When you live in a crazy time, it can drive you crazy

Proper 7-C;June 23, 2013

Laura Austin plays Lady Macbeth, and
and Tyler Spicer (behind her) plays one
of the witches, in the RedHouse free summer
outdoor production of Macbeth.

1 Kings 19:1-15a

Ps. 42 & 43

Galatians 3:23-29

Luke 8:26-39

DRAMA came right to our front door, yesterday. An audience of churchy and non-churchy people saw a production of Macbeth. Why, I wondered, are we seeing Macbeth on a midsummer afternoon, when any number of other Shakespeare plays spring to mind, for an afternoon’s entertainment. This story of evil, ambition and greed, of political intrigue and bloodthirsty vengeance – but this is a Saturday in June; what does any of THAT have to do with us?

Macbeth and his wife hatch their wicked plot to kill the king – and they succeed, although they leave a few more bodies in their wake then they had planned. But by the time Macbeth is made king, they are beginning to fall apart. The world has gone awry, and even though it was their evil deeds that caused it to happen, Macbeth and his lady are going mad. Macbeth sees the bloody ghosts of the men he has killed. Lady Macbeth cannot rest but dream of blood. The doctor her husband sends to heal her answers, She is

Not so sick, my lord,
as she is troubled with thick coming fancies,
that keep her from her rest.

Macbeth replies with the anguish of a husband, but with words tainted by the guilt that their actions have caused such madness:

Cure her of that.
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
raze out the written troubles of the brain
and with some sweet oblivious antidote
cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff
which weighs upon the heart?

Macbeth is not pleased when the doctor responds, “Therein the patient must minister to himself.”

The doctor, and Shakespeare, and Macbeth, even, know that when you live in a crazy time, it can drive you crazy. When the society around you is crumbling, you can feel yourself coming apart. When there are conflicting voices and threats and challenges and fears, outside of you, you can feel them inside yourself, possessing yourself, almost taking your real self away from you. The world might be mad, but that madness is manifested one person at a time.

We have lessons today about naming the demons and confronting your fears. We have God taking a direct hand in the righting of some individuals. Elijah, caught up on a deadly conflict with King Ahab and his powerful wife, Jezebel, runs into the wilderness, prepared to die – willfully to die. But God intervenes, makes him eat and drink, sends him to a mountain cave. After all the noise of earthquake, wind and fire, it is in the sheer silence, the solitude, the absolute aloneness that Elijah hears the voice of God. God restores him to his right mind, to his mission, to his life. Now go back to Damascus, God says; right those wrongs.

In the story of the person filled with so many demons their name is “legion,” we hear great noise as well. The poor soul screams and hollers and breaks his bonds. When Jesus commands the demons to come out of him, they jump into a herd of squealing pigs and hurl themselves off a cliff. And here, too, as in the story of Elijah, all the drama is followed by silence and stillness: the man sitting clothed and in his right mind. He wants to follow Jesus, but Jesus sends him back to his home, to tell this story of God’s power.

That’s the thing about all these stories of healing in the bible. Yes, an individual is healed, but it is always an individual in a social context, in a setting, a person with a mission. The healing is to right a wrong, to get someone back on track, and then to get that person back into the community. There is not the sense that the person is at fault alone for his predicament. It’s the demons, it’s the persecution by the king – something from the outside is causing the trouble here. And when the person is healed, back he or she goes to work. The healing itself is proof that God is in charge of the world, not those demons who throw individuals out of whack, not power-hungry kings. There are no HIPAA laws in the bible, no medical privacy acts. When God heals you, it is your job to get back out there, and tell the Good News.

There are a lot of stories of healing in the Gospel of Luke, so many that Luke gets nick-named “the

physician.” These healings are signs, Luke tells us in this version of the story of Jesus, that the kingdom of God is breaking in all over. The reign of God is happening. God is in charge here, God is healing the world. God’s spirit and God’s goodness cannot be contained. They are specific incidents: Jesus healing that man in that place, and that man is living in a Jewish country occupied by a massive Roman military force – by the Roman military legions. The Gospels are pinpoint specific to that time and place.

And yet if we would but hear it, we can hear how these stories of healing apply to us, and to our time as well. God is breaking through in our lives, and in our time and place – God moves in to any situation where things have gotten out of whack, and if God has ever restored us to our rightful minds, then we should get out there and spread that Good News that the world is dying – literally dying – to hear.

Let’s remember this where we are, here in this church, in this garden, in this town and community, that the treasure we have is the treasure of the Good News. Like the man healed, wouldn’t we love to get into that boat with Jesus and sail away, but Jesus speaks these words to us, too: "Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you." So let us then proclaim throughout our city how much Jesus has done for us.

Whose hungry do we feed?

Proper 5C; June 9, 2013

1 Kings 17:8-24

Psalm 30

Galatians 1:11-24

Luke 7:11-17

Many years ago, when we lived in a house from which, if we stood on one corner of the porch and got up on your tiptoes, we could see Onondaga Lake. In the 1990s, the county was beginning to get it together to clean up Onondaga Lake, and a campaign was launched: “Salmon 2000.” Clean the lake up enough that once again salmon would swim in it in abundance. My husband, Tim, who likes Florida, took it a bit further. Reports of the evidence of global warming were also in the news, and he was thinking a little of this climate change might not be such a bad thing for Central New York. “Manatee 2000!” he proclaimed. “Let’s have palm trees on Salina Street!”

As we know, the rain (or snow) fall on the just and the unjust, and so you could say that all of us will feel the effects of global warming. But some of us are more equal than others. Maybe we have the resources to absorb the effects of those changes, here in moderate Central New York, but millions of people around the world, who live by the seaside, or in flood plains, or in places which used to be dry and are now desert, can’t. Too much rain, or too little, and millions of people suffer. And we now know that global warming didn’t “just happen.”

The widow of Zarephath is suffering from the effects of an induced climate change. Desertification is already happening. God is punishing the evil king, Ahab, who is worshipping the false god, Baal, by bringing a drought to his kingdom. The mighty prophet Elijah tells Ahab and Jezebel that the power of only the one true God will bring rain and refreshment, and Ahab, who thinks his power comes from Baal, is very angry. Elijah leaves town, and God sends him to Sidon, to the home of this desperately poor widow.

If this widow lived in, say, DeWitt, she would pay $2.59 for a bottle of cooking oil. I don’t know what kind of meal she uses to make this cake, but if she used flour, it would cost her $1.99 – for five pounds. She is down to her last few tablespoons of oil, and last cup of flour. This woman is very, very poor. She is not just desperately poor; she is desolate, empty, without hope. We can assume that, like her king, Ahab, Baal is her god – Baal, who in this time of drought and famine has failed her. She is so poor that Elijah’s request seems an extraordinary imposition, but from some equally extraordinary reserve of hospitality, she uses her last bit of oil and last smidgen of meal to make a cake for this stranger. “Do not be afraid,” he says – you can see the incredulous look in her eyes – “The jar of meal will not be emptied and the jug of oil will not fail until the day that the Lord sends rain on the earth.”

And indeed, it happens just as the prophet said. The widow and her son are provided with food to last. But because famine and poverty take a devastating toll on the human body, even this sustenance is not enough to save the life of the widow’s son. She is now one step above desperation; she has enough energy to be angry, with the prophet and with God, the God who mustered enough grace to save her but not her child. Elijah then does the unthinkable, the unimaginable: he brings the child back to life. 

When I read this story I cannot get images out of my mind: images from our world, of people in war-torn regions, in places of drought and famine, earthquake and flood. Who are the Elijahs today, who save even a few women and children today? Can any of them, with their skill and resources, be as confident as Elijah, that God will give them the power to do what they say, to bring food, and hope and healing to these people living on the edge of desolation?

When Luke the evangelist writes his account of the life of Jesus, these are just the stories he finds, and uses. When Luke’s audience reads the story of Jesus bringing back to life the son of the widow of Nain, they would remember the power of Elijah, bringing to life the son of the widow of Zarephath. For Luke, the “usual suspects” are not who are interested in Jesus. They are too full of their own assurances, their own blessings, they are too secure in the belief that because they are well off, God has blessed them. Over and over again, Luke brings up these stories about Elijah, about the people he heals and helps – people outside of Israel, outside of the covenant, outside of expectations – people so desperate and desolate that they have nothing to believe in. Luke emphasizes that it is to these people that Jesus comes, and that it is these people who understand that the kingdom of God means new life for everybody, them included.

Think about how much you spend on groceries for one week. When I looked back, I was shocked to see that our family spent $9000 on food last year – not restaurants, but food. That is $750 a month. $175 a week.

The Springfield Gardens Food Pantry is about to re-open. There are people who live in the Town of DeWitt who depend on these groceries to make it through their month, people whose food income is well under $750 a month. Perhaps they are not as poor as the widow of Zarephath, but the disparity of income, in our own community, is shocking.

By the end of June, we have to come up with $3000 in order to open the food pantry. This money is used to buy food – Tary Simizon who is on the new board of the food pantry can tell you how it is budgeted, and how many people will benefit. The Food Bank of Central New York is remarkably efficient in getting groceries to the people who need them, and our cash donations go a lot farther with their food than what we could buy at Wegman’s and donate. $2500 has already been committed. Let’s pledge at St. David’s that by the end of June, we will get the pantry over the top. We will come up with $500.

Think about the widow of Zarephath, and that $2.59 she would need for oil, and the $1.99 she would need for flour. Think of what you spend on groceries. If your family of four, like ours in 2012, spent $9000, then maybe you could tithe a month’s worth of groceries, say, $75. Maybe you could donate ten percent of the cost of a week’s worth of groceries, say, $17.50. Or one percent: the cost of a cup of coffee. Whatever we can give, I know we can give, by the end of the month, $500 to support the emergency food needs of our neighbors, the families of the children who go to school with our children, the widows who might be living alone, anybody who needs help to make ends meet. If we do this, it will be a sign. The kingdom of God is at hand.

ENDNOTE: After not too many days had gone past, the congregation raised and donated over $1,000 to the DeWitt Food Pantry. Though us, as through Elijah, God works miracles. Let's keep it up!

Believe in miracles

Proper 4 C       June 2, 2013

1 Kings 18:20-21,30-39

Psalm 96

Galatians 1:1-12

Luke 7:1-10

In April, we had three groups of people talk to us during coffee hour – people doing, for lack of a better term, “global mission.” These were three groups of people working in, to say the least, difficult circumstances. 

• The Sisters of St. Margaret respond to the daily needs of Haitian people still trying to recover from the earthquake. 
• The Brackett Refugee Education Fund finds and supports the educational efforts of refugees fleeing strife-torn Burma. 
• Dr. David Reed works with a medical clinic in South Sudan where, with medical interventions both simple and complex, this team of Africans and Americans performs miracles daily.

In order to get their work done, all three of the groups have to collaborate with the enemy. The Sisters were invited to Haiti by the elites around the Duvaliers, whose rapacious policies stripped the country bare and left people lives of violence and poverty. Accomplishing anything in that land of civil and geographical chaos is a miracle in itself. The Bracketts found, in their work with people living on the Burmese border, that that is a very dangerous place in deed; even the progressive Burmese, trying to democratize a dictatorship, would just as soon kill as look at the Muslim minority group that lives there. David Reed talked about one of the ways they keep their clinic safe: they invited enemy warlords – both sides – to receive medical treatment – eye surgery, I think. The clinic became common ground for these modern-day equivalents of the Roman centurion, a safe place where miracles could happen for anybody, on any side, in any condition.

So our gospel story today is full of things that do not make sense to us. Miracle healings. Working with and even praising the enemy. Reprehensible social relationships, like slavery. Acknowledgement of a military social structure that seems anathema to Jesus, the Prince of Peace.

This territory of contradiction is the place we are entering for the next several months, as we work our way through the Gospel of Luke. We will read many stories of miraculous healing. We will encounter many non-Jews, Roman and otherwise, who seem to understand what Jesus is talking about better than those people who would be his traditional followers. Social boundaries are crossed right and left, and all sorts of “disreputable” people – demon-possessed, leprous, women, even, are healed, included, empowered, employed, as servants of the Good News, the vanguard of the Basilea: the kingdom of God, the reign of God, even, as one scholar puts it, the Empire of God.

Jesus in the Gospel of Luke doesn’t care that he upsets people, that he shocks people by breaking the standard operating procedure. Our lesson today, of the healing of the Centurion’s slave, echoes back to a story Jesus told in his very first sermon – we read it in chapter 4 – in his home synagogue of Nazareth. He talked about a story from 1 Kings, where the prophet Elisha healed Naaman, the enemy commander, who then turns and praises God. This story got the Nazareth crowd so angry they tried to throw Jesus off a cliff. And here he is again, not only telling the story of “healing the enemy” but doing it, but in front of a friendlier crowd. The Good News breaks all bounds, Jesus says. The power of God is recognized in the most surprising places. Human power structures, even those as powerful and vast as a Roman legion, are only human; the power of God to rule the world with justice and mercy and abundance and hope upends even all that.

What is a miracle? David Reed described the relatively simple eye surgeries that are routinely performed at the medical clinic in South Sudan. To those with those crippling conditions, who can never work or be productive members of their community or family, who must always be taken from place to place and cared for by other people who themselves cannot work or go to school because they have to care for these blinded people, people who cannot see the faces of those they love – for those people to have their sight restored is a miracle. It doesn’t matter if it comes with an “abracadabra” incantation, or mud and spittle rubbed in the eyes like Jesus did, or with a surgical scalpel in a sterile field: it is still a miracle. With an eye given sight, a whole community is healed.

Two thousand years ago people believed in miracles. We believe in miracles today. We believe in the people who restored us to full life, just as Jesus restored the lives of countless people he came in contact with. The Good News is not the technical aspects of what happened. The Good News is that none of us have to live like THAT any more, in fear and trembling, in darkness and despair. Those are the daily miracles that David Reed’s clinic, and the Brackett Foundation scholarships, and the patient work of the Sisters of St. Margaret accomplish. Like them, we are God’s hands, working those miracles.

At the offertory, we will add to our collection our gifts to the United Thank Offering, gifts of thanksgiving for the daily miracles in our lives. Give generously, give often. Like the Centurion, be part of the vanguard of the Empire of God.

Spirit and Relationship: sermons for Pentecost and Trinity

Trinity  May 26, 2013

Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31

Psalm 8

Romans 5:1-5

John 16:12-15

The book of Proverbs, the scholars tell us, is divided into two kinds of writing. It is a series of lectures, interspersed with a series of interludes.

The lectures are what you expect to come from the kind of Wisdom Literature entitled “Proverbs.” They are the kinds of sayings a parent would give to a child: advice about how to live, how to prosper, how to be a good person. Practical. Time-honored.

In the interludes, however, we see a different kind of Wisdom. This is the Wisdom of the big picture. This Wisdom was around when God created the world; indeed, this Wisdom played in front of God while God created everything. Yes, that word is right there in the text. The Hebrew term which in our lesson today reads “like a master worker” could also be translated as “like a little child.”

Think of how this ambiguity allows both ideas to be true at the same time. To think of Wisdom as the “master worker” shows us "Wisdom as God’s helpmeet in creation, a craftsperson who assists God in the formation of the world."[1]

On the other hand, to think of Wisdom as a playing child, “reflects the delight that God takes in Wisdom, and that Wisdom takes in humanity.”[2] Among the people I think are wise are the Biblical scholars who can dig into a word, and find so much meaning there. Listen to this:

The ambiguity of the translation … allows both understandings to operate together, depicting Wisdom as the formative power of God’s delight. … Wisdom “is a beneficent, right-ordering power in whom God delights and by whom God creates; her constant effort is to lure human beings into life.”[3] Wisdom is the creative power of God that is embedded in the world; each created thing, and the creation as a whole, speaks of the Wisdom of God at its foundation.[4]

This dual understanding of Wisdom in Proverbs really tells us something about the nature of God, something humans are always trying to figure out. God in the Hebrew Bible is very active. God wants us to live a certain way, to behave, yes, but also to prosper, to delight, to have fun, to create. If we are made in the image of God, that also must mean we reflect HOW God is, and in Proverbs, God delights in the work of creation. Indeed, the work of creation is play, it is beauty, it is joyful. And if the nature of God is Wisdom, then this Wisdom of God is played out in the public square, in social and economic activity. It is not just about a “religious” activity. It is about life: how you live AND how you make a living. Who you are AND how you relate to the people around you. How you put bread on the table and a roof over your head AND how you make that bread and that roof into the beautiful things which would delight God.

You are right, also, if you hear echoes from the Prologue of the Gospel of John in how Wisdom describes

herself. The Wisdom of Proverbs becomes the Word of the Gospel: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God and the Word was in God.” As the early Christians were wrestling with what their experience of God meant to them, they reached back, of course, into their own tradition for images and explanations, and here was Wisdom, right there at creation, co-present, co-eternal, and very active, drawing all of humanity and of the whole created world into a loving relationship with God. It is that very dynamic relationship right at the heart of God, at the beginning of creation, that is the Trinity: God in three persons, delighting, playing, creating, loving, and pulling us along into that dance of joy and delight.

With such an awareness of God, and of what God wants for us, how can we help but be grateful? To want to give back? To fall all over ourselves to share in this delightful abundance? We have many ways to do this.

Did not our hearts stop last week when we heard about the tornado in Oklahoma? I know that every week, every day, every minute, there are people around the world crying out for help in the midst of pain and disaster – and yes, we can help any and all of these deserving brothers and sisters. But there are times when we stop, and focus our prayers and concerns in one terrible place. Today, if you are moved and able, we can send our own prayers and donations to the people rebuilding their lives and their communities torn apart

by tornados. We will send all our offerings today, that are not part of our pledges to St. David’s, to Episcopal Relief and Development, who will put them where they are most needed.

And next week is our ingathering for the United Thank Offering. It is the Blue Box into which all our prayers and thanksgivings go. The money collected in those Blue Boxes makes a difference in the lives of thousands of people each year, through the Episcopal Church here in the US and overseas.

Wisdom draws us out of ourselves, out of our private reveries into the crossroads of life, to the gates of community, to the highways and byways. Wisdom calls us to take everything we have, from the Celebration of the Arts to the change in our pockets and give it in service to God’s world. You know that God delights in our generosity. God does a dance every time we give something away.

---

[1] Elizabeth Webb, ”What is the connection between wisdom and joy?  http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1708

[2] Ibid.

[3] Elizabeth A. Johnson, She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Co., 1996).. 88.

[4] Webb, Op. Cit.

Pentecost        May 19, 2013

Acts 2:1-21

Psalm 104

Romans 8:14-17

John 14: 8-17, 24-25

Pentecost. It’s 50 days: fifty days since Easter. Pentecost is also a Jewish feast, commemorating the 50 days it took the Israelites to get from Egypt to Mt. Sinai, where they heard the law – when Moses gave them the 10 Commandments. In the Acts of the Apostles, all the disciples were in one place to celebrate this Jewish feast of the giving of the law, to give thanks for the great freedom and blessing it brought them. They were not expecting this to be the “birthday of the church.” They were not expecting tongues of fire, a proliferation of languages, a mighty wind or ecstatic revelation. They were there to celebrate the giving of the law.

Now there is a story about the giving of the law – another version of this oft-told story of the Ten Commandments (without Charlton Heston). The rabbis say “that at Sinai all Israel heard the Ten Commandments, because the voice of God was divided into seven voices, and then went into seventy tongues so that all heard the law in their own language.”[i] Could this Pentecost of the Spirit, experienced by people who knew Jesus, be then an extension of that multi-tongued Sinai? Is this Pentecost a new life-giving law, a new way by which God establishes a new relationship with us? Is this a Sinai exploded beyond all expectations? A shattering of those old stone tablets in a great whoosh of fire and wind, each of us with a direct experience of God – in our own, intimate language, the language with which our mothers spoke to us in our cradles – and yet also a communal experience of God, each of us understanding God in exactly the same way?

With Pentecost, we go into warp speed – like on Star Trek, or in Star Wars, when Han Solo finally gets that old Millennium Falcon up and running and the galaxies streak by us like so many beams of light. St. Paul understood that Pentecostal Spirit – “all who are led by the Spirit are children of God.” No matter how we got here, we’re all here now, we’re all different but we are all together, each of us indispensable to this new life-giving, Spirit-filled law that has blown in from the desert.

This story from the Acts of the Apostles is about the world as we know it blowing apart in an ecstatic, joyful, creative way. Things catch on fire because this new thing is coming into being. This Pentecost is a chaos of hope.

The world, however, seems all chaos and little hope: it’s tornado season again, with whole communities being blown apart. The latest reports on global warming reveal CO2 levels something like 400x higher than what in our lifetimes was normal. Bombs explode on streets we have walked down. Even the IRS is caught up in a scandal. How much more can we stand? Where are the tongues of fire that can show us out of this mess?

In such times, we need to hear the Pentecost story more than ever, as a reminder of what IS possible in a world gone mad. On Mt. Sinai, the law gave direction to a people lost in the desert, wandering and aimless. The law gave them a purpose, a relationship with God, a set of rules about how to behave with each other. The powerful message of this Pentecost story is that not only does God have the last word, but God is The Word – and a Word that each of us can understand. We can make a mess of things, but God’s fiery and ferocious wind can wipe it all away:

Though humans crucify, God resurrects. Though humans divide and dominate, God communicates. God has the last word, and the word is wild. It changes everything. It rebuilds broken community. It breaks boundaries and enlarges the house. It makes possible understanding where before there was not understanding.[ii]

Our Pentecost prayer is “Veni Sancte Spiritus” -- “Come, Holy Spirit.” Guide us. Show us the way. Give us a clue about this chaotic, fractured, embittered world. Enlighten our blessings. Show us what to do, for life in this world is no longer as clear-cut as it was up there on Mt. Sinai. Give us the new vision we need to face the problems of today, to dream the dreams of the world as you would have it be.

---

[i] Carl A. Volz, from Word and World (Luther Northwestern Theological Seminary, 1990)

[ii] Nancy Sawyer, “Blogging Toward Sunday,” The Christian Century (http://www.theolog.org/blog/2008/05/blogging-toward.html)

God at the intersection of art and justice

The Celebration of the Arts at St. David's is a remarkable event. For 43 years this parish church has turned itself inside out to welcome local artists and art appreciators. God's mission has a church, Bishop Ian Douglas often reminds us. The piece of God's mission that this church takes on is to identify the divine in the creative process, to connect art and justice, to be a place where the stories of the people of this community can be told in music, poetry, painting and sculpture. Two sermons here, from the 6th and 7th Sundays of Easter, that reflect on that piece of God's mission.

Easter 7 C; May 12, 2013

Acts 1:4-11; Psalm 47; Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21; John 17:20-26

This Lion and this Dragon are replicas from the parish church in a small town in Essex, England. When Conrad Noel went to Thaxted, in the early 20th century, he went there to develop what he called the Catholic Crusade: a movement to make the church into the embodiment of the kingdom of God on earth – to be the herald, the vanguard, to make this earth as beautiful as heaven – with music, with art, with color, with dancing, with processions which gathered up all bystanders in joyful party.

And that party, for Noel, always began in church, with the sacraments, with

… the common meal, the bread and wine joyously shared among [the] people… The Lord thus chose the human things of everyday life, [Noel wrote,] the useful bread and genial wine, to be the perpetual vehicles of his presence among us till his Kingdom should come on earth as in heaven.[i]

So apt, then for this second Sunday of the Celebration of the Arts. Noel would endorse such a Celebration as we have here: the church turned inside out to show the works of people’s hands and hearts and voices. The beauty we see and hear reflects the beauty of God – God, Noel wrote, who was

… the maker of the sense of wonder, justice, love and worship; of the sense of color which delights in the flowers, pictures, sunrises and gay fabrics … of the sense of smell which rejoices in roses and frankincense; of the sense of hearing which responds to poetry and music.

All of this beauty, Noel would say, starts in the church, in this place of community and communion, of bread and wine and fellowship. The church is the community of the ascended Lord, this Lion who rules the earth, this Jesus who shares our human nature, now taken with him into heaven.

Yet if all this beauty stopped here, if we hoarded it only for ourselves, it would be corrupt and perverted. It is like that tempting and beautiful leviathan, that serpent, that dragon. Noel points out that for God, beauty is always connected to justice. Not only are there sufficient material goods to go around – indeed, the benefits of God’s commonwealth are for all of God’s people – but with that living wage goes a living beauty, and embodies a living hope: that the imperfections of the world, where want, greed, death and destruction threaten God’s creation, will be transformed, and the dream of God fulfilled.

We commemorate the Ascension of Our Lord every year, but every year it means something new. Some established order we thought was there forever is changed, gone, displaced – what we that was impermeable is now, we see, transformed into something new. At the Friday night performance, someone asked the new artistic director of the Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company what had happened to that community group since it lost its performance space, and what had called him to work to revive it. “The Paul Robeson Performing Arts Company was formed in 1982,” he said, “And it’s no longer 1982.” This company which was founded to give a voice and a stage to African American playwrights

and performers found itself in a world where the best and the brightest of those playwrights and performers could achieve great heights on any stage. But there are still stories needing to be told – not the same stories that were told in 1982, and not necessarily stories that will “sell” in the way that commercial theater has to “sell” in order to stay in business. These are stories that are worth far more than that, Ryan Johnson-Travis told us on Friday night. These are the stories of our community today, a multi-cultural community, a community where people embody gender and sexuality in different ways, a whole community, not only of the “south side” or “the 16th ward” but of the suburbs and the University and the immigrant north side. These are stories of hope, of a new reality, of the dragon of despair and alluring nostalgia trampled under foot.

We’ve done a lot of new things with the Celebration of the Arts this year, and there are more new things to come. Just as the Robeson company discovered it was no longer 1982, we can readily see that it is no longer 1970. Forty-three years is a glorious run, but “what we’ve always done” can get in the way of seeing what is going on around us now, can get in the way of hearing new voices, new stories, new music – can prevent us from welcoming the new people who embody the dream of God today.

Every Ascensiontide, we are given a choice. As the disciples watch Jesus ascend into heaven, no doubt mouths agape and eyes incredulous, two men in white robes ask them, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” That’s our choice: do we stand there forever, feet rooted, necks craned, lost in the glorious and beautiful past of the days Jesus was with us? Or do we become Apostles, walking out into this new world, this wild and different and multi-cultural and multi-lingual and complicated and beautiful world, with our useful bread and genial wine, and share with everyone what God has dreamed this world could be?

---

[i] Conrad Noel, from archival papers, quoted by Kenneth Leech in “Some Light from the Noel Archives.” Conrad Noel and the Catholic Crusade: A Critical Evaluation, ed. by Kenneth Leech (London: The Jubilee Group, 1993)

Easter 6C          May 5, 2013

Acts 16:9-15; Psalm 67

Revelation 21:10,22-22:5
John 14:23-29

Even here, in this suburban garden of prayer, we sit by a river. It is a small river, yes – the fountain in the Memorial Garden – but it is the river to us. The river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God, surrounded by trees and blossoms and fruit.

In our reading today from the Acts of the Apostles, we see Paul and his friends in a strange city, and as they look for a place to pray, they come to the side of the river, to the springs of the water of life. It could be any river, in any city or town – and there they find a place of prayer.

A synagogue, for faithful Jews, is a gathering of ten men – ten Jewish men. A Minyan. But look: the place that Paul and his friends find is a place where women gather for prayer – all kinds of women. “All kinds of women” were certainly not the people with whom Paul and his friends would have gathered for prayer in their former lives.

But this is, of course, not their former lives at all. These are the early days of their transformed lives, when the reality of what Jesus risen from the dead is just beginning to be understood. The roof has been blown off the synagogue. All bets are off. The invitations have gone out far and wide, and people, all kinds of people, women, even, are believing that even they are welcome to sit and pray and worship God by the river of the water of life.

Sharon Bottle Souva's
wall quilt in the
Celebration of the arts

We read about Lydia because she is an exemplary Christian: she is the person of faith we should aspire to emulate. She is open to God. She listens to the preaching and teaching of the Good News, and it makes sense to her. She knows it will make her life better. As soon as she opens her heart, she also opens her home. From faith flows hospitality. From the awareness of the abundance of God’s gifts and God’s grace comes this primal response: “Come to my house. Stay at my home. Eat at my table. Let me give to you some of the good things that God has given me.”

Lydia also must have very good taste. She is a dealer in fabrics, rich, beautiful, expensive fabrics. The fabrics of which Kings make their garments. Lydia is a woman of the world, an independent entrepreneur, no doubt an artist in her own right, a woman who recognizes good goods when she sees them. Lydia would be delighted to come to the Celebration of the Arts. Lydia’s favorite 20th century novel would be The Color Purple, and her favorite character would be Shug Avery, the woman who says, “I think it pisses God off when you walk by the color purple in a field and don't notice it.” The color purple that is the color of God’s glory. The color purple that is there for everyone to see. The color purple which comes from the plants which grow by the side of the river of the water of life. The color purple, bright as crystal, that flows from the throne of God.

Almost better than any other poet in the English language, George Herbert expresses the human desire to worship and delight in the beauty of God. God’s beauty is all around us, in the people we love and who love us, in art, in music, in language. We see God’s beauty when dismal neighborhoods are transformed into livable communities. We see God’s beauty when the hungry are fed and the desperate are cared for and when the prisoners are set free. We see God’s beauty when the sick person is made whole and when the abundance of God’s riches are spread among all who need them.

George Herbert was, more or less, a high church Anglican in the century when there was some tension between those who thought the Church of English should maintain some of its historic connections with medieval Catholicism, and those who thought the church should be pure, stripped bare of artifice and pretension and privilege. Herbert died in 1630, and in 1640 the Puritans won the English Civil War. The high churchmen, aristocratic or not, were thrown out, and the plain Word of God reigned.

But I think it is a mistake to think Puritan Calvinists were dry as dust. The great reformer John Calvin rooted his theology, much as George Herbert did, in the glory of God, and in the joyful duty of each believer to bask in that glory and beauty. But yes, the Puritan reformers were concerned with lots of things – political things, powerful things – and George Herbert, as we see in these poems we are singing and listening to today, gave up power and politics to sit in a garden like this, to listen to river of the water of life, and to write down all he heard and saw and smelled and tasted. The beauty of God filled his heart. The music of God filled his ears.

God has given all of us all of these things. The roof has blown open and all bets are off. It is time to take all that we have, and give it all away.

A new heaven. A new earth. A new church.

Easter 5-c         April 28, 2013

Acts 11:1-18

Psalm 148

Revelation 21:1-6

John 13:31-35

Years ago, I joined a tennis club. I did not then, and do not now, know how to play tennis, and I’m not quite sure why I joined. No one at the club was mean to me, but no one was really interested in me, either. I suppose we’ve all tried out membership in all sorts of clubs, or we’ve been in clubs when we knew that some of the people who walked through the doors just weren’t supposed to be there. What do clubs do when someone doesn’t have the right coat, or doesn’t know how to use the right fork, or, in the case of the apostles, doesn’t eat the right meat?

From the point of view of the rest of the apostles, Peter should not be eating with THOSE kinds of people. These apostles are followers of Jesus, yes, but they do not see why they should break with their Jewish past. They know well that Jesus said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.” But perhaps they hear more continuity than drastic change in what Jesus says. This commandment comes from God, like Jesus comes from God – and not some new, innovative God. John – and Jesus, and Peter, and all the rest of the apostles are talking about the same God they have known from childhood – and the same God their parents, and their parents’ parents, and their parents’ parents before them knew, the God who taught them about love, and who expected them to love each other. This is the same God who gave them rules to live by – rules about food – but also rules about caring for strangers, about mercy and forgiveness, about justice and compassion. God has always been about pushing the boundaries of the community out, out out, into the whole known world. God pushed and pulled us together as a people so we could be lights of God’s goodness for the whole world. When God saw the people of Israel getting too inward, too narrow, God pushed them, gave them a new challenge, something new that forced them to re-think what it meant to be the people – not only of Israel, but of God.

One of the ways God gets to people in the Bible is through dreams and visions, and God caused Peter to have quite a vision. In that vision, God caused a complete up-ending of everything Peter thought was “the way we do things in our club”, the place where the rules said you could only eat certain kinds of meat. Make no mistake: God had handed down those rules about what to eat, and Peter knew those rules. “We” ate a certain way, and “they” ate a different way. But now Peter heard God say, “Do not make a distinction between them and us,” and Peter was shocked. He had to hear this three times before he realized that it meant he had to go into that house and eat that food with those people.

And then the miracle happened: “they” became “us.” No doubt Peter was just as odd to them as they were to him. They, too, took a risk with their hospitality, but look what happened: A whole bunch more people became Christians, got the light, learned the story, and started to believe that they were in “the club”, too. This is how Peter explained what happened to his equally shocked co-apostles: “If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?"

Indeed: Who was I that I could hinder God?

Note that the word used there is not “should” but “could.” It’s not, who am I, that I should hinder God. It’s, who am I that I COULD hinder God? God’s spirit pushes and pulls us, loving us along the way, always insisting that we can do more, love more, open more, be more. We can invite oddballs like Peter into our house, invite him to sit at our table, and amazingly, there will still be enough to go around – amazingly, some amazing things can happen. The world can look like a new place. A new heaven. A new earth. A new church.

You might guess where I’m going with this. I had the strangest vision when I was praying over these texts, when I was trying to figure out what they might mean to us, here, St. David’s, DeWitt, today. I saw a medical clinic in South Sudan, and Bol Garang meeting his mother at Kennedy Airport. I saw meal after meal served at the Samaritan Center. I saw day old baked goods loaded into a van and taken to Temple Concord. I saw total strangers, grieving and sad, being welcomed here and given food and drink and comfort.

And I saw people who had not paid even their $25 Patrons membership fee drinking champagne at the opening of the Celebration of the Arts. I saw all of us – or a lot of us, any of us who want to come – whether we’ve paid our $25 or not -- wearing our name tags and welcoming people, and shaking their hands, and giving them a drink -- all those people, who came through our doors, thinking they were here just to see some art and listen to some music – people who aren’t Christians, who don’t want to be Christians, who go to other churches, people who eat all kinds of meat or no meat at all – people who came here thinking this was just some ordinary place – some ordinary church --  but what they saw, what they really saw, was a new heaven, and a new earth. 

The hand of God rebuilds the world that vengeance and violence destroy

Easter 4 C       April 21, 2013

Acts 9:36-43

Psalm 23

Revelation 7:9-17

John 10:22-30

The Gospel for this week takes us, curiously, out of Easter and back into the confrontations between Jesus and the people who did not like him, the people who got him put to death. “It was winter,” the Gospel tells us. The Feast of the Dedication is what we now call Hanukkah. This is the feast commemorating the rededication of the Temple by the Maccabees, an army of Jews fighting a war of independence against Syrian invaders. The Syrian king had desecrated the temple, and as the Maccabees cleansed the temple and rebuilt the altar, they found enough oil in the lamps to last eight days: a great miracle of light – God’s light – shining in the darkness of violence and bloodshed and desecration – a sign of the hope that defeats despair.

After the events of this week – of this spring – of this year – of this decade – it is tempting for us to say we have “lost our innocence.” But you would have to go back to the Garden of Eden, to the time before Adam and Eve lied about taking a bite out of that apple, to discover humans living in innocence. Of course, there are innocent and blameless individuals, and there are even whole societies of humans who live in peace, but really and truly: history is marked by horrific, blood-thirsty and wrenching violence.

The festival of the Dedication celebrates righteous violence, if there is such a thing. The Maccabees used military might to defeat a cruel invader. The drumbeat of vengeance was loud in those days, and we hear it today. There are people in our world for whom honor is more important than life, for whom shame must be punished by death. There are no innocents in such a calculation. Swords are drawn, armies march in, bombs explode: there are no bystanders, innocent or otherwise, in such a culture of war and vengeance, honor and shame. All take part, as protagonists or antagonists.

The events of the past week have caused me to read this brief Gospel passage in a way I never read it before. I now see so much more clearly that Jesus stands right in the middle of that culture of violence. Jesus places himself always in the center of that death-spiral of blood-vengeance, of honor and shame. Even in the midst of that festival that commemorates a righteous act of violence, Jesus says, Stop it all. Your culture holds life less important than honor? Stop it. To follow me is to gain eternal life. Your culture frightens people by threatening to take everything away from them? Stop it. No one will snatch my followers away from me. The hand of God does not wield a sword or pull a trigger; the hand of God brings comfort, and bread, and healing, and wholeness. The hand of God rebuilds the world that the culture of vengeance and violence – even righteous violence – destroys.

There is a reason why today’s reading from Revelation is so familiar to us: it is read at funerals. When someone we love dies, or is critically ill or injured, we are taken to a very raw and exposed place. It is the kind of place where we can see God so much more clearly than when life is ordinary and we think we have it all together. Revelation was written by and for people on the receiving end of that terrible culture of violence, and in some places of this complex book we read images of war and apocalypse.

But here, in these verses, we read what God means to people whose lives have been shattered. God is shelter from all danger, comfort from all pain, refreshment from all want. How can God be on some glorious, remote throne, when it is the very hand of God that wipes every tear from their eyes?

There are few people in the world today who have first-hand experience of a shepherd. Sentimental Victorian church art has made it even more difficult for us modern Christians to understand; stained glass windows crowd our imaginations with clichéd images of fuzzy sheep and Jesus in a pristine, white robe.

But look here: Peter, in the story from the Acts of the Apostles, looks more like the shepherds we would

recognize today. Who comes to us today, in the midst of our ordeals? Who pulls us away from scorching heat? Who rehydrates our parched lips, ties tourniquets around our shattered limbs, pulls us out from the rubble caused by earthquake, tornado or bomb? Who carries us to a tent, or slides us into an ambulance? Who reassures us with strong hands and calm voice, that now we can rest, that now we will be taken care of? Who rushes into the middle of that vortex of violence and chaos and dust and blood, and brings order and hope and a way out?

We know—we have always known – that we see the hand of God at work in the world around us – that the hand of God is none other than the hands of those who reach out to help, who go where they may not even have known they were needed. The hand of God is attached to the arms of people who have listened to the voice of Jesus all of their lives, and not known what it meant until some moving story, some situation of grief, some moment of overwhelming need compels them to act.

The shepherd is in our midst, saying “Stop that! But embrace this. And here, let me wipe the tears from your eyes.”