Prayer 3272: The Ninth Anniversary of the Prayer Circle and 3rd Sunday after Epiphany C

Eternal One,
God of Abundant Grace,
we gather in attentive gratitude:
Speak, Lord, for your serfants are listening.

You have called us
into the service of your gospel of hope and truth,
and made us citizens in your kingdom of mercy and grace:
may we center our hearts within your law
and pledge ourselves anew to your service:
to proclaim good news to the poor,
liberty to the imprisoned,
illumination to those in darkness,
justice to the oppressed,
and jubilee to the alienated and the lost.

May our hands be set to mending
the broken cords of love and faithfulness,
our shoulders aligned to the wheel of mercy
that it may run straight and true.
May we embrace the work of reconciliation
as a sacred offering to You, O Savior,
our Shepherd and our Light.
May our testimony sing out
the truth of your lovingkindness and redemption.

In humility, we lay our lives before You:
bless and hallow them to your glory, O Merciful One.
Spirit of God, rest upon us,
and extend the shade of your blessing over all for whom we pray.

Amen.

The Heart of a Home: Sermon for the 2nd Sunday after Epiphany (Observance of MLK Day)

The last few months have seen a variety of challenges in the lives of our family—like everyone, we’ve had illnesses and tension. But one of the blessings we have had has been our son being able to stay with us, perhaps for one of the last times, for a month. He is in his senior year of college; he already has a job lined up after graduation. He’s our youngest, so that empty nest thing is staring us right in the face. We have played numerous games of UNO, he has tried once again to get me to understand how a Playstation controller works so I can play video games with him, and I have introduced him to the joys of 80s video games like Joust and Ms. Pac-Man.

One of the things we have always enjoyed as a family is watching movies together, and one of the ones we got to share was Encanto, the latest Disney movie. It’s even got music by Lin-Manuel Miranda. The basic outline of the story is this: A young family with triplets flees a war in Latin America, Along the way, the father perishes as they are pursued, but the mother, Alma, with only a candle to light her way, manages to save her children when the candle suddenly magically protects them. Not only that, the candle then creates a magical home for the family in a hidden valley and burns continually for the next 50 years. 

The house gives each of the triplets--and their children-- their own special power AND their own special room as a symbol of that power: being able to produce flowers at will, or incredible strength or hearing, or being able to cook dishes that heal others. All of the children and grandchildren of Alma, now known as Abuela, or Grandmother, have powers—except for poor Mirabel. And because she lacks a special power, she is scorned by her grandmother and overlooked, even if unintentionally, by much of the family. She is literally deprived of her own room in the house, as well.

One day the youngest grandchild, Antonio, gets his special power. Abuela takes great pride in these miraculous gifts and in their miraculous house—and there is great rejoicing as Antonio learns he can talk to animals, and his room appears in the house, filled with animals for him to engage with. The family celebrates by taking a picture--- leaving Mirabel out. During the celebration, Mirabel has a vision of the house cracking apart and the candle going out—a vision she alone experiences. Not only is she not believed, her grandmother treats her as a malcontent and a misfit, trying to destroy the celebration because she is jealous at her own lack of miraculous gift..

Yet Mirabel is certain she has seen that the house, and therefore the family, is in grave danger. Mirabel decides to try to prevent this calamity, and sets out on a quest to find out why she is experiencing what she is. In the course of her investigation, she uncovers family secrets and hidden fears. Perhaps these secrets and hidden fears are at the root of the house’s instability.

I don’t want to spoil the movie, so I will leave it at that. But as we prepare tomorrow to celebrate the impact and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., on what would have been the start of his 93rd year, I can’t help but see this charming little cartoon as also giving some insight into MLK’s own life, and into our readings for today.

Mirabel had a prophetic vision. That was her gift. It didn’t require magic. It required courage—the unbelievable courage to tell the truth to those you love, even if—especially if—they don’t want to hear it, even if they FEAR the truth being told. She foresaw a disaster, and tried her best to get her family to focus on what should have been most important to them: not their individual powers, but each other. Abuela takes great pride in these miraculous gifts and in their miraculous house—more pride in these things than she does in seeing the family itself as a miracle. Frankly, the foundation of the house was shaken by the failure to value each person who lived within it equally.

In our hymns today, and in our readings, we see reminders of prophetic voices also urging us to seeing the blessing of true communion with each other in our lives. We hear the prophet Isaiah renouncing silence when he sees calamity besetting God’s people: “For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest, until her vindication shines out like the dawn and her salvation like a burning torch!”

You can just hear the prophet thundering in his refusal to accede to staying silent for the sake of comfort. And what calamity was it that Isaiah, and all of the prophets of Israel, named and denounced? 

It was one that was ever-present, then and now. A failure of the Great Commandment: to love God with all of our hearts, strength, and minds, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. A refusal to commit to justice and care for all of those within society, attempts to exclude and marginalize others deliberately—or the softer, more insidious danger of being blind to the existence of division and injustice in the community, a preference for the comfort of the illusion of peace bought at the price of respecting the dignity and full equality of all people.

Isaiah also makes it very clear that salvation is not defined by a personal, individualist focus. Salvation, redemption, and release from the peril of death and destruction isn’t just about whether this person or that person individually goes to heaven or goes to hell. Jesus’s miracle of turning the water into wine similarly isn’t about just saving a wedding host from embarrassment. It’s about reminding us of God’s abundant gifts to all of us, and about God’s abiding call for us to share that abundance with each other and to be animated by that abundance in our dealings with each other. Salvation is about the reclamation of the community, about the strength of the entire body of God’s children. All or nothing.

Our reading from Isaiah is thus a perfect reading as we look back on the life and legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin’s Luther King Jr. In the 54 years since Dr. King’s assassination, we have come to take for granted just how radical his message was, and how his vision of the Beloved Community still is yet to be realized.

Through the mists of time, we forget how much hatred and opposition Dr. King received—and not just from acknowledged segregationists and racists. No, as Dr. King noted in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” some of the greatest attempts to silence him and the civil rights movement’s prophetic demand for freedom and equality came from within the power structures of faith communities and the Church itself—the very body that as followers of Jesus should be most committed to justice for all. That letter—which every American should re-read at least every year, was written in response to a group of faith leaders, including Episcopal bishops, denouncing what they termed his radicalism, his impatience, his “outside activism” since he was not actually from Birmingham. We have forgotten how much suspicion the civil rights movement received from the federal as well as state governments, even from people of goodwill. 

And it continues. Too many of us have insulated ourselves from the very real injustices that still exist right now. Even from within the Church—the very family which was the source of Dr. King's own hope. A nation, a church, or any institution, is only strong when the people within it are valued more than its edifices. When leaders focus on the institution, rather than the people, injustice flourishes.

Like Mirabel, like Isaiah, like Jesus, like Abraham Lincoln, Dr. King saw the cracks in the house—the house of this nation, in his own particular instance, a house which proclaimed itself dedicated to the notion that all persons were created equal on paper, when its reality was vastly different in practice. This was a truth and unvarnished revelation that those who were powerful, those who were comfortable, refused to acknowledge as an injustice, much less confront. Dr. King not only saw those cracks, and the long-term dangers they posed to African Americans and to all Americans, through his years of activism and his fifty arrests. He sought to have even those whose privilege inured them to the perils of injustice and oppression believe in a possibility and the necessity of a better, stronger, more united house that would include all. The heart of a home-- the heart of a nation-- is the people, not the structures. 

But also, like Mirabel, like Isaiah, like Jesus, like Abraham Lincoln, Dr. King didn’t raise the alarm merely to be a critic and announcer of doom. He raised the alarm because of the great faith he had that we can do better in living into the vision of love and unity to which God calls us as Christians, and to which I believe God calls each and every nation, especially this one. Through the lens of this pandemic, it is patently obvious that this nation is still divided—and that the source of that division is STILL refusing to act out of a desire for the flourishing not only of ourselves and our personal circle, but of everyone.

You cannot repair the cracks in the house until you see them, and then determine to do the work of repair. You can’t repair the cracks in the house until you understand that the value of the house is about the people within it—and making sure all of them are equally protected, equally valued. Dr. King’s vision of a strong, united house, home to a strong, united community, founded on the bedrock of equality and commitment to ever seeking to make ourselves stronger as one people, is a vision we all as people of faith are called to share.

May we continue his prophetic work, rooted in our faithfulness to God, and to God’s desire for all of us to live in a house that is not only undivided but strong and flourishing because the people within it are secure and valued, regardless of their different gifts. Let us be a house united by our dedication to truth, to justice, and to dedication to our God and to each other.

Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 am online Eucharist at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO, on January 16, 2022 during time of COVID.

Readings:

Isaiah 62:1-5

Psalm 36:5-10

1 Corinthians 12:1-11

John 2:1-11

The Tenderness of the Creator: Speaking to the Soul, January 6, 2022

Isaiah 43:1-7

It seems like the idea of God as the Creator is too often seen as somehow remote, or bloodless. I don’t know if people have that idea that because God is so powerful that God can just basically snap God’s fingers and – poof!—a new thing is created, but with a certain emotional reserve between Creator and Created. Maybe it’s just hard to imagine, much less accept, the particularity of God’s love for each of us.

The ancient Greeks had a different idea. The offspring of Titans, Prometheus, is often credited, by the poets Sappho, Ovid, the playwright Aeschylus, Aesop, and others, with creating many of the living things on Earth—but especially humans-- as a master craftsman. He is credited with giving humans the fire of creativity as well as literal fire, and being punished by Zeus for it. Singer-songwriter Dar Williams, in her song “This Earth,” describes Prometheus as loving mortals and caring for them protectively—much like we see in this reading from Isaiah 43. She imagines Prometheus musing,

“I love this land of mortal men
They wake to know the fire again
The things we make, the things we feel,
Armored plates and molten steel
All of these inventions of the earth, the earth... this earth.”(1)

Thinking of the relationship between Creator and Created as a sterile transaction, less intimate than calling God “Father,” overlooks passages such as we see here in our reading from what is known to scholars as 2nd Isaiah. The prophet recounts the devotion and tenderness of God most touchingly here at the end of the pericope:

Do not fear, for I am with you;
I will bring your offspring from the east,
and from the west I will gather you;
I will say to the north, "Give them up,"
and to the south, "Do not withhold;
bring my sons from far away
and my daughters from the end of the earth--
everyone who is called by my name,
whom I created for my glory,
whom I formed and made."

In Isaiah 64 as well as Jeremiah 18, the prophets make the solicitousness and loving-kindness of God even more explicit in the metaphor of God as a potter, hands intimately shaping human beings. The touch of a hand is an undeniably personal image, and when that hand moves tenderly, like a caress, we know that we are loved, even without words. I wonder what it would do to us in our relationship with each other, especially in the situation we face right now, if we could take that belovedness for both ourselves and each other seriously.

As we remember the events of the past two years, and of a year ago, when a wave of rage was directed at our institutions and our representatives, the idea of love binding the creation to the creator puts into sharp focus how much our estrangement from God and each other costs us.

We are called by our Creator in love, and we are called by our Creator to love. Having faith in that love is our great challenge—to believe that love is that powerful, that foundational.

The Wise Men stepped out in faith searching for what was already theirs. They, like all of us, were seekers after what was already woven into their bones: the love of God.

Faith is not a box on a checklist. The point of faith is not primarily knowledge or mastery. The point of faith is relationship—to be specific, to accept the unimaginable truth that God loves us fiercely, tenderly, protectively, intimately as our Creator. It’s a relationship that burns with warmth, devotion, a longing for closeness from Creator toward the beloved Creation. This Sunday we will be reminded that we are forgiven, as hard as that is to accept at times; and more, that we are beloved, despite all our wayward tendencies. What an Epiphany that would be!

Attributions:

Dar Williams, "This Earth," from the album In the Time of the Gods, 2012.

This was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on January 6, 2022.

Homily for the Funeral of Dee Robinson

Readings:

Isaiah 61:1-3

Psalm 23 (NRSV)

I John 3:1-2

John 5:24-27

We are gathered today to remember and celebrate the ongoing life and love of Dorothy “Dee” Robinson, a woman of incredible strength, grit, joy, humor, and faith.

There are some people whose personalities are just too much to be contained by their bodies. Dee Robinson was apparently one of those people.

When I first was talking to the family about Dee, I made the mistake of referring to her as “Dorothy.” Apparently, no one knew her as Dorothy. She was Dee. Dee as in “determined.” Although she lived 50 years of her life under a diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis, one cannot say that she was a “victim” of MS, or even that she “battled” MS. No, Dee also stands for “dominate,” because she dominated MS and any wayward body part such as a foot that would dare not bend itself to her will. Dee “stands” for determined, because she faced the world on her own two feet even if one of those feet got ridiculous ideas about disobeying this lady’s absolutely resolute will.

Dee stood for D as in “dynamic.” Dee lived her life with certain distinct preferences: vegetables, no; extra vermouth in her Manhattan, yes. When it came to vegetables, and her repugnance for them, Dee also stands for the D in “dramatic” in the best and most charming sense.

And frankly, Dee stands for “d” as in “dynamo.” She loved and raised five kids, including her beloved Wendy, who is interred next to Dee and Mel in our columbarium. Her kids Deborah, Cindy, Ron, and Chuck in turn raised their seven kids, who in turn are raising, at last count, 8 great-grandkids and this web of love, loudness and laughter all traces itself back in all its glory to Dee. This is the ultimate testimony to a life well lived on Dee’s own terms.

One of the greatest challenges in preparing for services such as funerals is our misconception about them—and sometimes, the Church itself does not help. Some of the funeral readings provided for as suggestions in the Episcopal Church and elsewhere in Christendom can get downright depressing. Readings such as those would not have shone any light on the reality of Dee’s long and determined life. Yet Dee was also a woman of deep faith. And the readings we hear today reflect that.

The passage of Isaiah speaks of good news being proclaimed to those who most desperately need it—and that IS perfect for a funeral service. In particular it contains words of comfort for those who mourn. These are the same words Jesus read from the scroll in his hometown synagogue, after his baptism and temptation in the wilderness. He arrived back into town after those 40 days of testing, shook the sand and dirt out of his hair, got himself presentable – and if he followed Dee’s example this would include some anointing with the first century equivalent of Chanel No. 5. I know I did that today, from a bottle my own mother gave me, in memory of her.

Jesus sat himself down among a bunch of people who were undoubtedly ready to underestimate him—and proclaimed himself as the Messiah—the one to free captives and prisoners, the one to declare a Jubilee at a time when most people were bowed down under Roman occupation, and to encourage those who mourn to put on their party clothes and get ready to dance from joy at the fact that liberation from death and disease and pain and anxiety was there in the midst of them. I think Dee admired chutzpah like that. I am sure some people made the mistake of unserderestimating her too-- to their immense regret.

Jesus’s life and values of care and protection for those who are his own like Dee are also woven deeply into the fabric of our beloved 23rd Psalm. This is a psalm that is so beloved for a reason: its very movement from speaking about God to speaking TO God in just six verses reminds us of the general path of movement in our lives of faith. Did you hear that? If not, try listening again, this time in Robert Alter’s beautiful poetic version rendered just a couple of years ago:

The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
In grass meadows He makes me lie down,
by quiet waters guides me.
My life He brings back.
He leads me on pathways of justice
for His name’s sake.
Though I walk in the vale of death’s shadow,
I fear no harm,
For You are with me.
Your rod and Your staff—
It is they that console me.
You set out a table before me
in the face of my foes.
You moisten my head with oil,
my cup overflows.
Let but goodness and kindness pursue me
all the days of my life.
And I shall dwell in the house of the LORD
for many long days.(2)

This psalm reflects the struggle we all face in our lives of faith and shows us the way forward. When we speak of God as distant, it is not God who has wandered away. Many of us have experienced times when we have felt that God is far from us. Or we may feel that way due to the scars and wounds the world has inflicted upon us. We may feel unloved and unlovable, and treat ourselves as disposable- or allow others to treat us that way. It’s the same way sometimes in our relationships in our families.

It’s important to remember though, that it is not God who has wandered off. So, remind yourself that God is your shepherd, and the blessings and love and grace God shows upon us—especially when we might not deserve it. Grant each other that same forbearance as you grieve together. Return to God, and then repeat to God: “I know You are with me. Your rod and staff comfort and protect me, and remind me that you are my portion and my cup, that overflows with love and mercy.” Dee knew this. Dee knew God’s presence alongside her, especially in times of trial that demanded every ounce of her formidable will.

Our final two readings work together so beautifully because they also bring this point home: we are God’s, and nothing we can do will change that. God’s love is that all-encompassing, God’s love is that strong. Stronger that any obstacle. Stronger than death itself. She is not gone, but instead has gained the victory over anything that dared get in her way in life. That is the testimony of Dee’s life for all of us. Her strength and her love lived boldly endure, in each and every one of you. And that strength welled up from her faith, her certainty, in Jesus as our Savior, our Redeemer, our protector, our guide, our shepherd.

In the months since Dee passed away, the reality of her absence has certainly been a terrible ache for this family, her friends, and all who loved her and her indomitable spirit. But I am hoping also that at the same time, signs of her ongoing love and care and how it continues to animate her extended family have also become apparent. The strength and force and faith with which she lived her life cannot be quenched even by death. For all of you who knew and loved Dee, I hope you can look within yourselves and see the way that she inspired and inspires you, challenged you and challenges you still, and encouraged and encourages you to seize life—and faith-- with both hands, and get the most out of it.

1) Image from The Daily Mirror, UK.

2) Robert Alter, from his translation of the TaNaKh, 2017.

--Preached at the Service of Burial for Dee Robinson, July 10, 2021 at 11 am online and in person at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.

The Crooked Path of Trust: Speaking to the Soul for June 24, 2021

  

Isaiah 40:1-11

 

Today is the Nativity of John the Baptist. It’s an unusual feast day for many reasons. First of all, There are only three times when a saint’s birth date is celebrated -- besides the birth of Jesus himself, the Christian calendar celebrates the birth of the Virgin Mary, which is not discussed anywhere in scripture, and the birth of John the Baptist, which is. Further, the birth date of John the Baptist is dependent mathematically on two other feasts: Christmas, and the Annunciation. Because Mary is told that her kinswoman Elizabeth, John's mother, is already six months pregnant with John, John's birth is celebrated three months to the day after the feast of the Annunciation. And since John is born six months before Jesus, Christmas is now officially six months from today. For those of you who hate summer, which just now started, may this be a light of hope for you. You're welcome. 

 

The scriptures chosen for today all relate to the career of John the Baptist as a prophet and forerunner of Jesus the Messiah. We begin with the beautiful first eleven opening verses from Isaiah chapter 40, which includes the famous line that will be repeated in the gospel of Luke chapter 3: “A voice cries out: ‘In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.’” In the Hebrew imagination, wilderness and deserts are places of extreme stress, wild beasts, thirst, and chaos. It was a place where one could easily get lost. That's why the fact that the adult John the Baptist will spend so much time there makes him even more unusual of a person. 

 

In the most hostile of environments --wilderness and desert --the word of God comes to offer comfort, respite, and safety, despite Israel’s sinfulness and fault. It is in these most unlikely of places that God's comfort is offered and maintained. God’s comfort is a gift of grace in a time when all hope had been lost, when the fear of abandonment was seemingly permanent. Yet God’s promise remains true, and doesn’t depend upon human measurements of time to come to fulfillment.

As always, it is God who takes the initiative. At last, the light appears at the end of a long night. The Babylonian Exile, just like this ongoing pandemic, stripped the people of so much that mattered to them. Our own exile—from faith, from compassion, from dedication to community and true justice and equality—has also left us longing for meaning, for purpose. 

We think we can make our own pathways straight to success, to crushing our opponents. It’s part of the modern myth of independence that ignores how much we depend upon each other, and upon God. 

 

Yet our paths to God don’t have to be straight. It is often the most indirect, wandering stop-and start journeys that end up being the truest, because they don’t fool us into thinking that the life of abundance can actually be acquired. The broken road is often the road that leads us to God, because it strips away all our defenses and resistance to God.

The wilderness is no barrier to God-- God loves the wilderness just the way it is. God even loves the wilderness inside us, the one that often scares us, because God made us with the ability to appreciate the beauty of wild things and wild places. God is willing to spend a lot of time in the wilderness with us. It is us who want the wilderness leveled, not God.  Since when does God see the wilderness and respond with a construction crew and truck full of asphalt? God’s time is NOT our time, and God’s schedule is not our schedule. God likes to take the long way home, reminding us once again that God’s home is everywhere, wherever God is but not limited to one place.

 

John the Baptist’s life shows that the crooked path is also the path to true community, rejoicing in our interdependence. Where can you embrace the crooked path in your life today? 

This was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on June 24, 2021.

What Christmas Is All About- Sermon for Christmas Eve, 2020

It usually happened every year of my childhood at the end of November or the first week of December. No matter what else is going on in our lives, we kids would demand that nothing interfere with our ability to take part in this cherished ritual. I'm not talking about Black Friday -- I'm talking about the Charlie Brown Christmas special, which first aired in 1965, just months after my birth. As hard as it is for kids nowadays to believe, this cherished classic was broadcast one time only every year, and until the invention of the VCR that was the only time that you could see it. It was probably the best thing that Coca Cola ever sponsored, in my Pepsi-loving humble opinion.

It was also one of the friendliest and gentlest ways to remind people of the reason for this particular season. The opening scene shows Charlie Brown and Linus walking through town and toward a pond to go ice skating with their friends. Charlie Brown suddenly stops and leans against a snow covered wall, which was a common backdrop in the Charlie Brown comic strip for when Charlie Brown was having a philosophical conversation with Linus, who was always wise beyond his years. Charlie Brown stares off over the wall and says to his friend, “I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy. I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel. I just don't understand Christmas, I guess.”

And even all these years later, we know that Charlie Brown is not alone in sometimes feeling stressed, or let down, as much as filled with joy and anticipation during Christmas. In just the last few years, a tradition of blue Christmas services have sprung up mostly across the progressive end of the Christian spectrum to acknowledge and to make space for people who find Christmas to be an experience that can be a struggle as much as it can be a gift.

Charlie Brown's friend Lucy advises him that it might help him get in the Christmas spirit if he directs the Christmas play that the rest of the kids are putting on, even though Charlie Brown is more likely to get things wrong than right most of the time. And over the course of the show, we see that Charlie Brown knows what Christmas is not about: it's not about commercialism, or Christmas decoration contests, or asking for a bunch of gifts—not even real estate, which is what his friend Lucy wants every year. After Charlie Brown brings home a scraggly pitiful little Christmas tree to be the centerpiece of the play, only to be laughed at and mocked by the other kids, Linus steps in to remind everyone what Christmas is really all about.

Standing in the center of a single spotlight Linus recites from memory the King James version of the gospel we heard tonight from the second chapter of Luke, in all its simplicity and beauty. Linus then leaves the spotlight, walks over to Charlie Brown, and says “That's what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

With all the commercialization of Christmas that has gone on in the last century, especially since the invention of advertising, it's sometimes easy to forget that there's any sort of spiritual meaning of Christmas at all. Christmas has become a holiday that begins after Labor Day and fully occupies 25% of the year. . It’s about Santa Claus, and elves, eggnog, the smell of cinnamon everywhere whether you like it or not, and the mad frantic buying and wrapping and delivering of gifts. Christmas is about debating whether “Baby, It's Cold Outside” is playful or creepy; hearing Eartha Kitt coo at “Santa Baby,” or about whether Christmas itself crowds out other holidays of other faiths that happen to fall at this time of year.

Christmas has become a holiday that too often is severed from its religious anchor as being about the incarnation of Jesus through his mother Mary’s willing cooperation. Too many people can go all the way through Christmas season forgetting about the miracle that, as our reading from Isaiah reminds us, “a child has been born for us, a son given to us; authority rests upon his shoulders; And he is named Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

What lies underneath Linus’s gentle reminder to Charlie Brown and his friends is that Christmas is about reminding us that God is always active and engaged in the world. The sending of God's only son to live and heal and teach and care for us as one of us is itself a reminder that God always takes the initiative in reaching out to creation, and all our readings today reinforce this point. We do not approach God without God approaching us first.

Our reading from Isaiah reminds us that God brings about God's Kingdom of justice and righteousness -- this does not depend upon our own human abilities alone but trusts us enough to call for our discipleship in helping to bring it about, just as the incarnation could not have happened without Mary’s willingness to be the servant of the Lord. In Isaiah, the required human action comes in seeing: seeing a great light, which actually means seeing the world's cruelties and corruptions , and yet nonetheless insistently perceiving God at work within this world. Even in the smallest things.

Our psalm picks up this thread, observing and noting what God has done an is doing in the world --seeing God's works and blessings, ascribing and naming them specifically as being God’s gifts to us, and then being glad—or being grateful—for what God has done. Even more importantly, our Psalm reminds us that worship is over everything else a call to action.

One does not passively worship God by sitting in pews or by singing praise songs, no matter how catchy the tune. That’s entertainment. Worship goes beyond that—to carrying the meaning and glory God out into the world and making it visible for all to see in how each Christian live their lives.

God is working in the world—and thus this prophecy in Isaiah is as yet complety unfulfilled. Those who expected a great warrior king like the thrilling stories of David with his slingshot are going to be profoundly disappointed with the kind of King Jesus truly is—one who builds up rather than destroys, one who heals rather than wounds, one who comes not to overturn the Law, but to fulfill it, in Jesus’s own words.

This child who is born to us will grow to be a man who shows us what it is to be fully human—fully made in the image of God. One who will call us out of our own narrow view to a compassionate, passionate engagement with the world and especially with those who are suffering or oppressed in mind, body, or spirit.

Christmas is about hope. Christmas is about faith—faith in God and in each other. Christmas is about love. Love in action. Love found sleeping in a manger, leading us to the way of life we were meant to live from the beginning.

At the end of the Charlie Brown Christmas show, Linus wraps his special blanket around the poor pitiful little stick pretending to be a tree, and the other kids gather around it and decorate it. When they step back, it has been transformed from a scraggly stick to a beautiful, sparkling tree. the gift of love and care has taken something that was ragged and frail and turned it into a delight and a blessing. Just as Jesus taking on our flesh as a human who is also the son of God transforms us and challenges us to ourselves be a delight and a blessing to all whom we meet: all nations, all races, all creeds, all people.

That’s what Christmas is all about.

Amen.

Preached at the 8 pm Christmas Eve online service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville on December 24, 2020 in Coronatide.

Readings:

Isaiah 9:2-7

Psalm 96

Titus 2:11-14

Luke 2:1-14(15-20)

The Wilderness Way of God: Sermon for Advent 2B

In the Wilderness Prepare the Way, ©Jan Richardson janrichardson.com

This is a story of three prophets and three roads.

The first road is actually a crossroads. And poor tiny Israel --or what's left of it, the southern Kingdom of Judah --lies right at the connection of several major roads that tied Asia, Europe, and Africa together. Israel, already a small country, divided herself by inner bickering and made herself vulnerable two division by conquering armies, armies that often passed through Israel and the pinch point that she occupied on their way to take on their rivals at this juncture of three continents. That's where the book of Isaiah begins: Disaster looming on the horizon, disaster that the prophets believe is recompense for the people’s waywardness and faithlessness. Thirty-nine chapters later, that disaster arrives, and the elites are carried off into captivity.
Then a silence falls. One hundred and sixty years of silence. Years in which, undoubtedly the captive priests and rulers felt God’s silence deeply, and the people of the land left behind struggled mightily under the harsh expectations of their foreign overlords to produce food for their captors. As Psalm 137 describes it, years in which the people carried off into captivity mourned,

By Babylon’s streams,
   there we sat, oh, we wept,
      when we recalled Zion.

On the poplars there
   we hung up our lyres.
For there our captors had asked of us
   words of song,

and our plunderers—rejoicing:
   “Sing us from Zion’s songs.”
How can we sing a song of the LORD
   on foreign soil?(1)

Chapter 40, which begins a prologue to the second part of Isaiah, starts sixteen decades later. A new prophet has taken up Isaiah’s mantle, but reluctantly. We start with a silence, and then a conversation. Because the verses we hear are not spoken by one voice, but by three different voices: God, the heavenly hosts, and the second prophet to call herself-- yes, there is evidence that points to her being female—Isaiah.

God speaks first—as God always does. God speaks to the heavenly court, commanding them to deliver comfort to God’s people, communicating to Jerusalem, who had been completely leveled by her enemies, that she has been released from her shame of faithlessness. The double command (Comfort, O Comfort) adds extra urgency. Yet the focus is not on punishment (a sentence), but forgiveness.

A voice in the heavenly court cries out a word of hope, describing a scene of victory in which the exiled leaders of Jerusalem return from their bondage –but not along the terrible road upon which they were led away, but upon a new road. God’s highway, along which God’s glory will be revealed. Then another voice commands the prophet, who has been listening in disbelief, to cry out herself. The prophet objects, pointing out that humans are too fleeting in their existence to be able to join in this discussion; she has been worn down by the trials of exile alongside her people.

The heavenly host respond, yes, human life is fleeting, but God’s promises are not.

And so, the prophet takes up the words of reassurance, convinced by her encounter with God, and moved from despair to proclamation of that same comfort that at first was only expressed by the heavenly court. The prophet then calls the people to join her in seizing that hope and proclaiming the faithfulness of God. To proclaim faith and hope and strength where previously they have only bemoaned their abandonment. There is always a time for grief. But that time for grief is passed, and now is a time to renew their faith. So this conversation concludes. Point and counterpoint. And eventually the voice from the wilderness becomes one bearing tidings of tender care from the shepherd who cares for us all.

Haven’t we all felt like we have been in a wilderness at various points in our lives? And haven’t we felt lost and forsaken when all the neat, straight paths we’ve made for ourselves have ended up leading us astray?

In the most hostile of environments --wilderness and desert --the word of God comes to offer comfort, respite, and safety, despite Israel’s sinfulness and fault. It is in these most unlikely of places that God's comfort is offered and maintained. God’s comfort is a gift of grace in a time when all hope had been lost, when the fear of abandonment was seemingly permanent. Yet God’s promise remains true, and doesn’t depend upon human measurements of time to come to fulfillment. It is in this light that we read our gospel introduction of John the Baptist, who similarly is called to cry out from the wilderness to proclaim the comfort that is to come, comfort from the presence of God Godself taking on human flesh and living among the people.

Once again, it is God who takes the initiative. At last, the light appears at the end of a long night. The Babylonian Exile stripped the people of everything that mattered to them. Our own exile—from faith, from compassion, from dedication to community and true justice and equality—has also left us longing for meaning, for purpose.

We think we can make our own pathways straight to success, to crushing our opponents. It’s part of the modern myth of independence that ignores how much we depend upon each other, and upon God.

Yet our paths to God don’t have to be straight. It is often the most indirect, wandering stop-and start journeys that end up being the truest, because they don’t fool us into thinking that the life of abundance can actually be acquired. The broken road is often the road that leads us to God, because it strips away all our defenses and resistance to God.

The wilderness is no barrier to God-- God loves the wilderness just the way it is. And God spends a lot of time in the wilderness with us. It is us who want the wilderness leveled, not God.  Since when does God see the wilderness and respond with a construction crew and truck full of asphalt? God’s time is NOT our time, and God’s schedule is not our schedule. God likes to take the long way home, reminding us once again that God’s home is everywhere, wherever God is but not limited to one place.

A friend of mine shared these words earlier this week: “I imagine God taking one look at the straight paths we’ve scarred into the wild earth and either laughing or weeping or both, wondering if what we wanted was a tamer God or just one on speed dial who is always waiting to pick up. But isn’t God perpetually going out into the wilderness, out with the wandering Israelites or searching out a lost sheep, out beyond the cell towers, voicemails, and text messages?”

Instead, God walks in the opposite direction our straightened paths lead, just to see if we want a God who follows us or if we want to follow God.” (2)

The life of abundance that God offers to us starts with opening ourselves to the wonder of God’s creation all around us, and of celebrating our place in a web of relationships that each offer us a chance to ourselves bear the light of God into the world. Have you ever heard anything more absurd than the idea of anyone making a path straight for God to amble down?

It is in the midst of the wilderness that the people are urged to faith. And the kind of faith the people are being urged to embrace is not an easy faith. It is faith that seems to fly in the face of all evidence. The people are being asked to sing joyful songs even from the chains of exile and oppression. Being challenged to take up this confident proclamation of God’s presence even when all evidence points otherwise is a call to faith that doesn’t deny fear but responds to fear by proclaiming the power of unity and community over those forces that attempt to use division and loss as levers of control.

We, too, may feel like there has been a long silence, these last many months as this pandemic has stretched on here in 2020. For us, who expect instantaneous responses, eight months certainly can feel like an eternity. In the face of that pause, two doubts commonly arise to plague our spiritual lives: we either believe that God is powerless to change our suffering, or that God is indifferent to us and possibly even inflicts the silent treatment upon us. None of these take into account, as we are reminded in our epistle, that God’s time is not our own, and that God doesn’t wander from us. When we feel God’s absence, it is when we have wandered from God, allowed ourselves to drift, or believe that God is punishing us when we go through trials.

We may feel that we do not know the way out, the way of God’s highway—and how can we be blamed for that? Even Jesus’s own disciples and apostles cried out the same plaintive plea when they couldn’t follow the path he walked right before them toward wholeness, wellness, and peace.

The wilderness is where God’s word will be proclaimed, by Isaiah and by John the Baptist and Jesus. It’s a place that strips us bare of all our illusions and vanities and pretended pride. It’s a place where are defenses against admitting our wrongdoing are shredded, but not so that we can be punished. So that we can be moved to repentance—to the turning joyfully to a new life that is more pure and truer to God’s commandments. And this awakening to our own waywardness, our own privilege—that has become such a loaded word but it is a word that MUST be spoken if we are ever to move to reconciliation and healing in our world. That acceptance of our own benefit from injustice is there, and it must become visible by looking at life through the perspectives of others when they offer us their truth. has to be seen not as a source of shame but as a starting point for accepting the relief of God’s incomprehensible grace.

But perhaps God is calling us to embrace a long pause, a resetting of our priorities away from our worship of the god of our unending appetite for more, and is calling us to see creation ongoing all around us. We are reminded that the arc of human experience is short, and that for all our technology the processes of nature-- the mutation of a virus, in this case, that has always been around us in one form or another—can call us to an accounting that we cannot just wave away every challenge in an instant.

After the long pause, God promises a way through the wilderness, not an exemption from the wilderness. God calls us back from the exile we have put ourselves in, through fear and faithlessness. The story of the Exodus reminds us that we cannot allow our fears to master us: when that happens, we often end up longing for the familiar chains of slavery rather than taking up the hard work of the journey to equality and true justice, which can only be found when we proclaim community and insist upon it.

The closing image of our reading from this section of second Isaiah is the image of God not just as a mighty warrior, but also as a tender shepherd—a shepherd who endures all things alongside their sheep. This is one of the most common claims about true leadership that runs throughout scripture. A leader is called to unify the flock, not scatter it. The flock itself is called to observe this tender care for the weakest of its members, and likewise stand in solidarity with them. God calls us to order our societies in such a way that the leaders share in the burdens of the flock, knowing their needs intimately because that leader is not aloof to them but intimately familiar with those needs. God will act as a shepherd, and calls each of us to take up our duty and responsibility to each other likewise—to order our lives so. That we too will carry the youngest or the frailest in our arms. God as our shepherd calls the flock to likewise never abandon the least of their members to the wolves that prowl often in the shadows and out of sight of the most privileged among the flock.

Perhaps we can listen and hear God calling us to embrace the way of mercy and steadfast love, the way that lies straight and true before us, if only we will put our feet to the path and our shoulders to the wheel of mercy and compassion. And once we embrace that pause, seize hold of the chance to cleanse ourselves of all that draws us from love and faith, perhaps we, too, could then hear a word of comfort, and embrace a promise of renewal and resuscitation, of God’s Loving coming down and walking among us, teaching us to walk in the Wilderness Way of God.

Amen.

Preached at the online 10:30 am Morning Prayer service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO. during Coronatide.

Readings:

Psalm 85:1-2, 8-13

Isaiah 40:1-11

2 Peter 3:8-15a

Mark 1:1-8

Sources:

1) Robert Alter, The Hebrew Scriptures, Volume 3: the Writings

2) The Rev. David Henson, quoted by my friend the Rev. Anne Lane Witt

Being Fearless, Being Light: Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany, year A

This week by a fluke I discovered a wonderful little book, called The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse, by Charlie Mackesy. It’s a simple book, hand illustrated and written in brush strokes, so you might think it is for children—and it is. But it is also for adults, too—and it’s categorized as ethics. I want to share part of it with you.

The book starts off with a boy, who meets a mole. 
“Hello,” the boy says, and the boy and the mole look at each other. 
“I’m so small,” said the mole.
“Yes,” said the boy, picking up the mole. “But you make a huge difference.”
The boy then places the mole on a low-hanging branch on as tree, and climbs up to join the mole. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” asked the mole. 
“Kind,” replied the boy, and he is shown holding an umbrella over the mile as it rains in the tree. 
“What do you think success is?” asked the boy
 “To love,” said the mole. 

**** 

The mole is then shown looking at a beautiful three-tiered cake. “Well hello,” the mole murmurs to the cake. 

The boy and the mole are then shown walking and talking. 
“Do you have a favourite saying?” asked the boy. 
“Yes,” said the mole. “If at first you don’t succeed, have some cake.” 
“I see. Does it work?" asks the boy. 
“Every time,” the mole replied. 

****

The mole is then shown carrying a cake, setting it down and looking at it. “Just a tiny taste,” the mole says to himself, and in a series of images, we see the cake disappearing and the mole getting rounder. 

The boy and mole are walking and talking together again.
“I got you a delicious cake,” said the mole. 
“Did you?” 
 “Yes.” 
“Where is it?” 
“I ate it,” said the mole. 
“Oh.”
“But I got you another.”
“Did you? Where is that one?”
“The same thing seems to have happened,” the mole observes.

****

The boy and the mole are back sitting on the branch in the tree, facing each other. The boy speaks: “What do you think is the biggest waste of time?”
“Comparing yourself to others,” said the mole. 
“I wonder if there is a school of unlearning."
We see a picture of a mole with glasses and a cane. The mole continues, “Most of the old moles I know wish they had listened less to their fears and more to their dreams.” 

****

The boy and the mole are shown sitting on a rock, looking out at a field or moor. 
“What is that over there?” asks the boy. 
“It’s the wild,” said the mole. “Don’t fear it.” 
The two friends begin walking in the moor alongside a stream, and the mole remarks, “Imagine how we would be if we were less afraid.” (1)

****

“Imagine how we would be if we were less afraid.”

What an amazing observation. It’s actually what the gospel is all about, too. And I was thinking about this observation in light of the fact that today is also Scouting Sunday, and so, although I don’t want to put our Scouts on the spot, I was wondering if you would care to share the Scout Oath with us?

On my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my country and to obey the Scout Law, to help other people at all times, to keep myself physically strong, mentally awake, and morally straight.  

I am struck by the similarity of the principles of Scouting and the principles of being a faithful person. Scouts are also called to be dedicated, brave, loyal, and engaged with the community around them. You don’t become a Scout just for yourself, or just to collect merit badges. You also don’t just become a Scout for a season of your life. Scouting and groups like it are a lifelong community of people dedicated to working for the good of the greater community. It’s a life dedicated to sacrifice, in the best sense. Just like in our religious lives, being committed to a cause greater than yourself and selfish concerns makes a Scout brave, as well as reverent.

“Imagine how we would be if we were less afraid."

Our reading from Mr. Mackesy’s book and the principles of Scouting support the point of our readings today. As an observer of human nature and child of the Bible Belt, I learned early on that a lot of times people engaged in religious behavior when they are afraid—I noticed this when I was a little kid. When the tornado flew over our house when I was ten, and landed the next block over, as we huddled under the mattresses—except for my dad, who was keeping company with some guy named Jack Daniels, some guy named Marlboro, and our collie dog out in the garage—we certainly engaged in some prayer. Probably even my dad with that Jack guy and Marlboro guy.

Then as I grew older, I realized that some people were going to church out of fear. My Catholic friend told me about Holy Days of Obligation, and Confession, and dying in a state of mortal sin—and it scared me, and I was just a little towheaded Protestant. The preachers in some of the churches my mother took us to did an awful lot of describing of the Devil, and the fires of Hell, and being tossed into a lake of fire.

And I knew people who didn’t worship God so much as fear Him—and yes they always called God “Him” with a catch of fear in their voice. And it made me sad—the majority of Jesus’s words to us are meant to allay our fears, because a heart filled with fear has no room in it for love. 

Jesus spends a huge amount of his time reminding us of God’s abundance, of God’s generous love and gift of grace, probably because we live most of our lives being told to see everyone around us as competition for scarce resources, and see strangers as potential “takers of our stuff.”

In religious practice, this fear and hardheartedness often leads people to constantly try to find some magic formula that will keep God from smiting us, some calculated exchange where we try to find the least we can give so that we can still maintain the illusion that we are in control of our lives. And so they check off boxes like going to church—without ever moving to BEING the church out in the world. And it all starts out of hard-heartedness—which is almost always rooted in anger and fear.

Our readings today address those kinds of issues too. Our reading from Isaiah deals with how we can offer a sacrifice to God—what Isaiah calls a “fast”-- that would truly be holy and pleasing. At the root of Isaiah’s call to renewal is this question: How important is it to put your heart into what you do? Or is it more important to simply follow the rules and checklists of our “to-do” lists?

Fasts, especially in our world of cheap fast food, certainly are not a common practice—unless you are a religious person. Many of us have at least encountered religious people who fast at some point in the religious year. But the reading here questions empty observance of ritual without allowing true repentance to take root in our hearts. We are coming up on the season of fasting, and so it’s a good time to ask ourselves what purpose fasting serves.

It’s important to note that fasting isn’t just a Christian religious practice. Jews observe a ta’anit, or fast, on Yom Kippur and on Tisha B’Av, a day in July or August that mourns the two terrible destructions of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Babylonians and then the Romans. Muslims fast as part of the Five Pillars of Islam during the daylight hours in Ramadan, unless they are sick, pregnant, or traveling. Many Buddhists fast from meat and animal products by observing a strict diet of vegetarianism. 

Isaiah admonishes those who are using their fast to try to manipulate God without allowing God to transform them and their actions and values. This passage addresses the problem of empty worship—worship that makes the worshiper appear to be righteous, but instead is just camouflage, ultimately an empty gesture because it does not lead to a conversion of the heart and the soul.

It’s a trap that hangs there in front of all of us in this time, too. It’s easy to claim to be a Christian, or a Scout, or as a member of any other voluntary association, especially if that label gives you access to power and influence. It’s easy to claim that label but also resist or actually refuse being changed by the ideals the group stands for, such as following those commandments Christ gives, like loving your neighbor and praying for your enemies. 

I mean, who here has had a neighbor who was really hard to love? We did—Mrs. Mayes, who would call the cops on us when we flew our kites in front of her house. I kid you not. Who does that?? So loving your neighbor and praying for your enemies--THOSE are real sacrifices, too. But in Isaiah, God points out that the people are not truly engaging in sacrifice but merely participating in that same kind of magical thinking that pretends that by doing X, we can make God do Y.

Dear ones, God is NOT a puppet dancing on our strings. But the good news is, we aren’t supposed to be puppets, either. God doesn’t want empty shows of deprivation. God wants all of us—heart and soul, because God adores us that much. 

There certainly are times when our actions seem outwardly correct, but lack a conviction of the heart. This is also a common theme in scripture. Thus Isaiah reorients the term “fast” here in an unusual way—turning the concept of sacrifice on its head. Basically God is saying this: Don’t fast to me out of fear—offer your best to me and those around you out of love. Be fearless in giving to others. Be fearless in fighting wrong, even if it costs you. Don’t make a show of doing without if, after you end your fast, you continue to engage in activities that ignore the plight of the suffering, or even adds to that suffering.

Do you want to make a sacrifice that pleases me? God asks. Fight injustice and oppression. Feed the hungry and bring the poor into your home just as eagerly as you would an honored guest—which was a very serious obligation in the Mediterranean culture of that time. Clothe those who are naked. Help your family members rather than try to hide from those who need help. And do it all not out of fear, but out of love. Be fearless in living out of love, and your light will shine out for all to see. 

Through Isaiah’s words, God continues offering practical advice for those who want to LIVE as children of God in word, name, and example: Stop gossiping about others or pointing the finger of blame or shame at others. Satisfy the needs of the afflicted—those who lack safety, who are fleeing from slavery, oppression, warfare, lawlessness, racial or religious oppression, or violence. 

God makes it clear that the observation of religious ritual is empty if it does not bring about changes in one’s daily life, such as in how one treats others, as this reading points out. Ultimately God further clarifies the point of sacrifices: they are meant to give us the blessing of being holy, of being part of something larger than ourselves. Sacrifices are meant to give us the blessing of living without fear. 

And what is the result of following these kinds of sacrifices—the kind that make the person doing these kinds of sacrifices holy, blameless, and even blessed in the sight of God? Isaiah tells us that by being generous and openhearted in our own lives, God will pour out abundance within our hearts, making us joyful and even fearless in all we do in the name of God. Isaiah also promises that by offering our true fast to God, “Our lights will shine out for all to see.” Just as Jesus assures his followers in our gospel today. 

In our gospel, Jesus has just giving the Sermon on the Mount, and we hear the words right after the Beatitudes. Notice that Jesus also pointedly compares his disciples to light, just as the Isaiah reading did. Light helps us to see, and in seeing, gain knowledge and wisdom. Light is directly associated with wisdom in the word “enlightenment”—which is why we talk about “our eyes being opened” whenever we come to a new understanding, or epiphany. 

The point of enlightenment is not selfish—it’s not a “get out of hell free” card, although some people would lead you to believe so. No, truly enlightened discipleship doesn’t mean staying cloistered amongst true believers, who already live in light. Rather, Christian enlightenment calls us to go out where people dwell in darkness, and to work for their enlightenment, which in turn will build our own.

Letting your light be seen can mean not hiding your talents or beliefs, but also being authentic in your actions as well as words, and living with integrity, as Isaiah described in that first reading. 

Jesus constantly asks us to imagine how we would be if we were less afraid. Jesus’s message throughout Matthew is that kingdom of heaven is already upon us—not just somewhere off in the future. Our time to truly live as disciples is NOW, and Jesus seeks our response if we are to truly follow him and obey God’s commandments to love fearlessly and give fearlessly in heart as well as action. 

 Just like in that little book of ethical teachings about the Boy and the Mole, Jesus himself offers us a school of unlearning, as we heard in our story. Jesus challenges us to attend his school of unlearning—to unlearn the belief that we are awash in darkness, and that there is no way out. The belief that it is better to grab all you can than share what you have. The fear that there is never enough. 

Jesus calls us to turn our lives around first by denying the sway that common contempt and cruelty has in the world—and instead calling us to grow up to be kind. And then keep going in being more deeply transformed by Jesus’s radical gospel of love the more we practice true worship of God outside these doors and out in our everyday lives.

Be fearless. Be the light. Living as lights to the world is a call to be fearless in allowing Jesus’s gospel of love to transform us inwardly, and then to let that light shine through our care of each other and even people we’ve never met. It means saying yes to Jesus’s invitation to let go of fear and anxiety, to actually believe his promises of transformation, and then act of that ongoing transformation with the least of those around us.

Be fearless. Be the light.

Amen.

Preached at the 505 on February 8, and at the 8:00 and 10:30 Eucharists at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO.


Readings:
Isaiah 58:1-9a, [9b-12]
Psalm 112:1-9, (10) 
1 Corinthians 2:1-12, [13-16]
Matthew 5:13-20


Citations:
1) Charlie Mackesy, The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse, 2019. You can buy a copy of this amazing, beautiful book here.