you know wherever I am, I’ll come running”.

Bridge Over Troubled Water and in our

Hymnal 370 v6: Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me.”

Think about Jesus singing these to you.

If you believe that Jesus lives with in you, and you think he is asleep, wake him up. Call out his name! Let him sing a song to shield your joy while you hum along.

That’s what we as disciples of Jesus can do:

Call out his name. Hum or sing ourselves back to joy and assurance.

Today, I wish you all of the joy that your heart can hold, and a sense of peace in your heart that only Christ can give. When storms rise up and the winds start to blow, know that the joy in your heart will always sustain you. AMEN

Sunday, June 16, 2024

The Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 6, Year B)

Ezekiel 17:22-24; Psalm 92:1-4,11-14; 2 Corinthians 5:6-10,[11-13],14-17; Mark 4:26-34

The Rev. Clint Brown

Scientists were still 200 years away from discovering that the lowly bacterium Yersinia pestis is the cause of bubonic plague when, in the year 1665, the Great Plague of London ravaged the capital. In a version of “social distancing,” people came streaming out of the urban centers into the countryside in an effort to slow the spread, and the university town of Cambridge was no exception. Among the many displaced students that year was a precocious young man named Isaac – Isaac Newton, that is – still in his early 20s. He was not yet the famous “Sir Isaac Newton” – author of the Principia, president of the Royal Society, bewigged and sitting for official state portraits – but just another college kid being sent home to keep himself occupied as best he could. But to say that he thrived in isolation would be an understatement. The year-plus that Isaac Newton spent away from school during that plague year was one of the most blazingly productive periods of any single human mind ever. In fact, we call it Newton’s annus mirabilis – his “year of wonders.” First, while working out some of the mathematical problems he had been presented with at Cambridge, he laid down the foundations of calculus. Then, as if that wasn’t revolutionary enough, he acquired a few prisms, tinkering with them in a room he specially constructed to block out ambient light, and developed his theories of optics. And standing just a few steps from the door of the house in which he was staying was an apple tree. Yes, that apple tree. And while, as far as we know, no apple ever bonked him on the head, there is the report of one of his assistants in his later years who said that Newton was apt to muse for long hours in the garden, and that one day “it came into his thought that the same power of gravity (which made the apple fall from the tree to the ground) was not limited to a certain distance from the earth but must extend much farther than was usually thought.” And so, Newton conjectured, Why not as high as the moon or the stars? And so, the theory of gravity was born.

The reason I am giving this little portrait of Newton, of this especially fruitful time in his life, is that today’s readings are all about growth. “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow…first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head” (Mark 4:26-28). Growth, we are to understand, takes time and it takes care, and if to persevere in spiritual growth is what we are all called to – to enlarge and deepen our faith – I’m hard-pressed to think of a better model of persistence (or brilliance) in the application of oneself than Isaac Newton.  

We have, you see, not only an obligation to live, but also to live well. One is bound to ask from time to time, Am I doing all that can be done? Am I occupying myself with the things that truly matter? Or am I somehow wasting this precious gift of life? As Christians, we grow chiefly by four means: prayer, reading the Bible, doing works of charity, and regularly attending church. These are in no particular order, but they are the four essentials. Prayer. Bible. Service. Church. To be deficient in any one means that we are not growing as we should. God has told us both who we are and what we are to do. In the first case, God has told us that we belong to Him and owe Him everything. In the second case, God has given us both a written Word, in the Bible, and a Living Word in the face of Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the book we read to know how to live, and if we accept this – the posture of being a disciple of Christ – we save ourselves an enormous amount of frustration trying to figure everything out on our own. We do not have to reinvent the wheel. We can live in the assurance that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:17), and that we will be growing in the right direction if we are growing in Christ.  

The Hebrew word for “soul” – nephesh – imagines something quite different from the Greek psyche. We are used to conceiving of the soul as a nonphysical, immortal essence that is somehow trapped within us, but that is not what the Hebrew mind imagined. “Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a nephesh” (Genesis 2:7) A nephesh is a compound – an indivisible unit of body amalgamated with soul– and so personhood, to the Hebrew, is less like a geyser, bubbling up from mysterious sources below, as it is a bucket waiting to be filled from above. A nephesh is a body stretching out for what it longs for. “As the deer longs for flowing streams, so my nephesh longs for you, O God” (Psalm 42:1). If we are going to grow, if we are going to fulfill our longing, then we must turn like the flowers which turn to face the sun. And the sun is God. In the final analysis, everything depends on starting with the right premises. Just ask Isaac Newton.

Sunday, June 9, 2024

Pentecost – Proper 6

Genesis 3: 8-15; Psalm 130, 11-14; 2 Corinthians 4:13-5:1; Mark 3:20-35

The Rev. James M.L. Grace

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

                Today is the ninth of June – a regular day, for most people.  But not a regular day for my friend Mark Beebe.  Today Mark Beebe will call and leave a voicemail (yes he still does that) not of words, but of song.  The song Mark Beebe will sing onto my voicemail today is, fittingly entitled, “9th of June” a song by a Houston heavy metal band from the 1990s called the “Galactic Cowboys.”  Singing this song to one another is something Mark and I have done on the 9th of June since the song’s release in 1996.  As uncool and nerdy as it was for Mark and I to do this back in the 90s, it is exponentially so in 2024.   

            “9th of June” is a song about the end of the world – or at least one person’s belief that the world would end on June 9th.  The song has a heavy guitar riff, and a chorus with four part harmonies that sounds like something off a Beatles album.  It may not be for everyone, but Mark and I loved this band – and still do. 

            You may be thinking – rightfully so – what any of this has to do with St. Andrew’s.  More than you may expect.  The lead singer of the Galactic Cowboys, a Houston resident named Ben Huggins, attends Church of the Holy Trinity, a reformed Episcopal Church in Woodland Heights, not far from St. Andrew’s.  Before the church Ben Huggins attends was Church of the Holy Trinity Reformed Episcopal Church, it was previously the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd, where a few of St. Andrew’s current parishioners once attended.  In the 1980s Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd closed and merged with St. Andrew’s while the Rev. John Binford was Rector here.  The Christus Rex which hangs above our altar came from Church of the Good Shepherd.  The stained glass window of Jesus as the Good Shepherd which is in our chapel of the Good Shepherd came from -anyone want to guess – Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd.

            Now you may be thinking – rightfully so - what any of this has to do with our readings from today.  More than you may expect.  While the song “9th of June” ponders a person’s sensational claim that the world would end on a particular day, I would like to suggest that the world already has ended.  Well that sounds an even more ridiculous claim, does it not?  To claim that the world has already ended certainly sounds ridiculous, only if we believe the end of something is really the end of something. 

            When a man and the woman disobeyed God in the Garden of Eden, it seemed to be the end.  Paradise was closed to them, and they had to move out and find somewhere else to live.   Paradise ended for them because they allowed the serpent to confuse them.  The serpent told them that they could be like God if they ate the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (which by the way the Bible never says the fruit was an apple, although it has often been depicted that way.)  It could have been a strawberry or a kiwi.    

            What seemed an end to the man and the woman in the garden was part of God’s plan all along.  God was not surprised by their disobedience and their rebellion.  God did not have to quickly switch to plan “B” once they disobeyed God.  I believe God knew they would rebel and make bad decisions.  Their end was part of God’s plan all along, so that a better beginning could occur.

            Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd closed – it was the end of that parish, or at least it seemed it was, until it became a new church that would draw people like Ben Huggins, and many more. 

            Even if the world ends (on the 9th of June) or some other day, it will just be the beginning of something else, because God is not a God of endings, but beginnings. God creates.  People disobey and misunderstand God.  God knows that, and expects that, and loves creation in spite of its rebelliousness. 

            I will close with one more ending – the ending of this sermon.  Aren’t you all happy to hear that!  Two thousand years ago when a man died on a cross just outside Jerusalem, many thought it was the end.   It was – for a day or so.  Until God created, again: light out of darkness, life out of death, hope out of despair. A reminder for all of us that whatever we think is coming to an end for us (our lives, our marriage, our job, our world, our relevancy) – that’s just an illusion.  The ending is merely the beginning of something better than any of us could imagine – on the 9th of June, or any other day.   AMEN.

Sunday, June 2, 2024

 Trinity Sunday

2 Corinthians 4:5-12

The Rev. Canon Joann Saylors

The psalm appointed for Trinity Sunday last week, Psalm 29, included the words, “The voice of the Lord makes the oak trees writhe.” I couldn’t help but think about the May 26 storms only ten days before. I don’t know that a derecho is the voice of God, but the imagery of the oak trees writhing and giving up their branches, or even their lives, was a poetic and striking one.

It was a pine tree that landed on our house, pine branches and cones that mostly filled our yard, but there were smaller oaks that writhed as well. We’ve had all the same adventures as the rest of you in the days since – insurance, traffic, power outages, lots more storms.

I tell you this not because I want you to feel sorry for me – after all, we are very fortunate to have resources to deal with all of this – but because of a conversation I had a few days after the storm that I’ve been sitting with. One of my colleagues is especially good at reminding our team to pray at the beginning of meetings, a gift I seem to lack. As we named our prayer requests prior to our one-on-one meeting, I offered up what was on my heart in that moment. I have been praying for everyone affected by the storms all around the country, but that day I was especially thinking of all the transportation workers out there directing traffic and trying to get the traffic lights back on, as well as all the small businesses, especially family-owned restaurants, who were hit hard by the long days without power. The loss of revenue and inventory in a restaurant with very narrow margins is potentially devastating. So we prayed for that and our other concerns, and we went on with our meeting.

I didn’t think much about that particular prayer until later, when I got a very surprising text from that same colleague. “I’m impressed by how you’re handling the damage to your home. It’s inspiring to be praying for businesses and traffic lights when you’ve been affected personally. Thank you for sharing that witness.”

I tell you that not because I want to imply I did something amazing or was an extra-good Christian that day. Neither of those are true. I tell you because I was surprised that praying for others, even in the midst of whatever might be happening in my own life, something this colleague undoubtedly does more often and more faithfully than I do, was worthy of mention, much less affirmation.

And then came the readings for today, including Paul’s words to the church at Corinth. “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.”

Most of us, I’d wager, have at some point felt ourselves one of those things: afflicted, perplexed, persecuted, or struck down. Maybe not because a tree fell on our house, but we were afflicted when we lost a job, persecuted when we got dumped, struck down when we failed a test. Afflicted by disease, our own or a loved one’s, persecuted by the church or another institution, struck down when our car was totaled through someone else’s bad driving.  Maybe we were just perplexed by the human condition when we read the news.

 And yet, here we are, even making sacrifices to come. We bring resilience, hope, compassion, even joy. We come here to worship God, to give thanks, to offer our gifts to others. We share stories of God showing up – in the help from and for our neighbors, in the kind words of friends and strangers, in those coincidences and miracles we can’t really explain.

We come here to pray. Whatever our circumstances, we pray for others as well as ourselves. Whether we speak fervently, whether we’re saying the words by rote, whether we feel them or not, together we are praying and God is listening. And how is it that we are able to do that?

It’s not because we are amazing or extra-good Christians, although some of you undoubtedly are. Praying outward while struggling inward is a gift from God. “We do not proclaim ourselves; we proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord.”

Paul talks about carrying the death of Jesus within us.  Being willing to face our challenges and make sacrifices for what we believe in, just like Jesus did. 

I’d imagine we all have days when it feels like cracks keep spreading across our lives, cheap clay jars about to shatter. Maybe in today’s world it’s the cracks across the face of our phones. But even or maybe especially when we feel that broken, God can transform our struggles into something beautiful.  Our cracks can become openings for God's light to shine through, a beacon of hope for ourselves and others.

It’s our own cracks that create empathy for the people struggling around us, the ability to imagine the cracks in the lives of others. But it's the light of Christ shining through those cracks that gives us the will and the words to pray for them.

Friday was the Feast of the Visitation. After the angel Gabriel had announced to Mary that she was to become the mother of God, Mary went from Galilee to Judea to visit her kinswoman Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist. During that visit Mary proclaimed the Magnificat, a song proclaiming God’s glory in transforming the world through the Messiah. The proud will be brought low, the humble will be lifted up, the hungry will be fed, and the rich will go without.

So often we see images of Mary as radiant with the joy of becoming the God-bearer. I can’t imagine that was all she felt during her pregnancy. In addition to the joy of being chosen, I expect there was shock, followed by fear, confusion, and anxiety. She faced the same challenges of all pregnancies, adjusting to a body changing over the months, the physical tiredness and awkwardness, accompanied by psychological and emotional ups and downs. So I imagine the relief of finally being able to share those feelings with Elizabeth, facing challenges of her own.

Perhaps it was confusion of feelings around what could have felt a mixed blessing that gave her the words to pray. She wasn’t carrying the death of Jesus, not yet, but she was carrying Jesus himself. And maybe that gave her a deep connection to the lowly, the hungry, and the poor which burst out in a hymn of justice for them.

Looking back, my colleague’s identification of my prayers for others as a witness wasn’t really about me. It was more about Jesus at the heart of our prayers as the witness to God’s love, carried by all of us in our love of God and love for our neighbors. We are not so cracked that we can’t carry Jesus. Never so broken we can’t show his light to the world. AMEN.

Sunday, May 26, 2024

The First Sunday after Pentecost: Trinity Sunday (Year B)

Isaiah 6.1-8; Psalm 29 or Canticle 13; Romans 8.12-17; John 3.1-17

The Rev. Clint Brown

When it comes to explaining the Trinity, I think we all know that we can go as simple or as complex as we wish. There are, on the one hand, several formulas and images that tradition has passed down to us that can help our understanding, or you can dive into the depths with Augustine and Athanasius and all the other great thinkers. If you’re so inclined, you can wrestle for yourself with all the difficulties raised in a thousand hair-splitting ways, reliving the controversies that produced the Chalcedonian Definition and the Creeds, agonizing, for example, over the difference that a single letter “i” can make in deciding whether to speak of the homoousios or homoiousios within the internal life of God; and, before you know it, you might find your head spinning to such a degree that you might well say with Aquinas: “I can write no more. All that I have written seems like straw.” At some point in the writing of this sermon I, too, found myself standing at the brink, and – I think, wisely – I decided to pull back. So this morning, I think the way through the minefield will be to simply stick with the readings we have from Isaiah and Romans and John, for, each in their own way, offers us a portrait of the Trinity.

We begin with Isaiah. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple” (Isaiah 6.1). And then the prophet goes on to describe a most awesome scene – earthquake, fire, and smoke – and above the din and swoosh of the seraphims’ wings, penetrating the thick and heavy atmosphere, the other-worldly creatures bellow in concert:

“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Heaven’s Armies!

His majestic splendor fills the entire earth!”

(Isaiah 6.3, NET translation)

Here is an image for you…of the awesome, the unknowable God, beyond all categories or powers of description, grand and cosmic, that aspect of God which to fully know would be for us unbearable – even, fatal. This is the “divine other” spoken of by the mystics, the mystērium tremendum et fascināns: the mystērium tremendum (“mystery that repels”), in which the dreadful, fearful, and overwhelming aspect of God prevails, and, at the same time, the mystērium fascinōsum (“mystery that attracts”), to which we humans are irresistibly drawn. As we discover God in other ways – more, shall we say, approachable ways – we must always remember that behind them all lies this disturbing, dreadful, unsettling image of the deity that we can never bring under our control, that will always remain “other,” reminding us of how small we are and how great is the mystery to which our religious feeling is directed.

And so it is with some relief that we turn to John, leaving behind, for now, the throne room of God, where, to stay any longer, might spell our complete undoing, to encounter God in a person – indeed, the second Person of the Trinity – the man Jesus of Nazareth. In this little vignette from John’s Gospel, we witness a fascinating exchange with a teacher of Israel named Nicodemus in which Jesus tries to make plain for him what is obscure and which includes what is, probably, the most famous verse of the Bible. But, for our purposes today, I only wish to point out that, at its most basic level, it is a conversation with none other than God, face to face. This, of course, is the great innovation of Christianity, the audacity to declare that God has once been one of us, a man who could be spoken to, who could walk beside you, who could laugh heartily at a good joke, who enjoyed a fine dinner every bit as much as you or me; that we have come to know and understand that this particular human was at the same time something more than human, one in substance and in stature with the God who had been revealed to Israel – “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father.” Though a man, Jesus was God…yet as a God-Man knowing our weaknesses, sharing our sufferings, partaking of our joys – above all, manifesting in his person what a human life fully alive to God looks like. Here is no far away God – impassive, imposing, unknowable. Here is God made approachable, fully us, now opening up for us the possibility of imitation. The God who is beyond all categories, all knowledge, all description has come down and become one of us, not to condemn us, not to point an accusing finger, but to save us (John 3.17), by showing us by the example of his life how we ought to live. He means for us to be like him.

And for that we turn to the third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, which is that aspect of God that represents God’s everlasting immanence, his “always-here-ness,” that testifies to the fact that behind what we see and touch, what we can observe and measure, permeating everything, there is a reality even more real than this one – the world of spirit.

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. (Genesis 1.1-2)

The very first words of the Bible assert the truth that ever since the beginning the Spirit has been present – supporting, sustaining, energizing the universe, the invisible Hand of God making possible all that is visible. There has never been a time when the Spirit was absent; and, even now, the Spirit is present as God’s creative agency, re-creating us and the world. It is this same Spirit – this same power that holds galaxies in motion and sustains the universe – that makes it possible for us to participate in the working out of God’s purposes, here and now, and to be ourselves transformed. “For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God” (Romans 8.14). Our destiny is a spiritual destiny because we are, ultimately, spiritual beings just as God is Spirit.

And so, you see, God is many things – Mystery that is far off, Savior that has come near, ever-present Sustainer undergirding everything and witnessing to our true nature – that is the great truth of the Trinity – multiple aspects by means of which God is made known. And yet, God is not many, but Unitary – Single – One – embracing and comprehending us and all that there is – that also is the great truth of the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity answers both the questions “Who?” and “How?” To the question, “Who?” the Christian answers “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” And to the question “How?” the Christian answers, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” That is all we might ever be able to say, but that is enough. Let us pray.

We adore you, most Holy Trinity, we worship you, and thank you that you have revealed to us this glorious Mystery. Grant that we, persevering in this Faith, and loving you above all things, may see you and glorify you eternally, Whom we confess here, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, one God in Three Persons, Blessed for evermore. Amen.

Sunday, May 19, 2024

Pentecost 

Acts 2: 1-21; Psalm 104: 25-35,37; Romans 8:22-27; John 15: 26-27; 16: 4b-15

The Rev. James M.L. Grace

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

Today we hear words from the Apostle Paul in his letter to the church in Rome.  Paul wrote this letter, most likely, from the city of Corinth sometime around the year 58 CE, approximately 20-25 years after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.  The reason why Paul wrote the letter (or if you want to get fancy the “epistle”) to Rome is because he wanted to introduce himself to some of the small, emerging Christian communities there. 

Paul has yet to visit Rome on his journeys around the Mediterranean, and his other motive with this letter to Christian communities in Rome is- fundraising.  He is asking for funds because he intends to visit Spain and begin establishing church communities there.  While this letter is being sent to Roman churches by a carrier, who we believe to be a woman named Phoebe, Paul is on a boat sailing from Corinth to Jerusalem.  Why?

Paul is going to Jerusalem carrying with him funds donated by his gentile congregations in nearby Macedonia and Achaia intended for the temple in Jerusalem, which will, sadly, soon be destroyed by the Roman Empire as part of their attempt to suppress a Jewish revolt against Rome.  Paul is optimistic that the funds he is bringing to the Temple will help mend some broken relationships between him and other apostles who view his ministry with non-Jews (gentiles) with suspicion and grievance. 

Paul’s gift to the temple doesn’t go so well, because – and scripture is vague about this – it appears that Paul brings some of his non Jewish (gentile) friends into an area of the Temple that was restricted for Jews only.  This incites a riot in the Temple which results in Paul’s arrest.  The result of Paul’s arrest is that he will not ever make it to Spain.  Instead, he is imprisoned, and eventually sent to Rome where his story in the Book of Acts ends with Paul under house arrest.  While the details of Paul’s death are uncertain, tradition suggests that Paul was martyred in Rome, during the reign of Emperor Nero, around 64 CE.

Which brings us back to this letter – Romans, the letter to churches in Rome Paul sent from Corinth, on his way to Jerusalem, where he is arrested and sent to Rome.  Confusing, right?  Perhaps not as confusing as what Paul wrote about in the excerpt from Romans today.  In these few, brief verses from Romans today, we encounter Paul at his very best.

In these verses, Paul is describing the world as it is today – equating it with a woman about to give birth.  If you have ever given birth yourself, or been with someone giving birth, you understand that it is…painful.  The labor pains Paul describes are the labor pains of life.  Things not going the way we might have hoped they would – like Paul’s collection he brought to the Temple that he thought would mend broken friendships and instead got him arrested. 

Paul writes that even though the whole creation is groaning, at the same time we have the “first fruits” of the Holy Spirit.  In the Old Testament, what I prefer to call the Hebrew Bible, what was harvested first were the “first fruits” – these first fruits were the first portion of a harvest that were offered to God as a way of showing respect and gratitude for blessings received.  Paul takes the idea of “first fruits” and applies it to the Holy Spirit – implying that the Holy Spirit is a first fruit offering of God to us.

The Holy Spirit, Paul says, is a foretaste of an eternal banquet promised for all of us.  The role of a Christian is to live patiently expectant in a world that is groaning and in labor, a world where things rarely go the way we may hope or expect.  If anyone has credit to write about being patiently expectant when things go wrong, it is the Apostle Paul, who wrote several of the New Testament epistles from inside a prison cell. 

I don’t believe Paul’s imprisonment hindered his faith.  Quite the opposite – I think his faith grew deeper because of it.  “We hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience,” Paul writes in Romans.  Paul knew the Spirit was given to him.  Paul knew that the Holy Spirit would help him in his weakness.  He knew that human weakness and uncertainty were the very place the Holy Spirit could do some of its best work.  AMEN.

Sunday, May 12, 2024

7 Easter

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26; Psalm 1;1 John 5: 9-13; John 17: 6-19

The Rev. James M.L. Grace

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

About six years ago, a young man visited St. Andrew’s early one Sunday morning.  He was barefoot, had shoulder length hair, a beard, and was dressed in tan pants and a brown shirt, and he reminded me of the cartoon character “Shaggy” from Scooby Doo. 

I asked the young man his name, and he introduced himself as Eric.  It was clear to me that Eric was experiencing some sort of chemically induced high, and that he had been up all night.  Eric did not seem well, either emotionally or psychologically.

He also had an unleashed dog sitting with him on the narthex stairs, which prompted me to call the constable, who arrived and began asking Eric questions. The constable confirmed that  that Eric took LSD the night before, and at some point, had lost his girlfriend, who the police later found wandering 610 on foot – like Eric, also high.

Eventually, four police cars were in front of the church on Heights Blvd, and in the midst of all these uniformed personnel, a woman walking her dog stopped, looked at Eric, and the police surrounding him.  This woman, observing all that was happening outside the church doors, started to tell me about her grown, adult son.   

Without any shame in her voice, she told me with all honesty that she has an adult son, just like Eric.  This woman’s son, she told me, had been homeless for nearly ten years, and suffered from a debilitating addiction to crack cocaine.  She went on to tell me that she had tried everything she could possibly do to help her son, but to no avail.  She could not help him anymore if he was unwilling to help himself. 

It was obvious to me that this woman had no interest in enabling her son’s drug addiction, and that she had drawn noticeably clear boundaries to protect herself.  Growing up, my mom had four household rules: (1) no drugs (2) no babies (3) do not call her if you are in jail, and (4) no dogs on the couch.  My older brother learned the hard way my mom really meant what she said when one night he called her from jail (ignoring rule 3), asking if she would bail him out.  She did not, a story I enjoyed reminding my older brother of from time to time.

In my eighteen years as a parent, if I have learned anything, it is that there is nothing simple about parenting.  I experienced that in my own home as a child, I saw it on the front doors of our church six years ago with Eric, I heard it from the woman telling me about her own son, and I see it in my own house. 

One of the tenets of Buddhism, I believe, is that the great cause of human suffering is our attachment to things.  Attachment creates suffering.  Parents become attached to their young children, their children grow up and detach from their parent, and if you’re not ready for it, it can hurt.    

Like many things in life, Mother’s Day is a holiday with a shadow.  Underneath the flowery cards, champagne brunches, and gifts, there can be a lot of unresolved pain, for both children and mothers alike.  Mother’s Day can carry a lot of baggage for those who grew up without a mother, or for those who grew up with an emotionally unavailable mother, or for those of us whose mothers are no longer with us. 

Life is a moving target – there are no guarantees and nothing (except for God) is certain.  Eric randomly showing up on our church’s doorstep six years ago is but one example of how random life can be.  I am thankful Eric found this church, because even in his gibberish, he reminded me that God’s kingdom is open to everyone.  God sees no difference between the person who is nicely dressed in the church pew versus some barefoot, drugged out guy.  We are all equally loved by God.  And to be honest, Eric was not that different from any of us here today.  He brought all his problems (which were obvious) to our church door.  But we do the same thing.  We bring our problems here, too.  It is just easier for us to hide them from each other than it was for Eric.

I recognize that this sermon does not really have anything to do with any of our readings for today.  I am not sure what this is except perhaps a love letter to the parents who raised you.  Your parents, who, in spite of their own limitations, did what they thought best. 

I have no idea where Eric is today, or if he is even still alive.  The woman who told me about her homeless son, I have not seen in six years.  I do hope that there are people out there still who love them both.  If there isn’t, then there isn’t.  There is something better.  There is a God who looks at Eric and that woman’s son seeing not unmanageable drug addicts, but instead sees his children  – just like you and me.  It is said that God has no grandchildren – only children.  If God is our true parent (and I believe God is) then God knows Eric and that woman’s homeless son.  They are children of God, their names written upon God’s very heart, next to yours.  AMEN.

Sunday, May 5, 2024

Easter 6 (Year B)

Acts 10:44-48; Psalm 98; 1 John 5:1-6; John 15:9-17

The Rev. Clint Brown

To jog my memory from high school biology, I looked up what are the seven characteristics of all living things. The first might strike you as a bit alarming. It is dying. Dying is one of the characteristics of a living thing. But along the way, from birth to death, living things must also do many other things. They must move, reproduce, grow, respond to stimuli, and, finally, metabolize and synthesize energy; or, as we more commonly put it, eat and digest. It is not for nothing that we say, “You are what you eat,” because that is precisely what we are. We are made of whatever we give our bodies to build and repair itself.

“Abide in my love,” says Jesus. “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” It is not just that we need good nutrition for our bodies; it is just as important for our souls. And so, if you’ll indulge me, I would like to take the next few minutes to make this case…for something, in fact, that you have already shown yourself quite capable of doing, and that is that one of the keys to good spiritual health is to make it a habit to regularly go to church.

To begin with, did you know that it is a scientific fact that going to church is good for you? Study after study, year after year, confirm the remarkable mental health benefits of regular church attendance. Less anxiety, less worry, less fear. It’s not that people who go to church never suffer from any of these things or are somehow able to walk through the raindrops, it’s just that when we consume a regular diet of church we have a larger story in which to understand our own. This is our hope, and as Edgar Cayce once wrote: “For as long as there is life, there is hope. [And] so long as there is hope, there is possibility…” We set our hope on Christ, and Christ opens up for us possibilities that would not be possible without him. Church is for that.

And church is also good for families (my second point). It introduces our children to God and the things of God. I have known many instances when a parent has confided in me that they had for a long time put God in a box on a shelf, forgetting all about him, until realizing one day that they suddenly had little humans they were responsible for. “Train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray” (Proverbs 22.6), assures the Book of Proverbs. This is as much a responsibility as any of the other responsibilities we feel towards our children – to clothe them, feed them, shelter and protect them, and see that they get the best education possible. All of these are important, but there are spiritual needs, as well, and getting the kids to church is attending to those spiritual needs.

Third, going to church means community. While salvation may be individual, worship certainly is not. It requires others. In fact, did you know that we priests are absolutely forbidden to celebrate Holy Communion alone? It is actually a cause for discipline, as far back as the Reformation, to make “private Eucharists.” The reason is that this is just not the way we understand the sacrament. The making of Eucharist is a fundamentally communal action, an expression of the whole Body of Christ, and it is simply not possible for any one particular member of that body to do it alone. What we are saying by gathering together this morning is that we Christians are all in this together, inseparably so. We need each other’s companionship. We need each other’s encouragement when times are hard. And, yes, we also need to learn how to get along. It is only by having to deal with each other that we learn the most important thing – how to love each other. You might think that there has never been a time when culture wars and tribalism and partisanship has been as bad as they are now, but that is not true. Conflict is what happens as soon as two people have to share a water well or a road to market or discover when they got to church that someone was sitting in their pew. Dispute and disagreement is nothing new to us, and while it doesn’t get the press it should or the notice it deserves, it is nonetheless the case that through the ages Christians of all persuasions have knelt together at the altar rail to affirm that, at the end of the day, we are all sinners simply trying to do our best. Sin and sinfulness are the great levelers. This realization, also, is a gift of community.

Sometimes I hear people say that they can find God in nature and don’t need to go to church. The beauty of the forest or of the seashore, the majesty of mountains, the roar of a crashing wave – all this is the cathedral of nature, they say. Or why not just read my Bible on my own? This thinking is not misguided. I do not wish to minimize it. But I do feel that both of these postures suffer from the same thing – they are simply not enough. The danger of being off alone with God, whether in the cathedral of nature or at your desk, is that you are likely to create a God in your own image, who likes what you like and hates what you hate. This God of your creation is, of course, very acceptable and not very confrontational, because this God conforms to your expectations. The value of coming to church is to be confronted with the bumper rails of tradition, to hear the good and pleasing bits of Holy Scripture right alongside the challenging and uncomfortable, so that together we may take a stab at discerning truth. Not only is going it alone selling yourself short, it may very well cause you a great deal of harm.

But I think that the overwhelming good of going to church comes down to this: going to church requires something. It is active. It means choosing to make your faith a priority by simply walking through the door. Here is as good a place to start as any in that struggle all of us have to put God first. The great Phillips Brooks said: “Character may be manifested in the great moments, but it is made in the small ones.” You could just as well say the same thing about faith. Heroic faith does not arise in any one moment, it is something practiced and built in a million smaller ones, when the choice is made to continue to trust despite all evidence to the contrary; when we do the right thing in a moment of moral testing; and, as I am suggesting, in the mundane choice to get out of the house and get to church. While going to church can be as meaningful or as empty as any exercise of spiritual discipline, I submit that the decision to go regularly to church is at least a choice to prioritize your spiritual health and well-being. In my experience, God takes it from there. “Abide in my love,” says Jesus, and Jesus wants you in church. Amen.

Sunday, April 21, 2024

Easter 4

Acts 4:5-12; Psalm 23; 1 John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18

The Rev. Clint Brown

If there’s one thing we can know for sure about a sheep, it’s that it can and will get lost. In all the famous parables that Jesus tells about sheep, this idea goes uncontested. It’s just a given. The notion that one sheep will wander off from ninety-nine others does not strike us in the least as absurd or unreasonable. (We might, in fact, wonder that it’s only one sheep and not more!). Of course, what we are meant to understand is that we are the sheep, and so it is worth bearing in mind all the many different ways in which we can wander off and be lost. Certainly, there is the theological sense – of wandering off the true path and losing our way; sin can make us do that. But there are other ways. You can feel lost in company or feel left out or out of place on your first day of school. You can feel lost in a crowd or lost in busyness. You can even get lost in your thoughts. My favorite is getting lost in wonder. But not all “lostness” is created equal. Some “lostness” is of a more tragic type. The reality of being lost in an addiction or compulsion, for instance, is especially tragic…when, for a length of time, you have lost your very self: your identity – your confidence – your certainty. Perhaps, and this is the most tragic of all, there may be someone sitting here today who has lost their hope or, worse, their faith. So I want all of you to hear very clearly what I am about to say next. The good news about lostness is this: that to be found, you must first be lost. To be found you must first be lost.

Friends, I can say with absolute confidence that none of us sitting here today are in a position to say that we have got all of life figured out. No matter how full of confidence you may be about your present circumstances – or lack thereof – we are all, in a very real sense, still “lost.” “For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Corinthians 13:23). Being in possession of only some of the facts (and, of those, we are only partially able to put them all together) – this is our true condition. So here’s to figuring it out. Here’s to cultivating a posture of humility toward all that we think we know. Here’s to being lost; to being on the way; to clearing a path through the underbrush; to stepping in mudholes; to taking the road less traveled; to questing, seeking, asking, doubting, messing up, wandering off, feeling completely out of our depth, taking a risk, and doing it over and over again.

I tell you, the supreme irony of any of Jesus’ parables is the identity of the truly lost. At first, one thinks it’s the sheep, but it turns out that the truly lost are the Pharisees and scribes. They are the ones who do not see the point, who are actually blind to the truth. Which one of you, Jesus asks – meaning the Pharisees and scribes – which one of you would take the risk to leave the safety of the sheepfold and venture out to rescue the one lost sheep and exchange the known for the unknown? Which one of you, Pharisees and scribes, would have the vision to see that the point of living is not absolute certainty and security but, rather, absolute confidence in God? In this telling, the heroic character in the story is not the ninety-nine righteous who dared nothing, did nothing, risked nothing, but, rather, that lone, intrepid sheep. The one who endured the outrage of the naysayers. The one that asked the hard, penetrating questions. The one that messed up – bad – maybe ten times, maybe a hundred times, who knows? but who, in the end, came to his senses. The sheep who risked their faith in their search for truth.

I recall a conversation I once had with a person I was meeting for the first time, and in the process of introducing myself I mentioned that I was an Episcopalian. “Oh,” this person said, “y’all are the ones who let everybody in”…and I thought, Why yes! Exactly! That’s exactly what we do. And that’s exactly what I think this whole enterprise of church and faith and Christianity is all about. I think Jesus is calling us all – all the wanderers, and especially the doubters – anyone who seeks him authentically. He lets everybody in, and I hope we Episcopalians can always wear such a badge proudly and be best known for doing the same.

Jesus is the Good Shepherd – that is our theme today – and the Good Shepherd is for all of us – lost and found and everything in between. The Good Shepherd lays down his life for you. The Good Shepherd loves you. The Good Shepherd respects you enough to wait for your responding love in return. Because we are all prodigal sons. The prodigal lives in each of us. We are all wandering sheep, but this is not our fault, it’s just our nature. And the good news is that that’s okay, because we cannot be found, unless, first, we’re lost.

If you’re here today, it’s because you’re a seeker. I, too, am a seeker. But this lostness that compels our seeking is not, finally, the point. A state of lostness is not meant to be where we stay. It is not our destiny; it is merely our means. The extraordinarily good news for us both today is that the God that we seek has already come near. He can be found. Jesus Christ is his name, and he is seeking after you. Which means that the only way you can be lost is if you want to be. Amen.

Sunday, April 14, 2024

3 Easter

Acts 3: 12-19; Psalm 4;1 John 3: 1-7; Luke 24: 36b-48

The Rev. James M.L. Grace

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

It is not often that I preach on a psalm, however today I am.  In looking at today’s psalm – psalm 4, it appears that the author of the psalm was clearly tempted by at least two things which can easily tempt us today.  It is these upon these two temptations expressed in the psalm that I would like to build today’s sermon.  

The first temptation the author of the psalm confronts is one found in verse 2, where the author says, “You mortals, how long will you dishonor my glory.”  What is the author saying?  He or she is expressing concern about their reputation – what other people think and say about them.  Maybe the author is reacting to some personal attack or confrontation.  

Regardless, the psalm is clearly a lament – it is the author’s cry out to God for justice when people speak ill of either him or her.  So, a moment of personal disclosure.  I am a people pleaser. In some ways that is a positive attribute.  Many clergy, it seems are people pleasers.  Clergy want to be liked or arguably they need to be liked, because our system is set up in such a way that if we are not liked by you all, there is a financial impact when stewardship season rolls around, as it will in six months.

Before attending seminary, I went to a gathering for people interested in the priesthood.  I felt like I was the youngest person in the room and was so intimidated.  My feelings were not helped much when the facilitator said, and I quote, “if you are praying about becoming a priest, you better have a thick skin, because people will attack you from all directions.”

Maybe not the best way to sell priesthood as a vocation?  As a people pleaser, I wasn’t sure how to respond to what she said.  So I just went to seminary.  After I was ordained, and placed as a curate in my first parish, the Rector said to me other words that I also remember: “Jimmy, if everybody likes you, you’re not doing your job well.”  In the almost twenty years of ordained life, my skin has gotten really thick. 

I have no concept of what my reputation is here, but I will tell you how I choose to manage it.  I do it this way - if I am going to say something about a person who is not in the room, I make sure I speak as if the person were in the room standing next to me.  That goes for everyone in my life – family, friends, parishioners, etc.  In keeping this as a daily practice, I do not dishonor the glory of any person, and I don’t have to be concerned about my reputation.

The second temptation the author of the psalm expresses is found in verses 6-7, where the author writes: “Many are saying, ‘Oh that we might see better times!’  Lift up the light of your countenance upon us, O Lord.” The author is describing a temptation and concern over material possessions, particularly a fixation upon others seeming to have more than we do. 

I am most prone to this temptation when I compare my insides with someone’s outsides.  For me it can happen in a half of a second, and here’s how it works.  I am walking down the sidewalk, completely content, and feeling joyful.  A convertible drives by and in it are a husband and wife, and two smiling children in the backseat.  In less than a second my brain makes up a story about that smiling family in the convertible.  They have more money than I do, they are happier than I am, their kids are going to better schools, they work a less stressful job than I do, and they are just better people all around.  In less than a second, I move from joy and contentment to despair. 

Now – a caveat – if I am spiritually fit and in right relationship with God, the convertible with the family in it drives by, I notice it, think nothing of it, and thank God for a beautiful day.  It is only when I am pursuing a deliberate manufacture of misery or choosing to swim in self-pity that I fall into this temptation to compare what I have with what someone else has.  “Comparison is the thief of joy,” Theodore Roosevelt once wisely noted. 

Psalm 4 is about much more than temptation over reputation or what people own. Ultimately, the psalm argues the answer to both of these temptations is simply to trust God, always.  Today’s psalm presents a powerful teaching, which is that only in God alone do we find ultimate security and peace.  When we place ourselves within God’s peace, we lose interest in comparison and our reputation.  God removes these temptations, if we trust God to handle that work for us.  

So, if you are concerned about reputation or what you do or do not own, you may be spiritually unfit, and not in right relationship with God.  I promise you that no amount of reputational posturing or acquiring will get you into God’s peace.  To enter God’s peace, you have to grow up, and let go of childhood temptations, which do nothing but arrest your spiritual development.  Growing into God’s peace not only liberates us from temptation, it frees us to live as vibrant and spiritually awakened people.  The kind of  people God desires us to be.  AMEN.

Sunday, April 8, 2024

Easter 2

Acts 4:32-35; Psalm 133; 1 John 20: 19-31; John 20: 19-31

The Rev. James M. L. Grace

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

                Do you ever have one of those days where you wake up, and you know before your feet even hit the floor, that you just do not have much energy for the day ahead?  Is that a familiar feeling?  The feeling that once you get out of bed, you cannot wait until the day ends and you can place your head back on the pillow again to go to sleep?  Some days are like that for us.  That is true for the church as well. 

In some churches, the Sunday after Easter is kind of like one of those days.  It typically has less energy, and often fewer people, than Easter Sunday.  It is on a Sunday like today where parishioners might approach me and say “wasn’t Easter Sunday great?”  I interpret that statement as a polite way of saying “today is kind of a downer, the sermon isn’t as good as the one on Easter was, the energy in the room doesn’t quite feel the same.”  When the mundane of the present fails to match the grandeur of the past, often we tend to look backwards in time.  We look back to find a moment when things were really good.  Like Easter Sunday last week. 

We do this in our families, reminiscing about times when things seemed lighter, easier, maybe even more joyful.  We do this as a nation, looking back to decades past, often romanticizing what was great about those decades while minimizing their challenges. 

Since looking back to the golden age of anything seems to be wired into the human condition, perhaps it should not surprise us to see evidence of this phenomenon in scripture, which we do in today’s reading from Acts.  I would like to reread just a portion of it, in which the author describes the beginning of the Christian movement as “one heart and soul, and no one claimed private ownership of any possessions, but everything they owned was held in common. . . . [t]here was not a needy person among them, for as many as owned lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold. They laid it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.”  Sounds rather good, doesn’t it?

In the Rector’s Book Club today we are talking about the book of Acts, and one of the things I will say is that Acts was written sometime between 90-100 CE, approximately sixty to seventy years after the bodily the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the beginning of what became the Christian movement.  That means the author is looking backward some sixty to seventy years in writing these passages of the early church.  How well do you recall events from sixty years ago? 

Thankfully, we have the epistles in the New Testament, many of which were written much earlier than Acts.  A careful study of each epistle reveals more of the story.  Even a cursory reading of some of the Apostle Paul’s letters reveal that even in its earliest years, the church was often distracted and fledgling.  In contrast to the reading from Acts today, early church communities disagreed over theology, which leaders they should follow, and whether or not they were willing to send the Apostle Paul money again to fund his travels.

Please understand as I share all this with you, my purpose is not at all to discredit, or diminish the book of Acts.  And in full candor , if you just look to the next chapter in Acts (chapter 5) we see things fall apart very quickly when two members of this early movement hold on to some of the proceeds from a piece of property they sold, not laying all of their proceeds at the apostle’s feet, but rather putting a portion of into their own wallet.  I will not tell you the rest of that story, but it is safe to say this gilded period of church history did not last long. 

It is obvious that the early Jesus movement struggled and had growing pains.  But that struggle is not the point of this sermon.  The point of this sermon is that what is described in Acts for us today is not so much a description of the church’s past, but of its future.  I choose to believe that the paragraphs we read from Acts today contain within them as fine a description of heaven as I have ever seen. 

That is why looking back wistfully, often to a past we remember, but never really existed, is a waste of time.  Because in turning to look back, we miss seeing the heaven that is right in front of us.  AMEN.

Maundy Thursday, March 28, 2024

Maundy Thursday (Year B)

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

The Rev. Clint Brown

Pilgrims in their tens of thousands. Pilate, the Roman procurator and Herod Antipas, the tetrarch. Temple priests. Temple guards. Roman soldiers drawn from every quarter of the Empire. Zealots and radicals. Mercenary money changers. Sadducees, Pharisees, “doctors of the law.” Twelve disciples. A faithful band of women. Jesus. There is only one thing that could have brought together such a motley and disparate group to be at the same place at the same time, and that one thing can be summed up in one word: Passover.

Passover, the annual commemoration of God’s deliverance of Israel, had, by Jesus’ day, long since transitioned from a simple house ceremony to a full-fledged festival. Everyone who could was expected to make the journey to Jerusalem and offer their Passover sacrifice in the temple (Deut. 16),[1] and Luke’s Gospel reports that Jesus’s parents did so faithfully every year (Lk. 2:41). Modern estimates put the population of Jerusalem at around this time, conservatively, at something like 25 to 30,000 people, but during the week preceding Passover, that number swelled at least sixfold to 155,000.[2] For a few weeks every spring, the ancient City of David became a raucous, cacophonous mix of multiple languages and dialects, cramped and dusty lanes filled with jostling, irritable strangers, out-of-towners haggling over accommodation, street vendors hawking food, bleating animals meant for sacrifice, curious tourists, men of business unlucky enough to be caught in town, and, of course, the simply pious, shoulder to shoulder with the pickpockets and bandits, zealots and firebrands, and all the other opportunists that these kinds of occasions bring out of the woodwork.

Mixed in and among these teeming throngs were also the elite and privileged classes. One such party was called the Sadducees, and we might think of them as the aristocrats. They had old and distinguished lineages and owned much property. They occupied the majority of the seats on the supreme council, the Sanhedrin, which was presided over by the High Priest, also a Sadducee. The Sadducees, as a collective, were Roman collaborators who had a vested interest in appeasing their overlords even as they secretly despised them. Secondly, there was the party of the Pharisees, whose name is thought to mean something like “the separated.”[3] These were the true believers calling the people back to true religion, who took the view that only a strict return to the Law could save them all. Jesus had many disputes with this group owing to the fact that while they zealously observed of the letter of the Law, they seemed to have forgotten its spirit. Last of all, there were the hereditary priests, the guardians of the temple, who had at their disposal a small contingent of armed guards and who had oversight over the proper conduct of ritual. It was these men who were tasked with the gruesome and ever more formidable task of slaughtering the thousands upon thousands of animals brought to them for sacrifice and then splashing their blood against the sides of the altar. When you think of them, think of blood and sweat and slaughter by the dim, flickering light of torches.

But, as you know, Jerusalem at this time was not only a Jewish city with Jewish preoccupations, it was also a subjugated city, and Palestine was not the home of a proud, autonomous people but a provincial outpost of the Roman Empire, which had, by this time, made a Roman lake out of the Mediterranean. A few days in advance of the Festival, the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, had left his comfortable seaside villa in the city of Caesarea Maritima, the provincial capital, and begrudgingly marched his cohort of soldiers westward to deal with the cranks in Jerusalem. Experience had shown that it was not wise of the Empire to leave unpoliced this annual remembrance of Israel’s past liberation and deliverance, and Rome certainly had no intention of being another Egypt. And so, on the Sunday before Passover, Pilate and his column solemnly processed into the city to the steady and disciplined thump-thump of their drums and with the practiced professionalism of military men. If anyone had thoughts of causing a disturbance this week, by this raw display of power, they were meant to think twice. Without hurry, but also with some relief, the entourage made it to the safety of the Antonia Fortress overlooking the temple and the city. Here Pilate and his soldiers could keep a watchful and wary eye over the city and all that was to come.

But while all these groups and individuals are important players in the drama to come, none of them, we know, will have the starring role this week – that part is reserved for a certain man from Galilee – and it is one of the great ironies of history that at the same time as Pilate and his troops were making their grand but subdued entrance into the city from the west, a quite different procession was approaching the city from the east. At the head of this procession was an altogether different kind of figurehead, the popular and visionary leader of a reform movement within Judaism named Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus, the Gospels tell us, had set his face to come to Jerusalem several days before and now he had arrived to the boisterous acclaim of the crowds who hailed him as their king. But for Jesus, however, there was, as it were, a pall overshadowing all this celebration. Jesus knew that not everything was what it seemed. He knew that by entering the city that day he was entering it for the last time. He knew that he was going to die.

On Thursday night, Jesus gathered his disciples together to share the Passover meal. He washed their feet. He declared to them a new commandment, that they “Love one another.” He blessed and broke the bread and shared with them the cup and solemnly enjoined them (and us) to do this, as often as we come together, in remembrance of him. Which brings me to my main point. You and I are the final participants in this drama. The stage has been set, all the characters are in position, and it is now our turn to take our place. Tonight we commemorate the fact that every Eucharist is a pledge by which we commit ourselves to the cruciform life of a disciple of Christ. We remember that our highest aspiration is not to have great vacations, bulging bank accounts, or even, necessarily, lives of comfort and ease; it is, rather, to be as broken, as poured out, as Jesus Christ. Christ has arrived in Jerusalem to confront us all – pilgrims, procurators, powerbrokers, and us – and he means to transform us all. This Passover is where everything comes together. Take the bread. Take the cup. “Behold the mystery of your salvation laid out for you; behold what you are, become what you receive.”[4] Amen.

[1] By this time, it had become a requirement of anyone living within 15 miles of Jerusalem.

[2] Figures are taken from Joachim Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus (London: SCM Press, 1966), 84.

[3] C. H. Dodd, The Founder of Christianity (London: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd., 1970), 8.

[4] A line from St. Augustine, Sermon 272, “On the Eucharist,” used today in this paraphrased and amplified form in some modern liturgies.

Sunday, March 17, 2024

5 Lent  

Jeremiah 31:31-34; Psalm 51:1-13; Hebrews 5: 5-10; John 12: 20-33

The Rev. James M.L. Grace

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

 In our Bible studies earlier this week, one of the questions asked to the group was
“what qualities make a good priest?”  In the women’s study, they identified humility as an important quality.  The men’s Bible Study group were unanimous in voicing that the most important quality of a priest was the ability to deliver a short sermon.  So, this sermon is going to be really humble, and really short.

The subject of this humble and short sermon is the portion of Jeremiah which we hear today. 

Jeremiah was a Hebrew prophet. He was a descendent of Abiathar, one of two chief priests appointed by David, arguably Israel’s most well-known king.  Abiathar was a Levitical priest, a priesthood which traced its roots to the tribe of Levi. He counseled David during his son Absalom’s tragic rebellion against him, and was a close confidant of the king.  But not close enough.  In addition to Abiathar, David chose a second high priest, Zadok.  David had known Zadok for a long time.  Zadok helped to bring the ark of the covenant back to Jerusalem from nearby Gibeah after it languished in neglect for years under the reign of King Saul.   By having two high priests from two different priestly families, David hoped to create a sense of unity and stability.

However, the emergence of the Zadokite priesthood, which traced its history to Zadok, created political as well as theological tension with the Levitical priests.  Abiathar, the Levitical priest, was banished from Jerusalem by King David’s son, Solomon, because Abiathar wanted someone other than Solomon to be king.  Solomon did not like that.  With Abiathar banished, the Zadokite priestly lineage gained prominence, and Zadok’s descendants served as high priests in the Temple. 

Jeremiah was a descendant of Abiathar, this banished Levitical priest, which means that much of what Jeremiah writes is strongly critical of kingship of Solomon, the Jewish temple, and its Zadokite priesthood.

Jeremiah’s opinions, contained within this book, were extremely unpopular.  The book of Jeremiah was written when what was left of Israel was captured by Babylon.  Both Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed.  Jeremiah witnessed this destruction with his own eyes.

The most unpalatable of Jeremiah’s writing was his unwavering stance regarding Israel’s future.  More specifically, Jeremiah argued that the Israelites who remained after the destruction of Jerusalem must acquiesce and surrender to their Babylonian captors as the only way of avoiding their complete annihilation as a country and as a people.  No one in Israel wanted to hear that, and Jeremiah was persecuted by his own people for saying this.  His own family turned against him.  He endured beatings, imprisonment, and ridicule. Despite these hardships, Jeremiah remained faithful.  In an ironic twist, it was the Babylonians who freed him from prison. 

I have a hard truth I need to speak today – something none of you want to hear, but I do not have a choice, I have to say this: this is not going to be a short sermon.  But I am working toward its conclusion, I promise. 

Jeremiah believed that the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple were absolutely necessary so that God could begin a new thing.

That “new thing” is what we hear about in today’s reading.  “The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah…I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”  This is a rare thing to find in Jeremiah – hope.  But it is there.  Ultimately, Jeremiah finds hope amid devastating religious partisanship and geopolitical conflict. 

Partisanship and conflict exist today as they obviously did during the time of Jeremiah.  It is during such divisive times that Jeremiah becomes my curmudgeonly unpopular anchor I cling to.  I return to Jeremiah because of his courage.  He spoke the truth boldly and paid the price for it.  His life would have been much easier, and probably more pleasant, had he kept his mouth shut.  But he could not – he was God’s prophet.   

It has been said that “the truth will set you free, but first it’s going to make you miserable.”  That is probably true. It certainly was for Jeremiah.  Though the truth hurts, it is what we hunger for.  The truth is what we need.  It is what God is calling us ever closer to.  AMEN.  

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Lent 4

Number 21:4-9; Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22; Ephesians 2:1-10; John 3:14-21

The Rev. Clint Brown

This morning, I should like to take you on a journey, a journey through time. Our first stop is around the year 700 BCE during the reign of King Hezekiah of Judah. If you are acquainted with the book of Kings, you will know that the narrative is frequently punctuated by the mention of this or that king beginning to reign in such and such a year and always accompanied by a brief editorial comment: “this king did what was right in the sight of the Lord,” or, more often, “this king did not do what was right in the sight of the Lord.” It was the chronicler’s way of linking character with destiny. Impiety led inexorably to misfortune and this will eventually serve as the explanation for the destruction of Jerusalem and the carrying away of the people into exile just a few generations later. At this point, however, that is still a long way off, and Hezekiah was one of those few kings, in the long list of kings, who did what was right in the sight of the Lord. In fact, his reign became legendary for its reforms. We learn in the book of 2 Kings that one of them involved a rather curious object that had – along with the ark of the covenant and the tablets of the Law – survived in the Temple as a relic of Israel’s past. It was a large bronze snake affixed to the end of a pole, and, through the years, we learn, it had become the center of a cult. Understandably, for the pious Hezekiah, this was intolerable. There should be – could be – no rival to Yahweh for the hearts and minds of the people, and certainly not one in the form of such blatant, blasphemous idolatry. And so, the Bible says, Hezekiah broke it in pieces (2 Kings 18:4), and for this and the many other proofs of his righteousness, the text goes on to say that God made him victorious, both in resisting the mounting threat of the Assyrians on his northern borders and against Israel’s traditional adversaries nearer to home, the Philistines.

But to return to the snake and to appreciate its full significance, we must climb into our time machine and move further upstream to the Wilderness wanderings of the Israelites, our second stop. Having received the Ten Commandments, the people of Israel depart from the mountain of God and embark on what, map wise, should have been a relatively short trip to the Promised Land. But apparently not short, easy, or simple enough, because they complain about everything. The water which God makes to gush miraculously for them from a rock? Nice, but it could be colder. The manna from heaven? Okay, I guess, but does it have to be for every meal? At one point, they even have to audacity to claim that they have no food and water, apparently forgetting the basic principle of logic that you can only find unsatisfying something you actually possess! And as the people’s resolve breaks down, for the first time they speak out not only against Moses, but now also against God. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” (verse 5), but the “you” is plural. And, well, God is having none of it. God sends poisonous snakes to torment them and punish their ingratitude. Vast numbers grow sick; some even die. But one thing is for sure, God now has their attention, and, seeing their error, they repent and appeal to Moses to make everything better. And so, consulting God as to what to do, God instructs Moses to make a bronze snake, the very one we have just met with surviving down to the days of Hezekiah, and Moses was told to set it on a pole, and all who looked on it would be healed. The people’s salvation would lie in being forced to look upon their sin and accepting its consequences.

Fast forward a thousand years and we come to the last stop on our journey, to a grove of olive trees outside the walls of Jerusalem in about the year 30. It is night, and Nicodemus, a member of the Jewish council and an influential leader of the party of the Pharisees, has come to Jesus, secretly, to interview him about who he is and what he’s about. Now I have always been rather sympathetic to the figure of Nicodemus. I actually do not hold against him that he is not yet ready to publicly declare for Jesus – that will come. What I admire about him is his sincerity, his curiosity, and the fact that, though starting out muddled and confused, he doesn’t let things stand that way but he leaves open the possibility of finally understanding. So I am right there with Nicodemus as he finds himself growing not less, but more confused by Jesus’ cryptic answers that don’t really help to clear things up at all. Second births? Wind and water and spirit? What does it all mean? And all of it quite unsettles Nicodemus and he bursts out in exasperation, “How can these things be?” (John 3:9) And so Jesus makes a quick mental tour of the Torah for some allusion, some image that might help to pull together all these threads and forge with this fellow student of the scriptures a meeting of minds. And the image he settles on is the one with which we, by now, are very familiar with thanks to our tour through time. Who Jesus is and what he’s about is this: “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:14). The cure for what ails us, says Jesus, will be to look up, as the Israelites had done long ago, and see him, crucified, dying upon a cross. He is the cure. He is salvation lifted up on a pole. His body is stripped and broken; his condemnation is the result of our perversion of justice. This cross is where all our sin gets us, and we must accept its consequences. This is the length to which God will go for you. Behold your God and be healed.

Sunday, March 3, 2024

Lent 3

Exodus 20:1-17; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 1:18-25; John 2:13-22

The Rev. Clint Brown

I trust that you noticed that we’ve heard the Ten Commandments twice today – once as part of the Penitential Order and, once again, as our first scripture lesson? Now one way we might think of this is as needless repetition, to hear the same thing twice; but we also might think of it more positively, as a unique opportunity not only to see how this text has been and is used in our liturgy, but, today, to also see where it comes from undetached from its scriptural frame of reference. Now time will not permit me to comment on every single Commandment this morning (as everyone breathes out a collective sigh of relief) – for that you’ll have to come to this year’s Lenten series on Thursday nights – but I think I can, in the space of the next few minutes, offer what I hope to be some helpful context and ponder with you what makes this law code so enduring and so foundational.

Actually, time was when there was no escaping the Ten Commandments, as every child candidate for confirmation could tell you. Along with the Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, children were required to memorize every single one of them at their confirmation. And, from Elizabethan times, the Commandments were, literally, required to be “written on the wall.” Any of you who have had occasion to visit a colonial era church can testify to seeing them prominently displayed on the wall at the front of the church. They were there to be a constant presence, a constant witness to what was done there, and a constant reminder that these are the pillars of our faith; and also, perhaps, to give the wandering eye something edifying to ponder during long or uninteresting sermons! 

But what exactly are the Ten Commandments? Why assign to them the importance that we do? It’s not just because of a famous movie or that a great many people believe we ought to affix them to our courthouses. To answer why, you’ll need to recall where we are at this point in the Exodus. Moses has brought the children of Israel to the foot of the mountain of God – in some places it is called Sinai, in some Horeb – and this is because, at his commissioning at the burning bush, this had been God’s directive – not only to bring out the people, but then to lead them to this mountain (Exodus 3:12). The mountain was the objective all along. And this was so that the covenant that had been made with Abraham could now be renewed with these his newly liberated descendants. “I am the God who has acted on your behalf to bring you out from under the taskmaster’s whip,” says Yahweh, “and now that this is done there are certain things you owe me in return.” But notice what it is that God actually asks for. God does not ask for a great sacrifice of bulls or rams or the payment of some other tribute, like a king might demand of a vassal in exchange for his protection. Rather, God simply requires that the Israelites now act in a certain way. It is their behavior God is interested in. Before anything else, the God of Israel cares for ethics, and this sets up an ongoing tension in the Old Testament between form and function, outward ritual and the inner disposition of the heart, that finally finds its resolution in Jesus, who answers the question definitively: “Go and learn what this means,” he admonishes the Pharisees, “‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’” As the Psalmist had declared centuries before, “the sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise” (Psalm 51:17). Clearly, God in interested, first, with one’s disposition, and only secondarily with ritual.

And, so, returning to the Ten Commandments, we see that they express what we might call the “religious view of life;” that is, that we purposefully bind ourselves to God’s Law and, therefore, to the attitudes and behaviors it prescribes. Ethics itself becomes a kind of offering, a kind of sacrifice. We accept that God gets to tell us both who we are and how we ought to live, and this tells us, in turn, what kind of people God expects us to be. We are not that already – there is work for us to do – and it is in this sense that ethics is a kind of sacrifice, a kind of offering.

Now I know that guilt, shame, judgment – all things that follow necessarily from law – are not hugely popular ideas these days. We tend to think of laws and regulations and their accompanying judgment as odious and limiting, as offenses to our freedom. But, more positively, we might think of law as accumulated wisdom; as getting us further, faster; as expressive of the values that are meant to give our lives the proper “shape” to becoming who it is we ought to be. Yes, laws are restrictive. Yes, we are subject because of them to continual judgment. Yes, it would be easier to just ignore sin and not speak of it. But if we never faced the reality of our falling short of our ideals, we would never grow. It is judgment that enables transformation. 

So my advice to you today would be to recover somewhat the omnipresence and reach of the Ten Commandments into your life. Hang them on your fridge. Tape them to your mirror. Make it your Lenten discipline to read through them everyday and pray with them to discern how these commands can become more than law – how they can become principles. The Ten Commandments are there to shape us and recreate us, and that, I think, is the main point. The sacrifice that God most desires is the sacrifice of yourself.

Sunday, February 18, 2024

Lent 1

Genesis 9:8-17; Psalm 25:1-9; 1 Peter 3:18-22; Mark 1:9-15

The Rev. Clint Brown

I can’t remember exactly where or when I first heard this story, but once upon a time, it could be set anywhere, there was a man who cultivated the skill of reproducing very exactly the sounds of various animals. People would come from miles around to hear him and his artistic aping, and, in this way, he came to make a living. One day, a wise teacher passed by with a group of his disciples. The sage looked on appreciatively, if not bemusedly, as the man imitated his way through the animal kingdom, proceeding in turn to grunt like a pig, whiny like a horse, and cock-a-doodle-doo like a rooster, and it struck the sage that he could use this as a lesson to teach his disciples. The following day he put up his own stand and advertised that he would put on a wonder not to be missed for a single showing only, and, as a bonus, not charge any fee at all. When the time came, a prodigious crowd gathered to see just what kind of spectacle the old man would present, but they were disheartened and not a little confused when, instead of some great novelty, the sage brought out, in turn, a pig, a horse, and a rooster. With great gusto, he squeezed each animal until it had made its characteristic sound, then he bowed, deeply and expectantly, waiting for a thunderous ovation. But though the animals’ noises were undeniably accurate on account of being made by living, breathing specimens, the people were not impressed and there was no applause. In fact, they were angry and accused the old man of trickery and drove him for all his troubles from the town with his disciples with a warning not to come back with his silly ideas again. Turning to his disciples, the teacher made his point: “You see,” he said, “the people are so enamored of appearances that they care not for what is real.” It is a good lesson for us today.

I do not need to tell you that there are many counterfeits competing for our attention and our loyalty in the world today. Modernity presents us with any number of glittering distractions and easy answers to difficult questions that would lure aware from the narrow way. This is, as they say, the age of conspicuous consumption. But Lent is a time to see through them all. Lent is a time for recognizing our real hungers. That what we most need, after all, is God. And in terms of what really matters, it's hard to argue for anything more important than our faith and its nurture. Saint Augustine of Hippo said it well in beginning his famous Confessions: "Thou madest us for Thyself, and our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee" (The Confessions of Saint Augustine, I.I). God is a deep, deep mystery – I, for one, find God the most interesting thing there is – and the neat twist is that in pursuing God we are discovering ourselves. God has told us who we are. We belong to God. God pursues us and won't leave us alone. Jesus Christ who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Follow him. Love him. Worship him. He has the greater claim on your life than any other thing.

Sunday, February 11, 2024

Last 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, kind of like a Costco.  In this vast heavenly storage room there would be shelves as high as our eyes can see stocked with billions of little purple boxes.  If you were to open one of these little purple boxes, inside you would be surprised to find a blessing which God had given you that you either ignored or were unappreciative of.  Can you imagine how big a warehouse containing all of our ignored and unappreciated blessings would need to be?  

It might look something like the warehouse we see at the end of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know the one where some government employee boxes up the Ark of the Covenant for storage in a wooden box - wheeling it down an aisle of some huge government warehouse that seemingly has no end to it.  In the often-maligned sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark – Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, we learn the location of the warehouse holding the ark of the covenant – a top-secret military base in Nevada – Area 51.  Oh, and there are aliens in wooden boxes for storage there, too, by the way.  We also learn from  Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull that hopping into a lead encased refrigerator will save you from a nuclear explosion, a scene from the film which has now become its own meme “nuking the fridge.” 

Today “nuking the fridge” is a phrase used by movie fans to describe the declining point of a film franchise as a result of its heavy reliance on special effects.   You all might come up with a similar term – nuking the sermon – which would describe the declining point of a sermon as a result of its heavy reliance on pop culture refences, a point I think this sermon has crossed two minutes ago. 

In today’s reading from 2 Corinthians, the Apostle Paul writes these words “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ.” I am drawn to this verse from today’s reading and its description of blindness.  As Paul describes it, the blindness is inflicted on unbelievers by the “god of this world.”  This is the only place in the entire new testament where the devil, is given the title “the god of this world.”  According to Paul, the number one priority of the “god of this world’s” job description is to keep us blind, because in our blindness, we bocme unbelievers. 

And to varying degrees, all of us are blind.  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 and removes all human blindness.  Several years ago I read the Pulitzer Prize winning book, Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson.  In the book, Wilkerson establishes a daring premise, which is that many of us are blinded to an American caste system which she argues is “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 blindness of so many of us to this American Caste system, Wilkerson argues, “is what gives it power and longevity.” 

I want to revisit that vast warehouse – not the one from Indiana Jones, but the one I believe might be in heaven, the warehouse full of all our unnoticed and ignored blessings.  How many untold blessings would there be, just warehoused away, collecting dust, because we are blind and unwilling to open our eyes to see them?  What would it take to remove the veil from our eyes so that we might see those blessings?

 As I said earlier – the “god of this world” according to Paul, is happiest when we are blind.  What the “god of this world” cannot stand is gratitude.  The “god of this world” prefers we dwell in self-pity and morbid self-reflection, because that keeps us looking back to the past, while remaining blind to the present.  If we forego all the self-pitying and open our eyes to see everything, we have to be grateful for – the “god of this world” will run from us.  He will flee.  He cannot stand us being grateful and having our eyes opened.   

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 ignored blessings.  There is blessing in this world.  Are you courageous enough to open your eyes and see it?  AMEN.

Sunday, January 21, 2024

Epiphany 3 (Year B)

Jonah 3:1-5, 10; Song of Jonah; 1 Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20

The Rev. Clint Brown

You are called. That is the message for today. You are called to proclaim to the world – or, at least, your own small part of it – the good news of salvation in Jesus Christ. No other task that you’ve been given to do as a Christian – not your Bible reading, not your prayers, not your church attendance, not your pledge – is more tied to your success as a Christian as your commission to be an ambassador of Christ. In our readings we trace the outlines of that ambassadorship. In Mark, we see Jesus making the first call and see the response of the first disciples. In 1 Corinthians, Paul reminds us of the urgency of all this and of taking our responsibility seriously. This world, he says, and everything in it, is on the way out. Nothing lasts forever – neither the cosmos nor our lives – and so we had better make our move and make it decisively. And, finally, the story of Jonah illustrates both the failure and success of those who are called. Sometimes we get it very wrong and shirk our duties by trying to run from them; and sometimes we get it right and see whole cities transformed. Such is the life of a disciple. So to this clear and simple message, there is only one point that I hope to contribute today, and for that purpose I would have you briefly consider with me the case of the city of Nineveh.

Nineveh was the capital city of the Assyrian empire, and, in the march of empires, you’ll recall that Assyria stands between the Sumerians and Babylonians, on one side, and the Persians on the other, having its heyday in the 8th and 7th centuries before the time of Christ. Nineveh lay on the east bank of the river Tigris, directly across from present day Mosul. Many scholars are persuaded that the famous “hanging gardens of Babylon,” one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, are more likely to be identified with those excavated at Nineveh and constructed during the reign of Sennacherib in the early 7th century. Until its destruction in the year 612 BCE, Nineveh was known throughout the ancient world, as it is in the book of Jonah, as the “great city” (Jonah 1:2; 3:2).

The city actually crosses the stage of the biblical narrative remarkably early, being first mentioned nearly at the beginning in Genesis 10. There we learn of its founding by the great hunter Nimrod, who, incidentally, is stated to have founded another city of no small importance named Babel; and, like its sister Babel, the Nineveh of the Old Testament is uniformly maligned. The book of Kings gloats over the mysterious abandonment by Sennacherib of his siege of Jerusalem and hurried flight back to his capital, perhaps because of plague. The prophets Nahum and Zephaniah, writing a century after Jonah, proclaimed the ultimate fall of Nineveh and do not seem to know or care about Jonah’s mission or any conversion experience in the city’s history to which they might hearken. The book of Tobit, one of the apocryphal books, tells the story of a pious Jew living as an exile in Nineveh. He urges his family to flee the city before the judgment Nahum predicts. And the book of Judith, also one of the apocryphal books, recounts how an arrogant Assyrian king is outwitted and decapitated by an intrepid Israelite heroine. In the Old Testament, it is not too far-fetched to imagine that for its writers and readers the city of Nineveh was a place for cursing, the very personification of evil. What a contrast this makes to the penitent and chastened city described in the book of Jonah.

The Old Testament thus presents two images of Nineveh – the arrogant city that gets what it deserves and the repentant city that God spares – and, in the New Testament, the picture gets even more interesting. When in Luke 11:32 Jesus looks to the past for a model of the kind of response he is looking for, it is not just any city that he singles out for recognition but the Ninevites who responded to Jonah who, he says, will sit in judgment over his own generation. And this is where, I think, we do well to take note of a singularly ambiguous term that Jonah had used in his message to Nineveh. Foretelling its fate, he had cried, “Forty days more and Nineveh will be overthrown!” (Jonah 3:4). That the people of Nineveh did respond positively to Jonah’s message we know, but what bears scrutiny is that their response plays on the ambiguities of this verb “overthrown.”

In most places in the Old Testament, most conspicuously in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, this verb signifies destruction, it is true; yet, in others, under the aspect of overturning what seems to be fated and inexorable, the word signifies deliverance.

Deuteronomy 23:5, “The Lord your God refused to heed Balaam; the Lord your God [overturned] the curse into a blessing for you, because the Lord your God loved you.”

Psalm 66:6, recalling the crossing at the Red Sea, reads, “[God overturned] the sea into dry land.”

Jeremiah 31:13, “I will turn their mourning into joy,” that is, in the sense of overturning the one condition for the other.

That Nineveh is to be undone for its sins would seem to have been Jonah’s proclamation, and yet because of the grammatical ambiguity of this particular verbal form it could also be read as a reflexive. “Nineveh is overthrown,” could be read, instead, as “Nineveh turns (itself) over.” In other words, Ninevah will be undone but not through destruction, but through repentance. Bear that in mind, then, as we turn to the call of Jesus. “Repent!” he commands – or, “Change your mind,” as it reads literally in the Greek – let your whole world be turned upside down and inside out, we can hear Jesus saying, and then follow him. You’ll see that the message of Jesus and that of Nineveh bear more than a passing resemblance.

My point comes to this: to be called to be a disciple of Jesus Christ is to be called to change the world, but to change the world we must first change ourselves. “Overthrow yourself,” we might say with the people of Nineveh. And the hope is that it is this ongoing work of being converted ourselves that is the most compelling witness we can make to the world. We can hide behind and make a great show with our words, but how we live in the full view of others is an altogether different proposition. Perhaps this is the thing that is keeping the most people out of the churches – that they know too many Christians. So, remember that you are called – called to be faithful in giving, faithful in attending church, faithful in piety – but, above all, to be faithful to preach the gospel. And, by the way, use words only if necessary. Amen.

Sunday, January 7, 2024

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 God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  AMEN.

Today is a joyous occasion as we celebrate Holy Baptism this morning.  For the purposes of my sermon this morning (which will be brief), I simply want to share three brief points on what baptism is and what will be happening up here around the font in just a few minutes.

My first point is to simply state what baptism is, and what the Episcopal Church’s understanding of the sacrament is.  If you open to the very back of the prayer book, you will find a section therein entitled “An Outline of the Faith” or more briefly, the Catechism. Now, after three years in seminary, as a well-trained priest, who has taken classes on sacramental theology and liturgy, I know where to go to find answers to questions such as “what does the word catechism mean?”  Again, as a result of my three-year residential seminary education which cost more than around thirty thousand dollars a year, I know where to find the answer to the question “what does catechism mean?”  Wikipedia.

According to Wikipedia, “catechism” derives from the Greek word katecheo (kat-ay-kheh-o) which means “to teach by word of mouth.”  As it appears in the prayer book, the Catechism is presented in the form of a question, followed by an answer.  Generations ago, it was expected that people would memorize the Catechism, and a catechumen was title given to a person who studied (and memorized) the Catechism in preparation for Holy Baptism. 

Page 858 of the prayer book begins the section of the Catechism on Holy Baptism.  The first question is “what is Holy Baptism?”  Great question – and the church has a great answer: “Holy Baptism is the Sacrament by which God adopts is as his children and makes us members of Christ’s Body, the Church, and inheritors of the kingdom of God.  That’s my first point. Baptism is full inclusion into the body of Christ, and inheritors of the kingdom of God. 

But what does it mean to be part of the Body of Christ?  That’s my second point, and its explanation will be more brief than the first.  The Body of Christ is this – the church.  All the people gathered here this morning, and elsewhere around the world in churches all kinds.  But what is the church, and what is it called to do?  Here also, clear answers are provided for us within the Catechism (and probably also Wikipedia).  On page 855 of the prayer book, the catechism clearly states what the church’s calling is, is at the very top of the page, and it says this: “the mission of the church is to restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ.”  Well, how do we do that – there is an answer to that question as well: “the church pursues its mission as it prays and worships, proclaims the Gospel, and promotes justice, peace, and love.”  To be a part of the Body of Christ, means to pray, worship, and promote love, justice, and peace.

Which brings me to my third, and final point – which will be the most brief of all three, and it is this.  Baptism makes us inheritors of the kingdom of God.  That means that in baptism we are God’s child.  Now God has no grandchildren, but God does have a lot of children.  There is no better title in the world than this “child of God, inheritor of the kingdom.”  President of the United States?  That’s way below being a child of God.  Likewise with being the CEO of Amazon  or Google?  Being a child of God is better than even those, too.  Well, Rev. Brown, shall we baptize?  AMEN. 

Sunday, December 31, 2023

Christmas 1

Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Psalm 147; Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7; John 1:1-18

The Rev. Clint Brown

It’s New Year’s, which means it’s time for resolutions. Perhaps you have begun to think of yours? Whether you have or have yet to, the year ahead presents limitless possibilities. But perhaps, like me, you’ve come to realize, looking back over many years of making many resolutions, that there have been far more failed ones than successful ones. That’s just part of being human. When making resolutions we all tend to overreach a bit and resolve to do things that are either too ambitious or too vague to be actionable. One suggestion I might make is to commend to you the advice of the wellness columnist Tara Parker-Pope.[1] She says that to achieve wellness we need simply to remember four words: move, nourish, reflect, and connect. These, she says, are the four elements of a balanced life. Far from needing to think about resolutions as grand feats of will and endurance, all we really need to do is make sure to move, nourish, reflect, and connect every day, which can take many forms, the simpler and more sensible, the better. Some examples:

•      Move – exercise and physical fitness; notice the gentleness of the word; you don’t have to schedule time with a physical trainer at the gym; walking is not discounted; getting up out of your chair every 30 minutes and walking around the room will suffice; whatever you can think of to combat being completely sedentary is the idea here; but getting your heart rate up, that’s even better

•      Nourish – healthy eating habits; good nutrition; how much of what you are eating is highly processed or flavored soybean oil?; what’s the ratio of fruits and vegetables to the other things on your plate?; a good place to start thinking about your nutrition might be to pay a visit to the website of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition found at www.health.gov;[2] “food for thought,” you might say

•      Reflect – our bodies must be strong, but so must our minds and spirits; we exist at all these levels; the life of the mind and spirit need sustenance, too; this is where it’s wise to be a reader and a church goer; prayer, journaling, meditation; reading and study; remember that reflected experience is the only kind that matters; otherwise, we are just victims of circumstance; in the Information Age, reflecting on all that we hear and separating truth from hype – otherwise known as “discernment” – is becoming more and more an indispensable quality of the responsible citizen

•      Connect – relationships; we are social animals, we humans; we can’t seem to get along without one another, nor would be want to; tending, mending, bending; and, yes, this includes our relationship to God

Because for the Christian, it must be remembered, everything is related to God. We recognize ourselves as children owing to God our gratitude and our obedience. This is what separates those of us standing within a faith tradition from those outside of one. Whatever it is you decide to do in the way of resolutions or any other big decision this year, know that you are duty bound to make reference to God and to seek God’s will. There are only two ways a choice can go – there is the choice that either glorifies God or the one that doesn’t – and in making the first choice – the better choice – we soon realize that one of its distinguishing properties is that it minimizes our role and our capacity. This is true in the big things and the small things, for, whatever we decide to do, know that ultimately we can’t claim anything in the first person, only in the third person. It will not be because of anything we have done that we will enter heaven – good works, right belief, praying more, giving more – but, rather, what he has done – “he” being Christ.

I’m reminded of the story of the repentant thief – the one who was crucified with Jesus whom Jesus pardoned. He arrives at the gate of heaven to his surprise and the surprise of the angel attending the gate. The angel asks him how is it that he comes to be here? Are you baptized? (What’s that?) Can you name the books of the Bible? (I’ve never even opened one.) How many times a week did you go to the synagogue? (Oh *chuckles* I always did my best work while everyone else was there.) Did you tithe 10%? (I’m a thief! I take, I don’t give.) Hold on, let me get my supervisor…Let me get this straight. You don’t know the creeds. You never darkened the door of the Lord’s house. You have failed every test of faith. How is it that you think we can let you in here? To which the man replies, “Honestly, I don’t know anything about any of that. All I know is that the man on the middle cross said I could come.”

Our right to enter heaven, to claim anything at all, has been won for us… not by us. It is for this reason that I said before that whatever we resolve to do, ultimately, we can’t claim any success for ourselves. It can only be in the third person. There are limitless choices laid out in front of you for the coming year – indeed, for your whole life long – but none of them would be possible at all save for the man on the middle cross. So make this year a year to think more about the difference the man on the middle cross makes to you and for your life; for seeing and striving less for what you want for you and more for what he wants for you. Resolve to be led to the foot of the manger – to the foot of the cross – where the wisest of every age have resolved to be.

Children’s Sermon: Two or three years ago (December of 2020), a very unique event happened in the night sky. The two largest planets in our solar system, Jupiter and Saturn, seemed, from our perspective on Earth, to come together. Now they didn’t really – they are actually separated by 450 million miles – but it looked like it to us because their orbital paths crossed. Now I find that really interesting because it suggests that two things can be both near and far at the same time depending on your perspective. 

I think Jesus is like that. On the one hand, the first Christmas was a long time ago in a land far away, very far from us in space and time; and now, as we speak, Jesus is not in heaven, which seems to be even farther from us. But we must also remember that Jesus is near. He still matters. He still cares about us and involves himself in our lives. He lives even now. He is as near to us as saying a prayer. He is as close to us as partaking of the bread and wine at communion. Jesus may be far away in heaven, but he can also be near us in all these ways, and, especially, when we invite him to live in our hearts. It is in this way that Jesus can be both far and near.

I want to encourage you to remember that, even though Jesus is God, he is not too busy to be always thinking of you and watching over you. So don’t forget him, either. He matters. He is close. No matter how far he may seem, he is always near. Let us say a prayer…

[1] Tara Parker-Pope, “Four Simple Words to Help You Live Well,” New York Times, January 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/02/well/30-day-well-challenge-helping-you-live-well.html.

[2] https://health.gov/pcsfn