The End, the Beginning, but Always Love: Sermon for Advent 1A

In 1969, to wrap up side two of their masterpiece album Abbey Road, the Beatles designed a little two minute number to complete the medley that makes up most of the second half of the album. It was called “The End.” It featured a solo by each of the band members, fiddling around as only the Beatles could do. But closed with this truism: "And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” (1)

This is also the point, ultimately, of our readings that we hear today in the lectionary.

Today is a day of endings, and a day of beginnings. Today, we begin a new church year, a new liturgical year, with this first Sunday of the season of Advent, the time of expectation, the time of “already” but also “not yet” that so describes our lives as 21st century seekers after Jesus.

It is almost the end of November, which means it is almost the end of Native American Heritage Month, and our reminders of the people who brought us the first Thanksgiving to begin with, 400 years ago.

Today is hopefully the beginning of a new dedication to the concept of gratitude and thankfulness to which our faith calls us. But first, we have to confront our misunderstanding about this morning’s gospel. It seems to speak of the end—the Really Big End, the End Times, that if you grew up in evangelical Christianity meant that Jesus was going to appear again in the sky and take up only a lucky few to be with him in heaven, leaving the rest of humanity to suffer through wars and cataclysms and disasters.

This passage itself was one that was quoted to me often in my childhood churches. Many of them talked often about the “end-times,” and this was one of their favorite images: two people will be working side by side, and one will be taken and the other “left behind” when Jesus makes his “second coming.” I didn’t like hearing that any more than I imagine you did, back then.

The problem I had with the strategy behind this rapture stuff was that it put all the emphasis on the end. It really didn’t matter HOW you lived your life—so long as you personally accepted Jesus as your savior. You could still be mean to people, and make fun of or blame the poor, and hate foreigners and refugees. Just as long as you believed in Jesus, you would go to heaven. My problem with this was that I had actually read the Bible all the way through—even before we had the Old Testament TWICE in our high school English curriculum because, you know, I grew up in the Bible belt. And the funny thing was, both Moses and Jesus insisted exactly the opposite.

There is nothing in this passage actually about heaven. Read it again. But there is an insistence that we are accountable for our actions, and for living our lives on no basis other than love, compassion, and obligation to each other. Saying that you believe something, no matter how crazy it is, as we have seen over and over again in the last few years of our lives together, is the easy part. Especially if you think you will profit from it. Living a life guided by Jesus’s example, which called us to care, compassion, and healing, is much more difficult.

Because when we look at the message of the gospels in their entirety, we see a Jesus who called us to be disciples during our lives right now—to heal the sick and feed the multitudes and welcome the outcast. For all of this talk about Jesus coming again like a thief in the night in Matthew 24 there’s the outline of what it means to be a faithful follower of Jesus in Matthew 25, where the king judges the nations based on whether they cared for the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the sick, the prisoner, and the stranger. For every place in the scriptures that it talks about Jesus’s second coming, there’s many times as much of an emphasis that Jesus’s birth and life already initiated the coming near of the Kingdom of God.

The idea that Jesus will swoop down out of the clouds and take only some of us is not a helpful image. BUT the affirmation that Paul McCartney so admirably places before us, that it is the love we give and demonstrate that matters, IS, indeed, more helpful to us in unlocking the gospel imperative.

The Way of Jesus to which we are called is not about what we can take. It is about what we can give. It is not about looking out for ourselves. It is about being grateful for the chance we have to make a difference for others, to acknowledge the web of relationships that bid us together and lead us to flourish and grow as human beings. The heart of the ethical, love-affirming life to which Jesus calls us also means that we ARE accountable for our actions and their consequences, whether those consequences are deliberately intended or not.

This is where St. Paul’s admonition to wake up comes in. When I was a teen, my Sunday school class in my first Episcopal church was asked to design an altar hanging for Advent. It ended up being very simple: large dark golden letters spelled out “Sleepers, awake” with a Chi Rho against a purple background. This thing could easily be read from the back of the nave, and captured the main idea: that Advent is often described as a time of watchfulness, of anticipation, or preparation. It is a time of waking up and preparing for the coming of Christ with joy and gratitude.

Unfortunately, our epistle omits some important verses to help us understand what being awake and being thankful really means. If we back up a bit, here is what we hear:

Owe no one anything except love to one another. For the one loving has fulfilled the other Law. For the commandments “do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not covet” and any other commandment is brought to a head/summed up in this word: Love your neighbor as yourself.” For the love of neighbor works no evil. The fullness of the Law is love. And do this knowing the time, for the hour has already come for you to rise up from sleep… (2)

Therefore, although not mentioned within the verses the lectionary places before us, the center of the teaching we heard from our epistle is love, directed outward toward others, our neighbors, as an act of obligation, an ethical imperative to work for the good of those around us, to revel in rather than seek to deny or minimize our obligation to one another in favor of our own advantage or exploitation of those around us.

Today is a day for us to wake up to the blessing that obligation is in our lives, the holy calling to self-giving that Jesus embodied for us to imitate as his friends and followers. To remember that Christian love is not a choice or an emotion, but an obligation, a holy calling, an act of will, and a response ingratitude to what has first been given to us by a God who loves us so much as to give us God’s very Son to show us the way to holy, grateful living. The one we await and yet already know in this season of Advent.

And interestingly this brings us to the Native American wisdom we have been celebrating this month.

Biologist, professor, and enrolled citizen of the Potawatomi Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer’s classic work Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants speaks of the word obligation repeatedly in indigenous understanding of relationship. Early in the book, she tells the story of her father thinking strawberry shortcake to be the best present in the world, made from berries picked by his children. She notes:

Gifts from the earth or from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate. The field gave to us, we gave to my dad, and we tried to give back to the strawberries. When the berry season was done, the plants would send out slender red runners to make new plants. Because I was fascinated by the way they would table over the ground looking for good places to take root, I would weed out little patches of bare ground where the runners touched down. Sure enough, tiny little roots would emerge from the runner and by the end of the season there were even more plants, ready to bloom under the next strawberry moon. No person taught us this-- the strawberries showed us. Because they had given us a gift, an ongoing relationship opened between us.(3)

It seems obvious, right—and is especially a vital reminder as we continue to confront the need to care for this parish in our annual giving campaign. Use up all the strawberries, and the strawberries will soon not be there for you. It’s a simple reality we completely ignore at our own peril. Fail to take care of your needs now, and soon the things you depend upon for life will no longer be there for you at all. And the fact is, the same thing is true about any of our relationships—including, especially, with each other.

Ms Kimmerer goes on to share in her book an Iroquois pledge of gratitude that is used to start every meeting of the people. It is called the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, or in their language, the “Words Before All Words.” They start with this pledge of affirmation to remember all for which they are grateful, and I want to share some of it with you. It very specifically lists all the things for which we as human beings depend, and for which we are called to be grateful and acknowledge. It starts like this:

Flag of the Iroquois Confederacy

Today we have gathered and we see that the cycles of life continue. We have been given the duty and responsibility to live in balance and harmony with each other and all living things. So now, we bring our minds together as one as we give our greetings and our thanks to one another as people. NOW OUR MINDS ARE ONE.

We are all thankful to our Mother, the Earth, for she gives us all that we need for life. She supports our feet as we walk about upon her. It gives us joy that she continues to care for us as she has from the beginning of time. To our Mother, we send our greetings and our thanks. NOW OUR MINDS ARE ONE.

We give thanks to all the waters of the world for quenching our thirst and providing us with strength and nurturing life for all beings. Water is life. We know its power in many forms — waterfalls and rain, mists and streams, rivers and oceans. We are grateful that the waters are still here and meeting their responsibility to the rest of creation. Can we agree that water is important to our lives and bring our minds together as one to send greetings and thanks to the water? With one mind, we send our greetings and our thanks to the spirit of Water. NOW OUR MINDS ARE ONE.

And on it continues, listing food plants, medicine plants, animals, winds, thunder, sun, moon, stars. It gives thanks for the teachers of wisdom who pass down the collected lore and knowledge of the people, which once again reminds me of Thanksgiving at my grandfather’s house as we would listen to stories from our elders. It ends by thanking God, our Creator:

Now we turn our thoughts to the Creator, and send our greetings and our thanks for all the gifts of Creation. Everything we need to live a good life is here on this Mother Earth. For all the love that is around us, we gather our minds together as one and send our choicest words of greetings and thanks to the Creator. NOW OUR MINDS ARE ONE. (4)

Our readings today remind us, as our Indigenous friends’ words of gratitude do, that life is a circle, a sacred hoop of giving and receiving that has no beginning and no end. That we are bound together in reciprocity, obligation, and love—and that is a GOOD thing. That personal character—especially a character of giving and generosity—matters. That how we LIVE, rather than how we end our lives, is our foundation as Christians, yes, but as fully alive and flourishing human beings.

Advent is a time of waking from our delusions and embracing life as given to us in Christ. But as Paul insists, and as Jesus implies in the gospel, “the night is far gone, the day is near” is meant to remind us that the ONLY thing that matters is how well we take seriously the idea that we are bound together by the obligation of love and mutual caring for each other which is the essence of the Gospel of Jesus, the foundation of what we are called to BE as human beings made in the image of God. We are fully human when we acknowledge and rejoice in our dependence upon each other: among families—however we make them, among coworkers, among parishioners, within creation, within society.

“Belief” in Jesus isn’t just about heaven and what happens to us after we die or a magic ticket to save yourself, but rather and most importantly a call to work for the repair of the world. Belief in Jesus is about nothing if it is not directed outwardly toward those around us—that’s why there are so many commands to love one another in scripture. Belief in Jesus is nothing if it is not transformative, leading to making us not just fans out to save our own necks, but disciples. Discipleship is about transformation of our lives and our relationships with each other, especially the marginalized, the oppressed, and the helpless, right now. It’s about working to bring the kingdom of God into being the kin-dom of God, to recognize each other as beloved children of the One Who Made Us and Loves Us.

In the end, it is the life and love we offer each other that matters, and brings us back to the beginning. And the beginning is love.

Preached at the 505 on November 26, and at the 10:30 Eucharist on November 27 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Isaiah 2:1-5

Psalm 122

Romans 13:11-14

Matthew 24:36-44

Citations:

1) John Lennon and Paul McCartney, "The End," from the album Abbey Road, 1969.

2) Romans 13:8-11

3) Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, 24.

4) Ibid., 106-116. A version of the full text can also be found here: https://danceforallpeople.com/haudenosaunee-thanksgiving-address/ 

A Prayer for Thanksgiving: Speaking to the Soul, November 24, 2022

God of Abundant Grace,
your love preserves us
and calls us to wakefulness and compassion:
we raise our hearts in thankfulness and praise.

You, O God, call all the stars by their names,
and set them dancing overhead to our wonder and delight.
You teach the birds their songs
that lighten our hearts and call us to joy.
You have called us into community for our flourishing,
and called us to companionship in your Way of Love.

May we tend to the earth, and to each other,
with steadfastness and gratitude,
always seeing your imprint, Lord Christ,
wherever we look.

May we treasure friends and loved ones,
companions and fellow travelers on this earth,
and reach out to those around us in love and kindness.

May we be brave in loving,
bold in giving,
steadfast in hoping,
and grateful in all things.

May we seek to mend the wounds we have created,
and forgive those who have hurt us.

May we ever cultivate being honorable and compassionate,
being just while loving mercy and grace,
seeking purity while acknowledging our humanity.

Holy One, send your angels to tend to those
who call upon You and depend upon your care,
especially those away from home,
and those whose needs we place before You,
that your peace, surpassing all our knowing,
may be our embodied prayer.

Amen.

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on November 24, 2022.

Prepositions of God's Love: Speaking to the Soul, November 17, 2022

Colossians 1:11-20

“There is a theology in prepositions…”— Rev. Canon Graham Ward, How the Light Gets In: Ethical Life I

Remain strong, O faithful, O seekers
   with all the strength
   from Christ’s glorious power,
enduring
   with patience,
giving thanks
   to the Father
sharing the inheritance
   of the saints
   in the light.
God rescued us
   from the power
   of darkness
   into the kingdom
   of God’s beloved Son
   in whom
we have redemption, the forgiveness
   of sins.

Jesus is the image
   of the invisible God
firstborn
   of all Creation–
   in him

all things 
   in heaven
   on earth
were created
   through Jesus
and
   for Jesus.

Jesus himself is
   before all things;
all things hold together
   through Jesus.
Head
   of the body,
   of the Church;
Jesus, the beginning,
firstborn
   from the dead;

First
   in everything.

The fullness
   of God
is pleased
   to dwell
   in Jesus.
God is pleased
   to reconcile
   to Godself
all things
   in heaven
   on earth
   by making peace
   through the blood
      of Jesus’s cross.

This is how we remain faithful,
awaiting God-
   with-us,
Emmanuel
   by whom
   in whom
   through whom
we live and move and have our being,
revealing God’s love, longing, redemption,
seeking us–
world
and love
   without end.

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul, November 17, 2022.

Giving Our All: Sermon for Proper 28C (St. Martin's Day, tr.)

There are a lot of things going on in our lives right now that come together today. First, this is the Sunday closest to the feast day of our patronal saint, Martin of Tours, and so we celebrate that today, giving thanks for his example in our lives, and also having a wonderful feast, literally, in a few minutes after worship concludes, to which you are all invited.

We are also in the midst of Native American Heritage Month, which has been observed in this diocese by daily posts about the history and cultural achievements of the first peoples who lived in the Americas and in Hawai’i.

November 11 is St. Martin’s Day, and also is Veterans’ Day, which originally day of the armistice that ended World War I. Most people do not know that these two commemorations do not just coincide: they were MEANT to coincide. So we also marvel that our patron saint is associated with a day of great thanksgiving, a day in which we recognize the real sacrifice, honor, and obligation of those who serve in the military of this country. And our gospel reminds us of the terrible cost of war and military service that Martin himself knew.

Our patron saint, Martin of Tours, was born to pagan parents from Hungary in the early 4th century of the common era, with a father who was a senior military officer in the Roman imperial guard. As a child, he grew up in Italy, where his father was stationed, and at age ten it is believed he attended a Christian worship service. He did this against his parents’ wishes, and he became a catechumen, or someone undergoing religious instruction to join the Church. Back then, the minimum time for the catechumenate was three years but was often longer.

Then, at 15, Martin was required to join the army as well, and he became a cavalry soldier. It is said that while he was stationed in Gaul, near Amiens, a beggar approached him in the cold and asked for some alms. In response, Martin cut his military cloak in half with his sword. Later that night, Christ appeared to him in a dream, clothed in the half of the cloak he had given the beggar. Martin then determined to be baptized, and he was.

He eventually realized that he felt he could not be a Christian and be a soldier of Rome, and so he requested to be released from his 25-year commitment to the army. This was right before an impending battle, so he was charged with cowardice and thrown into jail. He offered to stand unarmed before the enemy army, holding nothing but a cross, and army officials were ready to take him up on his offer—but the enemy sued to surrender, and so Martin was discharged.

Martin then made his way to Tours in what is now France, where he studied with Hilary of Poitiers, and eventually made his vows as a monastic, but gained a reputation for piety and holiness. He established a monastery there called Marmoutier, where his holiness attracted several hermits who lived in small cells around him.

The people of Tours decided to make Martin their bishop, but he wanted nothing of it. So the story goes that he was tricked into the church to be elected bishop on the excuse that someone needed healing. One popular legend claims that he was so reluctant to be elected that he hid in a barn full of geese, who ratted him out by honking at him. And so the townspeople dragged him out, covered in feathers and probably goose-poop, and finally persuaded him to accept election as bishop. This is why, by the way, it is a tradition to this day in Europe to eat goose on Martinmas. Revenge CAN be, if not sweet, then at least tasty.

Nonetheless, even though bishop, he still lived in Marmountier in his humble cell. He was known for travelling to every parish in his diocese once a year, often on foot. In all things, he was led by a sense of duty, a sense of compassion, and a sense of conscientiousness that gazed outward with humility.

Martin is the patron saint of, among other things, tailors, beggars, soldiers and conscientious objectors, winemakers AND recovering alcoholics, which just goes to show that the people in the Roman curia who decide these things know a multi-tasker when they see one. He is the patron saint of geese, whose migration is usually simultaneous with his feast day, and although he is that patron saint of France, in England his emblem is a goose, and it is said that traditionally, the geese begin their migration south on St. Martin's Day. The newborn baby of Hans and Margaret Luther was baptized on St. Martin’s Day in 1483, and thereafter bore the name of Martin Luther into history. It is said that the trees bloomed on the day he was buried, even though it was November 11; and one term used to describe what some call “Indian summer” days at this time of year in Europe is “St. Martin’s Summer”—one we got to experience for two glorious days last week, including on St. Martin’s Day, before God turned on the cold Friday night.

St. Martin’s feast day is also what is called here in the US as “Veterans’ Day.” Martinmas is also connected to the end of World War I. Martin remained somewhat popular in France even during the French Republic, even if for a while his popularity flagged in France as violent anti-religious sentiment swept across it in the Enlightenment. Until World War I. World War I was a new kind of World War, fully industrialized, and the loss to human life was staggering for that time. Entire villages in England and France lost nearly all of their young men in the fighting.

The horrors of mechanized trench warfare, machine guns, and poison gas left a lasting impression on the survivors. Some villages in England lost every single young man between the ages of 18 and 35 to this war as either wounded or dead.

As the war dragged to a terrible end, the cease fire eventually was declared at 11:11 am on November 11, 1918—St. Martin’s Day—specifically, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. The French people had a resurgence of piety regarding the saint, with some believing that his intervention had helped spare France from any more of the horrors of the conflict, which was fought largely on French and Belgian soil in the European theatre. St. Martin’s feast and the celebration of peace and those who sacrifice to defend peace are forever linked. The feast day of the soldier and conscientious objector is also the day that this horrific war came to an end.

Therefore, every time we celebrate St. Martin’s Day, we honor also those who have sacrificed and continue to sacrifice upon the fields of battle, even while we fervently give thanks for peace—real peace that is grounded in abundance for all because we realize the interconnectedness of all. We remember the fast in the midst of the feast.

This is where this morning’s gospel comes in. Interestingly, this pericope contains all of chapter 21 EXCEPT that it omits the first five verses of this chapter:

[Jesus] looked up and saw rich people putting their gifts into the treasury; 2he also saw a poor widow put in two small copper coins.3He said, ‘Truly I tell you, this poor widow has put in more than all of them; 4for all of them have contributed out of their abundance, but she out of her poverty has put in all she had to live on.’

Think of these two small copper coins as pennies. Jesus sees this, and comments on it. The rich have given from their extra, but the widow has given all that she has to live on. Hers is an act of absolute faith and trust in God, while the rich are giving what they will not miss, what will not affect their real comfort and their bottom line.

The widow understands that she has an obligation to help maintain the Temple. Not only that, she has the FAITH to fulfill that obligation because she has an absolute trust in God. But we make our first mistake when we look at annual giving as only giving to this parish. Our giving to this parish is our giving to God.

The widow gives of what she needs, and does it without fanfare, and without hesitation. In this way she demonstrates great faith and faithfulness. The same faith Martin displayed when he gave up everything to follow Christ.

The anecdote about the widow is important in understanding the verses that we just heard. Where and how we worship God is a matter that we should have at the forefronts of our minds. And for the original audience of Luke, the answer to this question, even as followers of Jesus, had been the Temple. What is NOT spoken of, and what we have to keep at the forefront of our minds, is that Luke’s audience has already witnessed the very calamities and destructions that Jesus speaks of in this day’s gospel. Luke has Jesus speaking of things that happened after Jesus’s own earthly ministry, but within the life of the Lucan community. In 70 CE, the Temple WAS destroyed by the Romans, and not a stone WAS left standing. The beautiful treasures and ornaments that Luke has Jesus’s followers describe in those first words had been gone for years by the time Luke’s gospel was written. The only knowledge some of Luke’s community had for what the Temple had looked like in all its glory was probably memories from their elders, or the accounts of the Jewish historian Josephus

What Luke has Jesus describing had already happened. And I wish I could say that we ourselves have no knowledge of such calamities, as did our patron saint Martin as he experienced in his military career. But we do. Russia is committing the same kind of destruction and calamities in Ukraine right now. The last century alone has witnessed attempted genocides and slaughters of the Armenians by the Turks; the Jews and Gypsies and LGBT people, among others, by the Nazis; Stalin’s starving years; Pol Pot’s fields of blood in Cambodia; the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda; Muslims by Serbs in Bosnia; 300,000 residents of Nanking by the Japanese…. The list goes on.

And this month, we acknowledge and dedicate ourselves to becoming more educated about the violence, dispossession, and often outright murder that was visited on and still continues in some places toward the Indigenous people in the US, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. As we hear Luke’s passage, we think of people who have been persecuted for their faith throughout history, especially our Jewish kindred as anti-Semitism is on the rise in the US and other western nations again. As Martin was when he asked to be released from his military obligations based on his conscience.

So what is the good news? What do we “do” with the first verses of Luke chapter 21? What is its call to us?

First of all, we are reminded that faithfulness and generosity cannot be an afterthought, as the story of the widow, the story of Martin, and the story of Jesus himself illustrates and calls us to imitation.

We are also reminded that even when we encounter wars and calamities and destruction, God is still with us. I think we are reminded that the destruction of the Temple also ended up reminding us that we worship God not in a certain place, but in approaching Jesus and inviting him to live and guide us. In a way, WE are now called to be the Temple to the world as Christ’s body—to be the insistent reminder that God lives among us in creation and is forever making it new, as our Native kindred insist to this day, and as our passage from Isaiah proclaims.

So let us live lives of real sacrifice, real gratitude, real connection with each other and with our God. Let us pray for the wisdom and courage to make this parish stronger and on a more stable footing than ever. Let us honor the sacrifices of those who have gone before us in faithfulness both in our nation’s history and in the history of this parish, and put our empathy into action before the eyes of the world. And in all we do, may we proclaim boldly our commitment to God and each other with gratitude for our blessings, steadfastness in hardship, and see our responsibilities to each other as never a burden, but a joy. May we follow in the example of Martin, and live s life of faithfulness and dedication to God, all our lives.

Preached at the 505 on November 12 and at the 10:30 Eucharist in November 13, 2022, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville,

Readings:

Isaiah 65:17-25
Canticle 9 
2 Thessalonians 3:6-13
Luke 21:5-19

Benedicite Missouri: Speaking to the Soul, November 10, 2022

All praise and blessing to our Creator,
   who tenderly shapes and sustains us:
O praise and glorify our God
   whose love tenderly nourishes us forever!

You constellations, meteor showers, and galaxies; sun and moon and clouds,
Sparkling Milky Way dancing overhead in velvet night:
give to your Creator your thanks and praise.

Father of Waters, rivers and streams, prairie, glade, and grassland,
Wetlands and forest, karst and cavern, limestone and chert:
give to your Creator your thanks and praise.

Shortleaf pine, pawpaw and hickory, canoe birch and cypress,
Redbud and dogwood blazing pink and white in spring joy:
give to your Creator your thanks and praise.

Sweet flag and cranesbill; brittle and crested shield ferns,
Dogtooth and birdsfoot violets carpeting the ground in beauty:
give to your Creator your thanks and praise.

Big Bluestem, foxglove and bluebells nodding in wind-kissed woods,
Little star moss, chantarelles and morels hidden like treasure underfoot:
give to your Creator your thanks and praise.

Sapsuckers and screech owls, kestrels and turkey vultures tracing the sky,
Waxwings in cedars, indigo buntings flashing electric blue:
give to your Creator your thanks and praise.

Swallowtails and monarchs, tiger moths and sulphurs warming your wings in sunlight,
Commas and fritillaries nectaring in coneflower fields, bats wheeling at dusk:
give to your Creator your thanks and praise.

Crayfish and mussel; painted mudbug, hellbender and harlequin darter shyly hiding,
Bluegill and bowfin; mudpuppy and milksnake; spring peeper and bullfrog dueting:
give to your Creator your thanks and praise.

Bobcat and coyote; mink, muskrat, and red-eared slider in sheltering riverbank,
Red fox and opossum, white-tailed deer leaping ravines:
give to your Creator your thanks and praise.

Children of the Middle Waters, Illiniwek, O-Gah-Pah, Jiwere, and Nutachi,
Farmers and businesspeople; parents and children; kindred united in this beautiful land
give to your Creator your thanks and praise.

Let all who breathe and live and turn their faces to the sun bless our Creator,
   Whose wisdom weaves us together as one family,
Joined together in mutual gratitude and sustenance:
   O praise and glorify our God
   whose love tenderly nourishes us forever!

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul, November 10, 2022.

The Gift of Interdependence: Sermon for All Saints/All Souls' Day, Year C

There are certain parts of scripture that are beautiful poetry and resonant truth, passages that burrow their way into the wider culture, like the first verse of Genesis, or the Ten Commandments, or the 23rd Psalm. These are often familiar to people even if they don’t consider themselves religious.

One of the things that makes scripture enduring even beyond people who identify as followers is the universal truths they contain. Our gospel today contains one of them: the golden rule. Which we heard right there at the end of the gospel: treat others as you want to be treated. It shows up in every religion on earth, from Hinduism to Buddhism to Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. It’s so simple—and yet so important. Can you imagine what the world would be like if we all really followed just that one little commandment?

Some of these universal truths in scripture even make it into popular culture, especially music. For instance, back in the 1980s, there was this new band called U2, three of whom were Irish Anglicans, who burst onto MTV with their first US hit-- a driving rocker called “Gloria.” This one was not the song the St. Louis hockey fans sing to bring good luck—it was about Glory to God. I know! Being sung on MTV.

Then a but later there was a new wave band called Mr. Mister that even had a hit based on a poppy, upbeat take-off of the Kyrie Eleison, or Gloria, that is right there in our prayerbooks on p. 361. Unbelievable, right?

When I was in college, I had a poster in my dorm room of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8, written in calligraphy. It goes like this:
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to reap;
a time to kill, and a time to heal,
a time to break down, and a time to build up…
and so on.

This was more old school—it had been turned into a folk song called “Turn! Turn! Turn!” in the 1950s by Pete Seeger, the coolest banjo-playing grandpa ever, and later covered by the Byrds in the 1960s. Years later, my own kids heard it in the soundtrack of the movie Forrest Gump.

This passage was comforting to me because it pointed out that there is balance in life: for every time to be born, there is a time to die, for every time to plant, there is a tie to harvest and then clear the fields for the next year, for every time of killing there is also a time of healing, and so on.

The gospel we hear today from Luke is one of those kinds of passages that can almost be that familiar. We just heard Luke’s version of “The Beatitudes.” The name comes from the first two words of each of these sayings in Latin, beati sunt, which means “Blessed are.” In the original language that Jesus spoke, however, they are in the same pattern as the very first verse of the Book of Psalms, which in some translations starts “Happy is the one who does not walk in the counsel of the ungodly.” The word for “blessed” and the word for “happy” is the same word.

So, if you had never actually read this passage, you might think that the Beatitudes are about happiness, right? About being blessed by God.

Not so fast.

While the specific things that are listed that makes one blessed are certainly counterintuitive. Note the conditions that Jesus says makes someone blessed: being poor, being hungry, weeping, being hated and treated hatefully on account of your faith, as we just heard.

Who here thinks any of those things, on the surface, sound like happiness?

Most of us would argue quite easily that being poor, or hungry, or sad, or the object of hate would be the exact opposite of being a condition of blessedness. Being in those categories sounds more to most of us like curses. No one want to be poor, or sad, or treated hatefully—not if they can help it, any way. And maybe you notice that, as in the passage I mentioned from Ecclesiastes, Luke provides us with some balance. Luke then follows the four blessings with four warnings for those who have the means to help others, yet turn away. To those who see the blessing of responsibility as a threat and a curse.

Jesus holds up those who are oppressed by poverty, sorrow, or oppression as having good things awaiting them, and he warns those who are in more favorable circumstances to use remember the mutuality and interconnection that binds the community together. The Beatitudes remind us that we have responsibilities to each other, and that those responsibilities are actually blessings.

November is Native American Heritage Month. Each day this month the diocese will be sharing daily posts celebrating and honoring Native culture, Native people, and Native history. The 505 will feature Native prayers and translations of scripture from across the Episcopal Church. While there is more than a little bit of irony that the month chosen to highlight Native American achievements would also be the month that contains Thanksgiving, there is also a certain harmony in that too, given the importance of gratitude and mutuality in Native ethics especially regarding the importance of community for the flourishing of life. Today is also the day we officially launch our annual giving campaign, which also focuses on the importance of gratitude for the gifts we have been given and strengthening our parish community for the flourishing of our shared life of faithfulness, fellowship, and service. And all these things are woven into our living out the Beatitudes in our lives, in striving to be saints of God.

In her book Braiding Sweetgrass, biologist, professor and member of the Citizen Pottawatomie Nation Robin Wall Kimmerer explains the connection between thankfulness and the strengthening of community:

Cultures of gratitude must also be cultures of reciprocity. Each person, human or no, is bound to every other in a reciprocal relationship. Just as all beings have a duty to me, I have a duty to them. If an animal gives its life to feed me, I am in turn bound to support its life. If I receive a stream’s gift of pure water, then I am responsible for returning a gift in kind. An integral part of a human’s education is to know those duties and how to perform them.... [D]uties and gifts are two sides of the same coin. Eagles were given the gift of far sight, so it is their duty to watch over us. Rain fulfills its duty as it falls, because it was given the gift of sustaining life. What is the duty of humans? If gifts and responsibilities are one, then asking “What is our responsibility?” is the same as asking “What is our gift?” (Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 115)

How life -changing would it be to think of our responsibilities as gifts? I remember how proud I was when I was growing up when I became old enough to be trusted to operate a lawn mower, or to babysit. Can you remember when a newborn baby or puppy or kitten was first placed in your arms? You KNEW that responsibility was a gift—how we embraced it and knew it for the privilege that was! Native wisdom aligns with Jesus’s teaching on the Beatitudes to insist that our special gift from God as humans made in God’s image is to embrace responsibility, service, and empathy rather than avoid them. To see the web of generosity that supports us, and to joyfully embrace our place as part of that web.

That is also the heart of stewardship. Our budget is about balance, too. Balance between our obligations and paying them yes. Balance between our expenses and our income. Balance between when we get from this community and how we support it to help it grow and witness. This too is a sacred balance. It is a balance that gives life, rather than takes. This responsibility, too is a GIFT.

A commitment to live lives of outstanding gratitude and generosity is woven into scripture—and into the lives of the saints we also celebrate today. They lived lives of abundant faithfulness and generosity—and if we don’t mean to be one too, as the song goes, then what are we doing here?

Too often our culture is predicated upon scarcity, and over and over again we hear a drumbeat warning us that we don’t have enough. That idea of scarcity makes everyone else a competitor in a mad scramble for power and wealth. But it is this simple: scarcity breeds fear, and fear strangles faith.

Let me say it again: Scarcity breeds fear, and fear strangles faith. And that is the reason why there are 366 reminders throughout scripture not to be afraid—one for every day of the year, and then another just because, in case we need it. Scarcity lures us to break the bonds of fellowship and deny the truth of our interdependence upon each other, upon this earth, upon God.

The culture of the Beatitudes is the culture of the Saints we celebrate today. As a matter of fact, the word for saint is right in there. “Beati”—is the beginning of the word “beatify” which means to recognize someone as a saint. And the entire point of this day is to remember that saints are NOT born, they are made.

Jesus isn’t trying to scare anyone into submission, ever. But Jesus does remind us to use the gifts we have been given for something greater than ourselves—for each other, and for the world. The Beatitudes encompass the greatest lesson in the lives of the saints, and that lesson is this: no matter what we have or don’t have, whether wealthy or poor, whether sinner or saint, we cannot depend upon our own resources to be blessed. It doesn’t work that way. The key to being truly blessed is to truly be a blessing—to acknowledge our reliance upon God, no matter what our situation. Happiness begins with acknowledging that God’s grace and mercy are not only necessary, but also real and present in our lives.

As for us, sitting here, as we remember saints of God, we remember people who, in ways small and great, were willing to be cursed, to go against the logic and the dominant culture around them, in order to testify to the God Jesus came to bring to flesh and bone before our eyes: the God who always takes interest in those who are humble in spirit, and yet filled with awe and wonder at the wonder of this God-infused creation of which we are a part. And saints are those who see with the eyes of Jesus the belovedness of everyone, regardless of any other condition.

Jesus calls us to discover within ourselves the same greatness of faithfulness and abundance that reflect God’s imprint in each of us. May we find blessing in the balance between responsibility and gratitude,  b between obligation and gift, for the flourishing of each other, and the wider world.

Preached at the 505 on November 5 and at the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist on November 6, 2022, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

Readings:

Daniel 7:1-3,15-18
Psalm 149
Ephesians 1:11-23
Luke 6:20-31

Citations:

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2013), p, 115.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Speaking to the Soul, November 3, 2022

This Sunday many of us will celebrate the transferred Feast of All Saints, officially observed on November 1, combined with the Feast of All Souls, which falls on November 2. We will remember those we have lost and gone to be with the saints, yet whose lives continue to touch ours.

The gospel reading is Luke 6:20-31, when Jesus sits down on a plain to teach the crowds, and we receive one of the two versions of the Beatitudes in the gospels.
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
“Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.

“Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
Luke’s version reminds us to love our enemies, to do good to those who wish us ill, and be generous to all who ask regardless of what we might think of them.

I give special thanks this year for this gospel, heading into next week. So many of us are anxious because of the election on Tuesday. We have already heard people, long before voting began, anticipating the worst and vowing to resist violently by turning against their political opponents. Violent political rhetoric has intensified.

This is NOT the American way, nor is it the way of people of faith. But such talk does have precedent in American history.

In the election of 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president in a fractious election that featured the vote split among four candidates. After the electoral college met in December of 1860, states began attempting to secede from the Union, even before Lincoln took office on March 4, 1861. Seven states had already announced their decision to split by the time Lincoln addressed the nation in his first words as president. In his First Inaugural Address, he appealed to calm, to reason, and to affection, to shared history and values. Lincoln closed with this plea:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

In the end, Union prevailed, albeit at a great and terrible cost. Unity is yet harder to come by, even now, although it is never too late to turn aside from division to embrace hope.

Consider the list of blessings from Luke. Each of them refers to better angels of our nature. Each of these blessings begins in the present (Blessed ARE…) and points to the future (for you WILL BE…). Is. Present tense. And so too, our political lives are rooted in the present, but should look forward in hope to a better future for all.

The Beatitudes remind us that those who are especially blessed of God are not the high and mighty ones, but those who are on the side of those the world esteems little: the poor, the weak, the suffering, the innocent, the peacemakers, and those who persevere in discipleship even when they stand at risk of unjustly losing all the things the world values. The Beatitudes are addressed to the Church, to those who proclaim that they are disciples of Jesus. Those who are blessed are those who look beyond themselves, to work for the common good, guided by the better angels of our nature.

This was first published at Episcopal Journal and Cafe's Speaking to the Soul, November 3, 2022.