Tuesday, February 28, 2017

Prayer 1496: Shaping Our Lives With Love

The altar at Holy Communion, dappled in evening light.

Lord Christ,
part the darkness of the night,
and open the eyes of our hearts
to your truth and light, we humbly pray.
We praise you,
we bless you,
we worship you
and give thanks for your blessings and care.
Mold us as a potter works her clay, Lord,
and inspire us to shape our lives
according to your gospel of love.
With humble, hopeful hearts,
we ask for your guidance this day, O Holy One,
that we may walk in paths of peace and holiness.
We place before you our cares and concerns,
and ask your blessing upon those we now name.

Amen.

Monday, February 27, 2017

Prayer 1495: I lift up my soul to Christ

This portrait of my friend, mentor, and priest, the Rev. Emery Washington, Jr.,
painted by Ms. Tito Gay, was unveiled yesterday at Holy Communion.

Most Precious Savior,
Brother Jesus, Love Incarnate:
guide me in paths of wonder and grace today.
To you, I lift up my soul:
accept my poor offering,
open and renew it, I pray.
Center my scattered thoughts;
within your embrace may I rest and gain strength.
Let me take that strength
to serve as You served,
humbly and with great love and mercy.
Teach me and shape me
to walk gently on this earth,
led by your wisdom and compassion.
Accept my prayers
as they rise to You with the sun,
and open the ear of my heart to hear your Word.
Comfort those who watch, or weep,
and relieve the distress of those who hurt,
especially those we remember before You.

Amen.

Sunday, February 26, 2017

Prayer 1494: Last Sunday After the Epiphany

The reredos in evening light at Christ Church Cathedral in St. Louis.

We gather in your courts to worship and obey,
O Light of Lights,
and give thanks for your grace and mercy.
Open our ears to hear your Word, Holy One,
that we may enshrine it upon our hearts
in love and hope.
Lord God, You call us not just to repentance
but to transformation,
that our witness to You may shine in the darkness.
Make us better disciples of your Word,
and give us courage of our convictions
to stand for justice and peace.
Let all we do reflect your glory
and serve You and each other in the name of your Love.
Gather within your embrace all who seek You,
and send your Spirit to comfort those we now name.

Amen.

Friday, February 24, 2017

Prayer 1492: Receiving the Light of Christ

Jesus with the children, window at Church of the Holy Communion, University City, MO.

Holy One,
Light of Lights,
rise within our hearts
and fill us with your light,
that we may be people of hope.
Help us to lift up those
who are in anxiety, grief, or trouble,
by loving each other
through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Grant us strength for today's labors,
compassion for today's encounters,
and rest within You, O God, at day's end.
Ground us in your mercy, Lord Christ,
and root us in your love,
that we may grow deep in faith and justice.
Gathered in your name, O Savior,
we ask you grant your peace and comfort
to those we remember before You.

Amen.

Thursday, February 23, 2017

Prayer 1491: My soul quieted within Christ

My friend and teacher Peter and my friend Maria prepare to bless my car, which made me feel so much better. I still have some anxiety after my last car was totaled in a collision, and this made me feel reassured.

Most Merciful God,
who rested your hand upon me through the night,
let me now draw before You in thanks and praise.
With each breath,
let me offer my humble thanks for each blessing,
and rejoice in your guidance and care.
Let me still my soul
and make it quiet within You, O Savior,
resting upon you like a child at peace in her mother's arms.
Let me rise from my prayers
refreshed and strengthened,
dedicated to testifying to your grace in my life.
In all my steps,
make me an instrument of healing and reconciliation,
for the life of the world.
Holy One,
I remember before You those in anxiety and trouble,
and ask that your blessing rest upon those who call to You.

Amen.

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Prayer 1490- With a song

A glorious sunset begins at the start of my first clergy retreat in the Diocese of Missouri.

With a song in my mouth
and a glad cry in my heart
I rise this morning
to breathe in your presence,
O Holy One.

God of mercy,
hear my prayer,
and let it rise
with those who seek you.

Grant me
an understanding and humble spirit,
that I may walk in the way of Christ
with love.

Settle your Holy Spirit
on those whose needs we lay before You, O God,
especially those we now name.

Amen.

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Prayer 1789: for steadfast faithfulness

Evening light through the windows of St. Martin's, Ellisville.

(inspired by Ruth 1)
Almighty God, we lift our eyes to You,
Source of Our Help and Light for Our Way,
who has brought us safely to this day.
Forgive us our sins,
especially for the times we have broken faith
with those we are called to love.
Give us, instead, the steadfast love of Ruth,
and generous hearts to walk beside our companions
in all their ways.
Make us faithful servants of God,
daughters and sons
in the name of love and hope,
led by Christ and his example of mercy.
Rededicate our hearts for healing
and hands for comforting,
that we work for the renewal of those who struggle.
Send your Holy Spirit
to rest upon those who lift their needs before You,
O Holy One.

Amen.

Monday, February 20, 2017

Prayer 1488: for generous hearts

Pray without ceasing, and let your light shine.

Blessed Savior, we lift our hearts
as the sun rises in the East:
hear our prayers and accept our lives
as we offer them to You.
Forgive us for the sins we have committed
and the sins done through our quiet assent or distraction.
Forgive us for claimed helplessness
in the face of oppression
and denying the power of your Spirit within us.
Make our spirits generous and glad;
save us from those with leanness in their souls.
Give us wisdom, O Lord,
to ask and to work 
for what is good for us:
peace, justice, and fellowship.
Help us to live into your call to us
to work as disciples and beloved brethren
of the Prince of Peace.
Holy One, open the clenched fists of our hearts
to embrace each other
and all creation
in the name of hope as we pray.

Amen.

Sunday, February 19, 2017

Prayer 1487: Seventh Sunday after Epiphany


Morning mist on the lowland fields in the Missouri River bottoms.
O God, your mercy endures forever;
your steadfast love never fades.
Gather us into your house as one people,
united in love, justice, and faith,
seeking to serve You and the world.
Teach us your ways
and inscribe them on our hearts
that we may walk blamelessly before your altars
as children of light and love.
Reconcile us to each other
according to your law of forgiveness and mercy.
Teach us to pray for those who hate us,
that their hearts may be turned
and divisions may cease. 

In all things bring our hearts back
to praise and prayer grounded in your Incarnate Love,
and hear our prayers as we remember these beloveds.

Amen.

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Beyond Valentine's Day: Speaking to the Soul, February 15, 2017



Here we are, on the day after Valentine’s Day. If your house is like my house, there are chocolate wrappers stuffed in the trash; the scent of roses fills the kitchen; the remains of a wonderful dinner are in the fridge.

When I taught middle school, I dreaded Valentine’s Day. Some group in the school would fundraise by selling candy or flowers that would then be sent around the classrooms at the end of the day. Some kids came out on top on these transactions, and some kids ended up feeling lonely and forgotten. Lost in the shuffle was the idea that a day dedicated to celebrate love should not leave some people feeling more lonely than ever. Some of us teachers often plotted together to have “secret admirers” suddenly erupt with candygrams for all as a way of compensating. There were few tears shed when we finally did away with this particular kind of fundraising, I can tell you.

Even though this day supposedly is all about romantic love, the marketing gods have realized that simply making this day about people with significant others or spouses means that too many might slip through their net. Therefore I have also seen commercials about celebrating “Pal-entine’s Day,” and also seen female friends of mine giving thanks for their gal pals on “Gal-entine’s Day.”

So now, we’re in the “hangover” phase after this big, commercial holiday. Why not use this day, then, to celebrate the varied ties that bind us together? It is a good and right thing that no one feel excluded from a day in which love is celebrated. I sometimes think of February 15 as “Valentine’s Day Plus.” It’s a good reminder to me to think of the love I feel and receive from all the various corners in my life: my family, my fellow parishioners, my friends, my colleagues, those who so generously mentor me, and those I have been privileged to mentor. Too often we get hung up on official titles for the relationships that we hold the most dear. I made my peace long ago with the fact that there is family of the blood, and family of choice, and the heart will love members of each just the same. What’s important is not putting asterisks or qualifiers next to the names of those who are our brothers or sisters, whether of blood relationship or simply through love, care, and loyalty.

Love is love. I think that’s what Jesus keeps trying to get at as we wrap up our four week visit with the Sermon on the Mount this Sunday. Too often we focus on the prohibitions embedded in teachings like the ones we’ve been hearing, instead of seeing that at the bottom of it all is a call to be expansive in our relationships.

This Sunday, we will hear a selection from Leviticus that uses the word “neighbor” five times, defining a holy people as one who deals justly and generously with those around us, acting out of love for the other as well as love for God. Building upon the call to inclusion and justice in that reading, we will hear Jesus call us to choose to love even in the face of hatred or persecution. “Give to everyone who begs from you.” “Love your enemies, and pray for them.”

In direct counterpoint to the dominant strains of competition and striving that too often poisons our relationships with others, Jesus as the new Moses leads us into loving people rather than things. As we move beyond Valentine’s Day, we turn our faces toward the beautiful discipline of Lent, remembering our common bonds within creation. At the foundation of it all is a determination here within the Jesus Movement to build a new kind of community that seeks to exclude no one, but rather embraces everyone.

Sunday, February 12, 2017

Sermon for the 6th Sunday After Epiphany: Being Disciples

Readings:

This Sunday, there is no Super Bowl. There’s no football at all—unless you like soccer. We are in that terrible sports-doldrums where there’s no football AND no baseball, which may be part of the reason for my dislike of late winter.

But last Sunday, some of you may know, was the Super Bowl. Some of us avoid watching it if it registers at all, not being into brutal, violent, contact sports. Some of us watch only for the commercials. Some of us only watch the half-time show, because they are often quite spectacular, and this year’s show by Lady Gaga did not disappoint. Some of us watch the Puppy Bowl instead, which consists of, of course, bandana-wearing puppies who need to be adopted romping around on a miraculously clean plexiglass field, playing with toys and being generally adorable.

Some of us watch, and think of all the times we watched with our daddies, and remember playing catch in the front yard and being taught to punt by our moms—yes, our moms, because Oklahoma.

And some of us, especially those of us brought up in Texas or Oklahoma, ahem, watch avidly for the football, if only because we loathe one team as being a bunch of cheaters and want to see them go down in flames—I mean, because we have from childhood enjoyed the strategy and teamwork of the sport. It’s a game with rewards and penalties and referees, with strategies and goals. We revel in the rules, and the pageantry, and the message of competition, especially. Some watch because, as in life, in football there are winners, and there are losers, and what could be more American than that?

In the Oklahoma in which I grew up, in our “cultural worship life” on the weekends, there was football, and there was church. By the age of seven, I had both four dresses for church to rotate during the month, and the helmet and pads of the Dallas Cowboys to wear when we played tackle football in the neighborhood with my friends.

And in both football as well as in church, there were winners, and there were losers—that’s what we were taught. In church, the “losers” were the ones who broke the laws the church taught. In the particular churches we attended, that meant those who had not been “born again,” those who were “sinners,” those who did not accept Jesus as their “personal Lord and Savior.” They were people who drank, or smoked, or played cards, or danced to rock and roll or watch movies like Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. They were law-breakers. They belonged to other religions—or no religion at all.

Just like in football, we were taught very straightforward rules, and if we followed the good ones and went to church every Sunday, we would NOT be among the losers, and would receive our reward in being blessed during this life, and in spending eternity in heaven in the life to come. It was all very straightforward, and that appealed to many of us. In both football and in church, there were rules and expectations, and we were fans of that.

But for the last three weeks now, we have been being reminded by Jesus that the life of a true disciple is not so straightforward as that. This is the third of four Sundays we will spend this Epiphany season with Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount. We are in the part where Jesus specifically addresses rules handed down for generations, rules that some people took great pride and comfort in living by. Jesus, being the rebel that he is, takes a lot of those rules that everyone knows and he turns them upside down. What Jesus says, especially on the surface, can be mighty hard to hear—then and now. But Jesus doesn’t want fans. Jesus calls us to be disciples. Jesus calls us from the comfort of thinking that the life of discipleship can be achieved just by following rules as individuals concerned only with our own salvation.

In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addresses the overall message of the Torah. After the beatitudes that we heard two weeks ago, Jesus then spends a good portion of his sermon using this pattern: You have heard it said in Torah, do x….. but I say to you, do x-PLUS. So let’s look at what Jesus talks about in today’s gospel.

Jesus takes the commandment against murder first, and, good grief, he connects anger and disdain for others with that. Ouch. He takes the prohibition against adultery, and points out that any time you treat another person as an object for your own needs rather than as an individual worthy of respect and autonomy, you have failed to avoid that sin. Regarding divorce and the taking and making of oaths-- he connects with being steadfast in your relationships and being a person of your word in all things.

Each one of the teachings he expands upon here are hard to hear for us now—and they were hard to hear then, too. Yet we can fall into the same trap if we miss that he is trying to turn us toward intention and community as the ends of the commandments. Anger and frustration happen. Relationships sometimes need to end, especially if there is physical or psychological harm involved. Some people have taken Jesus’s teachings here and done the same thing with them that he was trying to correct about the original rules—they have made them absolutes in individual cases, rather than a call to live in love and respect as a new community grounded in Christ. That’s the real point.

The problem is emphasis on the individual, rather than on the community. The point of the gospel was NOT to try to create a nation of individual rule-followers, but a beloved community of disciples who modeled fellowship and love in a new and radical way to the entire world.

All four of the teachings Jesus expands here this Sunday ultimately are trying to lead to helping us to live lives of integrity and honor with each other. We should hold ourselves accountable for our angry and contemptuous words—because they harm others, and seek to make them “less-than:” less holy, less worthy, less beloved of God. 

As disciples, we are called, as the Baptismal Covenant reminds us, to respect the dignity of every person and not treat them as objects to gratify our own selfish ends and desires. We should enter into relationships carefully and deliberately, seeking to honor our beloveds and remain steadfast and true to them as we have promised, and not enter into covenantal relationships lightly or rashly.

We should realize that in the teaching about divorce, Jesus is also talking about an institution in which power was not shared equally as is the ideal today, but one in which the man had all the power. We should realize that in that teaching about divorce, in particular, Jesus was admonishing husbands not to abandon their wives to shame and poverty by treating them as objects, which often happened in that very patriarchal society.

The last section deals with vows—a nice tie-in with our reading from Deuteronomy about covenant. There is a logical flow here- adultery is the only grounds for severing the vows that seal a couple into the covenantal relationship of marriage. In a society in which all are careful of their intentions, there is no need to swear outrageous oaths. One’s word is good enough, because one’s attitude is already aligned with fulfilling one’s promises. We should also say what we mean and stand by our word. If we did that, there would be no need to swear that we are telling the truth. There would be no need to preface our claims and testimony with “Believe me….”

In all four of the specific teachings in our gospel today, Jesus is trying to remind us that intention matters as much as actions. At the root, these teachings are all about relationships- either relationships with God or with each other (just as the Ten Commandments were). Most of the oaths we make—for it is THAT kind of swearing that Jesus is speaking about, not the cussing kind of swearing—are about regulating relationships and expectations. They are also about intentions, not merely the actions themselves, but what we are trying to accomplish by our actions. That emphasis is carried over from last week’s readings.

Jesus’s expansions on the Ten Commandments we see here upends the idea that just following rules is enough to be saved. Salvation—being saved—is not a solitary activity. Instead we are called to live in true relationship with each other, to see the divine imprint of creation in every person, even and ESPECIALLY those who are different than us. It’s easy to love your neighbor as yourself when your neighbor isn’t much different than yourself. It’s much more challenging to love your neighbor when your neighbor is different—from a different economic class, from a different region or country, from a different religion, a different sexual identity, a different ethnic background, even from a different political party. Oooh, that last one can be particularly hard in this day and age especially, and like all preachers, I’m preaching to myself here as much as anything.

Being a fan of Jesus is easy. Being a disciple is hard. Being a disciple calls for daily, even hourly conversion in our lives, so that we take what we hear on Sunday out into the world and try to testify to the gospel through our lives the rest of the week. It’s easier to be a fan. It’s easier to think we can just follow a set of rules and be a winner.

Eighty years ago, German pastor, theologian, and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote an amazing book called The Cost of Discipleship that included his thoughts on Matthew’s account of the Sermon on the Mount that we are hearing today, and he called out that tendency to think that we can be fans of Jesus without discipleship. He called that tendency “cheap grace.” He said,

Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession...Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.” [1]

We fool ourselves if we think grace is free. Bonhoeffer calls “costly grace” the only thing worth having. It is the way of discipleship. It is the way of forming community against the individualism of the world. It is being willing to live with integrity within ourselves and within the community without trying to build walls or barricades. It is a radical way of life—but remember, that the original meaning of “radical” means to be “rooted.” More specifically, Jesus’s message to us today is to convert ourselves toward living in true brotherhood and sisterhood with each other—no exceptions.

Bonhoeffer again makes this clear to both individual Christians and to the church as a whole: “Let the fellowship of Christ examine itself and see whether it has given any token of the love of Christ to victims of the world’s insults and contempt…  otherwise, however liturgically correct our services are, and however devout our prayer, however brave our testimony, they will profit us nothing, but rather they will testify against us that we have as a church ceased to follow our Lord. God will not be separated from our brother: God wants no honor for himself so long as our brother is dishonored.”[2]

Because God’s Son became human, Jesus is the brother of us all, and then Bonhoeffer brings it home: “the Incarnation is the ultimate reason why the service of God cannot be divorced from the service of man. He who says he loves God and hates his brother is a liar.”[3]

Rather, Bonhoeffer says, we as Christians and we as the Church can’t let ourselves off so easily. When we claim grace and forgiveness for ourselves through our own efforts, yet turn against our brothers and sisters as being less deserving. As the hymn “Amazing Grace” reminds us, grace is unearned, given to us – all of us, no matter how sinful we are in the eyes of the world-- through the love of God, which is limitless. We cannot be disciples if we give in to the notion that in God’s kingdom there should be winners, and there should be losers. We cannot cry “scarcity” in the face of want, when we ourselves are comfortable.

Jesus’s teachings in our gospel today ARE radical, now as well as when he first uttered these words two millennia ago. The fact that we still struggle with living into Jesus’s call for radical love and care for all of God’s creation, for all of the members of our human family regardless of status, is proof of our continued need, all of us, to live into the Gospel of Jesus in radical opposition to the calculus of the world, the balance sheet that creates winners and losers, that lures us from living with integrity and trust in the promises of God to love us even as we all struggle and fall, again and again and again.

It is easier to live by rules rather than in real relationship with people who are just as flawed and yet just as beloved as we are. If we claim God’s grace and mercy for ourselves, we have to also be willing to acknowledge God’s grace and mercy working in the lives of others. We have to be willing to see those “others” not as “THEM” but as “us.” God’s mercy and love is wide, and, as children of God and brothers and sisters in Christ, ours must be no less encompassing. Jesus is calling us to live into grace as a new community of hope and faith, as disciples, not just as fans. May we give thanks for that grace and help embody that grace, not just for ourselves but for all.

Amen.




[1] Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship, 44-45.
[2] Ibid., 128-129.
[3] Ibid., 129.