God’s promises will be true tomorrow, even if we do not know what the community of the people of God will look like

Epiphany 3-C

Annual Meeting 

January 27, 2013

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10
Ps. 19

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

Luke 4:14-21

The passage we read from Nehemiah this morning tells a remarkable story. The people of Israel have come back home: they have been released from their captivity in Babylon -- to rebuild their city and their Temple, which is the center of their religious and social life. The first thing they do when they get there is to read the law: to remember the relationship God established with them. The law is more than a set of rules: it is the bonds and the boundaries of this relationship. They are going to be able to restore things to the way they used to be, and they are profoundly grateful. Their feasting – eating fat and drinking sweet wine and making sure that everyone has enough to eat – this is a sign that their grief is over, that their joy has returned.

It would be one thing, of course, if we could tell this story as one of a blameless people, carried off into exile by a conquering enemy. The enemy conquered them, but the prophets who spoke for God told the story this way: Israel had been disobedient. They had not followed the law. The people were selfish, corrupt, thought of themselves and not of others. The prophets condemned Israel for following gods of greed and self-centeredness, gods which turned them away from the communal responsibilities to the poor, the widowed, the downtrodden. According to the prophets, God sent those conquering enemies into Israel for a reason: the people of Israel had disobeyed God. The people would protest: Hey! This is the way we have always done things! But, no, the prophets would say, that “old way” got twisted, distorted. That “old way” strayed from the way God would have them live. When God let them go back, they needed to promise once again to God that they would be people of the law, of justice, of mercy, of compassion -- that they would worship only God and live rightly.

The Gospel of Luke sees John the Baptist – and probably Jesus, in this story of his speaking in his hometown synagogue – as prophets in the line of those who chastised Israel from straying from the covenant. Prophets don’t condemn for all time: they shout out to give you a chance to turn around. It’s not too late – yet! – prophets say. You have still got time to get it right, to live right with God, you still can love God and love your neighbor. Prophets grab people by the collar and yank them around to face the future. That future is where you are going to live the rest of your life: now is your chance to change your life, to live it the way God would have you live it. There is always time to claim a future of abundance, love and mercy. There is always a way to plan the future so that there is enough for everybody, a future not constricted by the way things used to be, by that old-time “business as usual.”

Jesus, like the other prophets, reminded the people of God of this. In this his first sermon he reads a piece of scripture they knew well, a piece from that time when they came back to a shattered home. Jesus reminds them of God’s promise to rebuild, to restore. But Jesus does not let them stay in that comfortable, if glorious, past. TODAY, Jesus says, the scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. TODAY: not in the past, no matter how good or bad it was. God’s promises are true TODAY, and they have a certain shape. But God’s promises will also be true when TOMORROW is TODAY – God’s promises will be true tomorrow, even if we do not know what the community of the people of God will look like. God’s promises – the good news of abundance will come to the poor, even if today we cannot possibly imagine what it would be like to redistribute wealth and privilege. Captives will be set free, even if now we have no idea what it would take to rehabilitate people who have done terrible things and return them to productive life in our society. Blind people – physically blind – will be able to see, even if today any surgeon would tell you it’s not possible. Blind people – spiritually blind – will see and understand what God is doing for justice and righteousness, even if now their hearts are hardened against all change. People who are oppressed by all sorts of burdens – people like you and me – will be freed from what ails us. We will live the lives that bring us God’s peace and prosperity, God’s serenity and simplicity, even if right now we cannot possibly imagine a way out of our rut of struggle and debt and discontent.

Those people listening to Nehemiah might have wanted Jerusalem to be the same when they got back, but it was changed, for ever and ever. Some things were GONE and could not be resurrected. But what all the prophets told them – and what Jesus was telling the people in Nazareth – was that they could take the most precious thing they had -- the love of God -- and carry it with them into the future. The love of God was the foundation upon which they would build the new Jerusalem, not some old stones that conquering armies have shattered. What was really important they had with them TODAY and they would take it with them into the future.

TODAY, Jesus says, you can believe that God’s promises are TRUE, even if you cannot imagine what that will look like. Your future, Jesus says, does not have to be a nostalgic rehashing of the way things used to be. TODAY something new has happened, a future God has been planning since the beginning of time.

Filling the hungry with good things: Cana

Epiphany 2-C 

January 20, 2013

Isaiah 62:1-5

Ps. 36:5-10

1 Corinthians 12:1-11
John 2:1-11

You have been invited to a wedding. It’s kind of far away, in a not very interesting place. The family are dear friends of your family, but they are not very well off, and you suspect that it will be a not-so-grand wedding. It will be fun, and loving, and festive. So you go to this out of the way place, for this humble yet elaborate ceremony and party, and yes, your fears are confirmed: the catering has been done on the cheap; they’ve run out of wine.

This is the scene into which Jesus walks, a week after his baptism, and three days after calling his disciples. The Gospel of John is one of those “pretend” histories; John gives you dates and places and you think, Oh, this is the way it was – an eye-witness account. But not: John’s gospel is a symbolic history, a theological story. John knew what happened at the wedding in Cana, and he structures this story with meaning rather than mere fact.

We do know this: Cana is a poor, out-of-the-way place. It really is the generic banquet hall off the interstate kind of a wedding, and not some swank affair on Park Avenue with a reception at the Waldorf. This modest place, among ordinary people, is the place John declares is the site of the first sign of Jesus, the first place where God’s glory is revealed. Wait a minute here. This is the gospel that begins with a bang:

“In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and the Word was with God. … And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory … full of grace and truth. … From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. The law was indeed given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”

With an introduction like that, where do you think Jesus would first reveal God’s glory? Surely in some important place – in Jerusalem, on the temple mount, or on Mt. Sinai. The beginning of the Gospel of John is banner headlines: THIS IS BIG. But where does John take us? To an out-of-the-way place, among ordinary people, and to a crisis provoked by scarcity, which brings us to our next meaningful clue: Mary.

There is no story of Jesus’ birth in the Gospel of John, and so this is the first mention we have of Jesus’ mother. I guess John assumes we know she is important. I guess John assumes we remember her song, recorded in the Gospel of Luke, when she understood that the baby she bore meant that God was bringing down the powerful and lifting up the lowly, filling the hungry with good things and sending the rich away empty. I guess John assumes we remember the story from the Gospel of Matthew, when three regal wise men knelt at her baby’s cradle. I guess John assumes we know the story of the angels’ shouts and the shepherds visits, that Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart. I guess John assumes we know what happened when the Holy Family took the baby Jesus to be blessed in the temple, and what the wise and ancient Simeon told Mary: “This child is destined for the falling and rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed – and a sword will pierce your soul too.”

John assumes we know all that – all that prophecy and all that conflict – and so when Mary says, “They have no wine,” we hear all the longings of the poor, cursed with scarcity and yearning for God to turn the tables and provide for them. We hear all the hopes that this Jesus is truly the grace and truth of God. We hear also that this grace and truth comes at a cost, with a prophecy of violence, death and grief. Mary knows all this, knows that to begin this journey means that it will be difficult and deadly. John Chrysostom, one of the church’s early theologians, speculates that she had heard that Jesus had been baptized by John, a fellow-conspirator in this revolutionary hope, and that he was beginning to collect his own disciples. From then on, he writes, “She began to have confidence.”

This is the big epiphany, the light that shines in the darkness, the warmth that melts the cold, the hope that a world of scarcity will be overcome by one of abundance. This is the party where the food is terrific and the company is scintillating and the wine never runs out. This is the grace and truth of God.

Baptism and Community

First Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C

Holy Baptism: January 10, 2013

Isaiah 43:1-7
Ps. 29

Acts 8:14-17

Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

Today we are hearing some news that is both very new and very old. In our Gospel story, Jesus comes up to John, so he can be baptized in the Jordan River. This is something very new. Jesus is not there to “repent of his sins.” Jesus does not do this to join a new religion. There is an astounding rush of a mighty wind. The Holy Spirit comes down over Jesus’ head and a heavenly voice booms out, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

When Jesus joined that throng of people coming to John to be baptized, we can imagine that he, like them, was longing for something powerful to happen. They were a group of people who wanted to turn their lives around, and who believed that the whole world could turn around: they were filled with expectation, Luke tells us. For them to want “the Messiah” is to want a world in which God’s justice reigns, where families and communities are whole and prosperous, where there is enough of everything to go around, a world full of hope that the future will be better than the past. When the people – Jesus included – came to be baptized, it was not just about themselves, alone: they were coming to be part of a community, to be part of a new world, to be part of the world that God had always promised was the way things would be.

Luke, unlike the other gospels, gives us some stories about Jesus’ childhood and youth. Luke tells the story of Mary and Joseph taking Jesus to be blessed in the Temple, and how people there recognized him as the promised one who would bring about God’s reign. Luke also tells the story of Jesus as an older child on another trip to the Temple, where he leaves his parents and sits and talks with the scholars and teachers, strong and confident, even as a child, about his place in God’s world. These stories give us a hint that in this story, as Jesus comes to be baptized, and lingers and prays by the river, that he is not surprised when God’s voice, proclaiming him “the Beloved,” booms out from heaven. Jesus knows that he has a place in this world, and a role to pay, in making this world the beloved and blessed place God intended it to be.

I said before that this story is about new news and old news. God has always loved this world, and this is the old news about baptism: when we are “marked as Christ’s own forever” it means that we should remember each day who we are, and whose we are, and who we are called to be. And every day, especially on those days when things get difficult, don’t each of us long to hear those words, that we are beloved? That God has loved us from the beginning of time, just as our mothers and fathers and friends have loved us, and just as we love them back?

Our first reading today is one that Jesus himself knew. The prophet Isaiah tells the story of that old news: that God has created us, that God sticks by us in difficult times, and that God wants everyone, all sons and daughters, to come home – to come from the ends of the earth to this party, here, in this place, here in the heart of God. In a few minutes, when we pour water on your head, as Jesus had water poured on his, you will know the old truth: that you belong to God, and God loves you. With this baptism, as with all baptisms, God is saying to each of us, "No matter what happens and no matter how low and discouraged you feel, no matter what is happening around you and in your life, don't you ever let anyone tell you that you are anything but a precious and beloved child of God."[1]

So today, this party is about you, and about how happy we are that you found us. And this party today is about all of you, children here for "First Communion," to take communion together, and how you understand how beloved you are by God. You all are here today to teach the rest of us something so very important: Baptism connects us. It ties us together as a community. We are so much more than a collection of individuals, making our own way, struggling alone with our own burdens. You being here today, taking communion together as a group, are showing us that we are part of something much greater than ourselves, that we are part of a community engaged with God in the transformation of the world – that we, like Jesus, are standing here in this mighty stream of people who from the beginning of time, have worked with God to make this world the blessed and beloved place that God created it to be.

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[1] Kathryn Matthews Huey, Sermon Seeds Year C (Pilgrim Press, 2012), p. 45

Even people we thought were enemies long to see the Light

Epiphany

Jan. 6, 2013

Isaiah 60:1-6; Ps. 72

Ephesians 3:1-12

Matthew 2:1-12

In our hyper-rational world, dreams are the product of a troubled mind. We have alarming dreams of forgetting a homework assignment, of missing an exam, of showing up at a job interview in our pajamas. We have terrifying, strange dreams, finding ourselves at the brink of death, waking up heart pounding and haunted. And occasionally we have dreams of astoundingly wonderful wish fulfillment, dreams from which we never want to awake.

We no longer view dreams as things which tell us what to do, as dreams told the wise men to avoid Herod and go home another way – as dreams told Joseph to flee with Mary and the child to find safety in far-away Egypt – as dreams told an earlier Joseph, of the coat of many colors, how to save the people of Egypt from famine by storing up their bounty for the hard years ahead. When the famine came, it was his brothers that Joseph was also able to save – his brothers, the children of Israel, who had sold him in slavery in Egypt in the first place. Dreams in those “old days” were like twitter feeds, e-mail announcements, facebook posts: dreams were how people interpreted what they were experiencing when they were awake. Dreams were how people understood what they events of the day meant.

It is easy to get caught up in the magic of old language like these bible stories. The old language can distance these stories from our current lives. Those “magical” things happened then; this is now. But let’s look again at this story of the wise men: Matthew was trying to tell his readers something important, in the words they could understand – what is he trying to tell us?

The wise men – and Matthew doesn’t tell us how many there are – come from “the East.” From Asia, Persia, Babylon. From the place where hundreds of years earlier the people of Israel were held in captivity by their conquerors. People from “the East” are the enemies of the people Matthew was writing to. Yet even these people see something important in the birth of this child. These people can see it in the world around them – in a star, in a wonder of the natural world. Everything points to this birth as something miraculous, something awaited – the ultimate “aha!” moment – the key interpretation that unlocks the meaning of the dream that everyone has been having.

The other theme in Matthew’s story is that of Herod, the frightened, the powerful, the violent. Matthew is writing to a Jewish audience, and here he depicts Herod, the leader of the Jews, as reprehensible and cruel. Herod is the one who does not dream. Herod is the one who wants no interpretation of the world around him other than his own – that it is a world completely under his power and authority. Soon after this passage, of course, he looks for the baby Jesus, and when he can’t find him, he kills all infant boys. Herod’s world is the world of ultimate rationality, ultimately ruled by fear.

Our two readings from the Old Testament – the passage from the prophet Isaiah and Psalm 72 – tell us what all the dreams point to. They tell us what Matthew had in mind, when he described Jesus as the true king and Herod as the false one. God’s vision for the world has always been one of justice, one of abundance, one of mercy. This is the light God shines on all the world – all the peoples – not just the ones who came out of Egypt as “God’s chosen people.” The kings who rule as God would have them rule defend the needy and rescue the poor and crush oppressors.

Given human nature, it is likely that there will be more people like Herod in this world, people who get power, and fear loss, and take revenge by shedding blood. But lessons like these let us know that we are not alone in condemning that way of doing things – that even people who we thought were our enemies yearn to live in peace and prosperity – that peace and light and justice are not only vague dreams but the means by which we interpret what is going on around us, even now, even today, “as the day dawns, and the morning star rises in our hearts.”[1]

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[1] 2 Peter 1:19

God appears and God is Light

Christmas 1

Dec. 30, 2012

Isaiah 61:10-62:3

Psalm 147

Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7

John 1:1-18

Years ago, when Tim was the rector of the Syracuse Urban Cluster, we worked closely with the minister of a Pentecostal Holiness congregation. We shared services, festivities and community events. We marched through the neighborhood, praying in front of crack houses and anointing with oil any who came up to “Father Hall” or “Minister Ellis,” as our friend was called, to be saved.

Not long before he started his congregation, Minister Ellis was a jazz musician, a studio and session musician, and the grandson of folksinger Libba Cotton. What drew him and his congregation to the Episcopal Church, we wondered? After not too many sermons we understood: it was the Gospel of John, with its deep poetry, its stark contrasts between darkness and light, between those who hear Jesus’ voice and follow him and those who stray. The Gospel of John is not easy to understand, but if you live a life of ups and downs, of tragedies and near-misses, the Gospel of John is easy to feel.

Soon after we moved back here a year ago, Tim ran into Larry Ellis, a joyful reunion with many promises of getting back together. Sadly, not long after that, Larry Ellis died, unexpectedly, putting to rest a glorious voice and a magnificent soul. His music rose from the depths of his experience to the heights of glory, confident that no matter what came to pass, he belonged to Jesus, the rock of his salvation.

A theology based on the Gospel of John revels in contrasts: darkness-light; knowledge-ignorance; blindness-sight. Taken to an extreme, it defends an “us against the world” understanding of Christian community. It can feed notions like the “clash of civilizations,” leading to the demonization of “others” who just don’t get it, others who reject our world view.

It is all too easy to stay on the surface when we read the Gospel of John, and revel in its dualisms of good and evil, dark and light. But to do so can distort the Jesus about whom John is talking in this Gospel, a Jesus who brings a light to enlighten everyone – everyone – into the world.

In 1803, the English poet William Blake wrote a poem which ended,

God appears and God is light
To those poor souls who dwell in Night;
But does a Human Form display
To those who dwell in realms of Day.

God comes in a form we understand. If we live in gloom or trouble, God first appears to us as light. But if we already have had a glimpse of that light, God comes to us as one of us, embodying our hopes for righteousness and justice, love and freedom, giving us something tangible to hold on to and model our lives upon.

The Gospel of John reminds us that God has been calling us into being since the beginning of time. The light still shines and there is no darkness – no depth of human evil, no ignorance or fear or violence or death – that can block it out. If you listen closely, you can hear the angels – and Larry Ellis – sing.

All we have is a child, and everything in the world looks like a promise

Christmas 2012

Christmas is a confused jumble of stories, sources, traditions, customs. We pull together what is “Christmas” to us from a variety of places. At the 4 pm service we read the accounts of the birth of Jesus from both the Matthew AND the Luke gospels. Those two evangelists tell different stories about Joseph, Mary and the Babe in the manger; Mark and John tell us nothing at all about how Jesus got here, but they both allude to Jesus’ mother and brothers and sisters.

We also include in “Christmas” dozens of customs from all over – a mélange of Charles Dickens and medieval carols and Coca Cola ads. The piano accompaniment to “the Charlie Brown Christmas” means the holiday to us as much as Handel’s “Messiah.” “The Miracle on 34th Street” captures the essence of the season as much as any number of elegant musical settings by Benjamin Britten and Ralph Vaughn Williams. This season is a sentimental time, and a hopeful time, as we approach the turning of the year and all of the promise that the birth of a new child brings.

But back to the Bible: even with all these different strands of stories about the birth of Jesus, the Gospels all include some mention of dark things. Even the blessed Wise Men, when they come to honor the Baby Jesus, inadvertently play a role in terrible destructive things. Herod, powerful and yet weak, so fearful of this child, this king-to-be, uses the Magi’s hopeful seeking for his own wicked ends. He uses his military might to kill all the baby boys just in search of the one who escapes his grasp. The Holy Family flies to safety, just in time.

Christmas has always included this poignant mix. Charles Dickens wrote his “Christmas Carol” against the backdrop of the deprivations and hardships of industrial England, contrasting the bounty and warmth and cheer with loneliness and hunger.

Christmas is, in a way, a kind of crystal ball: what we see in it, what we experience, is influenced by what we bring to the encounter. There is an old saying, that if all you have is a hammer, then everything in the world looks like a nail. The terrible events of the past couple of weeks have reminded us that if all you have is a gun, then everything in the world is a target.

But tonight, all we have is a child, and to us, everything in the world looks like a promise: a promise of hope, of love, of grace, of forgiveness, of starting over, of seeing the world in the way this child sees it. And since this child is God, that means seeing this world in the way God sees it.

One of the things that our Christian tradition enables us to do during this season, is to hold together all of these things: the promise and the pain, the abundance and the loss. We can miss someone so much during these days that it hurts, and yet at the same time be overjoyed with gladness at the things around us. 

We are all meant to be mothers of God

Advent 4-C

Dec. 23, 2012

Micah 5:2-5a

Canticle 15: The Magnificat 

Hebrews 10:5-10

Luke 1:39-55

People of faith are viewed by many people in this society as kind of kooky. People of faith are just not realistic. Even the “I’m spiritual but not religious” types are seen this way by the hard-headed realists. We are sometimes dismissed as “Religious do-gooders,” airy-fairy types. Just how much of a difference can our meager efforts make in this world where the problems are immense and the solutions nearly unimaginable?

Mary and Elizabeth must be seen as the ultimate kooky “people of faith.” What could be less realistic than the words Mary sings when she meets up with her cousin, Elizabeth? Casting mighty from their seats of power? She, a pregnant, poor, unmarried girl? Filling the hungry with good things? Her cousin Elizabeth is elderly, and is now pregnant for the first time in her life. These are just ordinary people, not miracle workers; how much more delusional can they be?

These two women, and the two baby boys they carry in their wombs, come to us today in the line of prophets. Mary and Elizabeth came from people who read their Bibles carefully. They lived on the fringes of society, where they could see the things that were wrong, where they could see how poor and powerless people were treated. They knew their Bibles well enough to know that God promised that the world would be a better place. They stood in a long ling of prophets who listened carefully to God, and who looked carefully at the world around them, and said, Wait a minute here. There are things going on in this world that are not what God intends. When Mary and Elizabeth listened for God, they heard the great and powerful swooshing sounds of angels’ wings, the Holy Spirit coming upon them, overshadowing and empowering them to see the world as God sees it, and to speak and to act.

And all the world is grateful that these two kooky women, these people of faith, and hope, these attentive listeners to God, said yes.

Meister Eckhart, a popular and mystical teacher of the Middle Ages, said this about Mary: “We are all meant to be mothers of God.” To be mothers of God in the sense of being a kooky person of faith like she was. To be a person who listens closely for the swoosh of those mighty Holy Spirit wings, and who looks closely at the world around her. We are all meant to be mothers of God when we say yes to the promises God has in store for us. Mary and Elizabeth certainly saw lots of darkness and violence in the world around them – December 2012 has no corner on that! – but in spite of that, Mary and Elizabeth said yes to the goodness God put here when God created this world. We are meant to be mothers of God when we open ourselves to be changed by God, even if we only take one step at a time, not exactly sure that what God would have us do is reasonable, or socially acceptable, but we do it nonetheless. To be a mother of God is to be willing to be a kooky person of faith.

There is something curious about this Magnificat song that Mary sings. It is in the words of a young woman, talking about the promises God has made for the world, but it is spoken from the point of view of something that has already happened. God has already overthrown the mighty and given the hungry enough to eat. God has already pulled the downtrodden up and sent away the rich people, who were not willing to participate in this way that God would have the world work.

This kooky person of faith seems to think that all those things have already happened, and that the birth of the son she carries is part of this ongoing process of healing the world, of bringing it back to the world God created it to be.

What a kooky imagination this Mary has, to listen to the swooshing, swooping powerful wings of the Holy Spirit, and to begin to see the world as God sees it – to take it on faith, as it were, and to begin to live her life, now, in the real world here and now, believing it to be true.

“We are all meant to be mothers of God.” Kooky. Hopeful. Knowing that the world could be, and is, a better place, and saying yes to God, when God shows us how this could be so.