Prayer 1990: inspired by Matthew 23:1-12

Holy, Holy, Holy,
Creator and Sustainer of the World,
we join with the choir of heaven in singing out our praise;
we rejoice within your embrace, O Holy One,
and put our trust in your unfailing love.

May we carry the essence of your law within us, O God,
make your lovingkindness our model and guide,
and seek to walk in the ways of Jesus
with mindfulness and devotion.
Blessed Savior, our Teacher and Companion,
may we embody your healing and reconciliation
into the furthest reaches of our communities.
Holy One, we throw ourselves into your arms
with the joyful abandon of little children,
and invite you to renew our spirits
in devotion to the cause of peace,
which is the fruit of justice and mercy.
May we mindfully choose our steps today
to walk the good road of love,
empowered by the Holy Spirit
to serve God and our kindred with grateful hearts.

Holy and undivided Trinity,
Creator, Redeemer Sustainer,
Center of Our Very Being,
bless us in fulfilling your holy call today,
and draw those for whom we pray
within the enfolding arms of your healing and mercy.

Amen.


Photo: Detail from Chagall's White Crucifixion, Art Institute of Chicago, 2016.

Prayer 1979: Inspired by Matthew 20:17-28

(Matthew 20:17-28)
We lift our prayers to You,
O Love Above All Loves,
and place our hearts and souls within your keeping:
thanks be to God!

Teach us to walk in humility and compassion, Lord Christ,
as companions in joy and sorrow with all the earth,
which you created in unity
for the sake of love.
You gave your life as a ransom for all, O Savior:
let us dedicate ourselves
to serving God and each other
in love and faithfulness
according to your commandment.

Teach us to seek the good of others, O Redeemer,
to serve rather than be served,
that we may embody your grace and mercy.

By the path we take today, O God,
may we shine forth the love of God into darkness,
reconcile the world to your truth,
and proclaim your marvels as your witnesses.

Spirit of Hope, kindle your light within us,
and pour out your grace and peace
upon those for whom we pray.

Amen.

Prayer 1978: Inspired by Matthew 20:1-16

(Matthew 20:1-16)
Lord, the sun rises over the vineyard,
and You call us as workers into it:
may with go with joy and humility,
gathering the harvest of the kingdom:
love,
joy,
peace,
forbearance,
kindness,
goodness,
faithfulness,
gentleness,
justice,
and self-control.

May these be pressed into new wine within us,
that we may embody them into the world,
in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
to the glory of the Name of God.

May we rejoice when new workers join us,
embracing them and welcoming them
in the name of love in action,
in justice and charity and hope.

Lord Jesus, center us and enter us by your great mercy,
that at day's end we lie down in peace,
having served You in each person we have met and welcomed in love.
By the power of the Holy Spirit,
guide our labors in your name today, O God,
and anoint these beloveds whose needs we raise before You.

Amen.

Keeping the Sabbath: Sermon for the 2nd Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 4B)

In our gospel today, Jesus is confronted about two separate incidents in which he is judged to be violating the spirit as well as the letter of the law prohibiting work on the Sabbath. These two vignettes come on the heels of Mark 2:18-22, where the Pharisees confront Jesus about not observing fasts with his disciples, in comparison to even the disciples of John (of whom Jesus may have been one at some point, given his baptism by John). And of course John and his disciples fasted—John preached about repentance of sin and lived out in the desert wearing rough clothing and eating locusts—I’d fast too, if that was my diet.

Jesus and his followers are accused of violating the Sabbath in our gospel today because they are plucking heads of grain and snacking on them as they walk through a farmer’s field. I’ll be honest, one of the things that has always bothered me about this set-up to this story is how the Pharisees knew it happened in the first place? Did they have spies stationed among the wheat stalks? Did they sit around and gossip on the Sabbath as someone else told them? Because I am pretty sure gossip doesn’t really accord with keeping the Sabbath holy, either.

Then Jesus on his own enters a synagogue, where he immediately encounters a man with a “withered hand.” Note that Mark’s gospel shows the Pharisees taking it for granted, even here in only the second chapter of Mark’s gospel, that Jesus COULD heal the man’s hand. Not “could he,” but “would he?” Their priorities are so scrambled that they are willing to brush off a miraculous healing, as long as they can use that healing as a weapon against Jesus.

Ultimately, here, Jesus defends keeping the spirit of the Sabbath, by privileging people over practices. The Sabbath was made for the good of people—and in most cases, people’s good can’t help but be served by observing a day of rest. Yet, there are acknowledged exceptions even to the observance of Sabbath: even the most observant person is allowed to work to prevent suffering, or to save a life. And yes, the irony is not lost on me that we clergy are the worst about that, and Sunday is a day of work for us.

Yet, the purpose of the Sabbath is restoration, in other words—and what is more in the spirit of that than restoring strength through eating, and restoring the ability to make a living by healing a hand? In healing the man, Jesus restored him to wholeness and agency. Especially in Jesus’s time, workers depended on their hands for their livelihoods.

The question posed in our gospel reading from Mark today is this: how do we best live a faithful life? There is obviously a difference of opinion here between the Pharisees and Jesus. But before we go off railing at the Pharisees, let’s remember that far too often we modern Christians devolve into rule-followers rather than healers. We must be on guard that we don’t make the Pharisees “those hide-bound Jews” rather than “us.” Texts like this have been used against Judaism for millennia, and that misses the entire point. If we are really honest, there is a Pharisee lurking in the hearts and minds of each and every one of us, at one time or another.

Living a faithful life has to be grounded and rooted in love and integrity, in trying to make ourselves holy reflections of God’s mercy and grace in the world. Jesus is not saying that keeping the Sabbath is pointless—far from it! As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel points out, in the story of creation that starts the book of Genesis, God makes things and admires them, calling them good. But the first time God blesses and makes holy is not connected to a “thing” at all. The first thing God blesses and sanctifies is the Sabbath—a period of time, not a thing at all. And by tradition, the spirit of the Sabbath, as is the case with all laws, is grounded in relationship, not in things.(1)

As modern Christians, most of us don’t even come close to keeping a Sabbath in terms of rest, refraining from “work,” and from acquisitiveness. There are too many other things going on. I am old enough (and from the Bible Belt) to remember when stores were closed on Sunday until noon. The assumption was that you should be in church during that time—including the employees. Yes, it’s true. But gradually, in the 1970s- 1980s, that stopped. Now, partaking in commerce is a 24/7 proposition. Any time you want something today, you can probably locate it online and start it zooming toward your mailbox or porch with just a couple of clicks of a mouse, trackpad, or phone. 

But what if we understood that we are called to a holy work in keeping the Sabbath—the holy work of listening to each other and caring for each other, regardless of differences? What if we understood keeping the Sabbath as calling us to remember that community and the compassion that is the foundation of community is sacred, as Jesus repeatedly teaches us?

Sometimes we have a tendency to privilege institutions and systems, especially legalistic systems, over human good, to the point of almost deifying them. We cling to institutions and systems of law because they make us feel secure, because we believe that they work for us. But if we fail to unplug from our striving for possessions every now and then, if we fail to hold our treasured laws at arm’s length and take a good look at them, we can all too easily miss the fact that institutions and legal systems can and do fail other people. Our constant busyness sometimes numbs us to the very real costs that accrue to ourselves and others when we forget that time itself is sacred and holy, and that we will not pass through any day again.

The foundation of all law, after all is relational. Those who live alone have no need for law. Law is there to regulate our common life together—and in the case of religious law, it is there to mandate our relationship with each other as well as our relationship with the Divine.

Back in the 1980s, a singer named Bruce Hornsby had a smash hit with his song, “The Way It Is,” which talked about the common failure to respond to the needs of others who were oppressed by racism, or those who were homeless or unemployed, left behind by the changing economic conditions of the era. Hornsby sang about the tendency of simply turning a blind eye on the suffering of others by claiming helplessness with a shrug, and the comment “That’s just the way it is—some things will never change….”(2)

When we adopt attitudes like that, it is to justify our inaction as helplessness, which is actually quite a different thing. We are attempting perhaps to insulate ourselves from the demands of compassion. And that’s where Jesus’s point becomes clear: the heart of the law is relationship. The heart of the law is love: loving God, and loving our neighbor, as Jesus states in the Great Commandment in Matthew 22:36-40. Jesus’s call and example to us to keep the Sabbath centered around restoration and relationship also calls us to action for the sake of others—for the sake of love.

One of my favorite writers and poets, Wendell Berry, has made it a practice to walk around his Kentucky farm on Sundays. Since 1979, he has written a series of poems that have had their birth during these walks, which he simply calls “Sabbath Poems.” This is one of them, entitled “Amish Economy”:

We live by mercy if we live.
To that we have no fit reply
But working well and giving thanks
Loving God, loving one another,
To keep Creation's neighborhood.

And my friend David Kline told me,
"It falls strangely on Amish ears,
This talk of how you find yourself.
We Amish, after all, don't try
To find ourselves. We try to lose
Ourselves"-- and thus are lost within
The found world of sunlight and rain
Where fields are green and then are ripe,
And the people eat together by
The charity of God, who is kind
Even to those who give no thanks.

In morning light, men in dark clothes
Go out among the beasts and fields.
Lest the community be lost,
Each day they must work out the bond
Between goods and their price: the garden
Weeded by sweat is flowerbright;
The wheat shocked in shorn field, clover
Is growing where wheat grew; the crib
Is golden with gathered corn,

While in the world of the found selves,
Lost to the sunlit, rainy world,
The motor-driven cannot stop.
This is the world where value is
Abstract, and preys on things, and things
Are changed to thoughts that have a price.

Cost + greed - fear = price:
Maury Tulleen thus laid it out.
The need to balance greed and fear
Affords no stopping place, no rest,
And need increases as we fail.

But now, in summer dusk, a man
Whose hair and beard curl like spring ferns
Sits under the yard trees, at rest,
His smallest daughter on his lap.
This is because he rose at dawn,
Cared for his own, helped his neighbors,
Worked much, spent little, kept his peace.(3)

The Sabbath is a time to remember to stop, to remember that we are upheld by God’s generous grace and mercy—grace and mercy that heals our wounds and restores our souls by calling us back to ourselves. Jesus reminds us that healing and restoration are what the Sabbath is all about. Jesus does not call us to be secure from each other, but rather to be vulnerable to each other as only those in community can be, acknowledging our obligation to the needs of the other who is made as much in the image of God as we ourselves are.

In our gospel today, Jesus points us back to the establishment of the Sabbath in the amazing self-giving that allowed God to create in the first place. Jesus reminds his critics—and that means us-- that the ground of Sabbath observance is tied to the ongoing creation God is effecting in the world around us—and in our hearts. And keeping Sabbath can definitely be a vital part of that. It is holy time that is meant to help us remember who we really are: God’s beloveds, made to work for what our Jewish friends call tikkun olam: the healing, repair, and restoration of the world. The Sabbath reminds us that we find our deepest meaning not in things, but in relationship with and for the sake of others.

The Pharisees were not wrong in lifting up the Sabbath, but in forgetting that the end is not mere obedience, but compassion. The Sabbath was made for us; we were not made for the Sabbath. Like the boy Samuel, we are called to keep it, to keep it and make ourselves holy in the keeping. In our time, may keeping the Sabbath remind us that all our time as disciples, whether at work or at rest, is rightfully turned to hearing the call of love and compassion. If it doesn’t serve the causes of love, mercy, and healing, we are not doing it right. Time to turn and start again, upheld by the spirit of grace that is the heart of the Sabbath, no matter what day of the week it is.

Amen.


Preached at Calvary Episcopal Church, Louisiana, MO at 10 am and St. John's Episcopal Church, Eolia, MO on June 3, 2018.

Readings:

1 Samuel 3:1-10(11-20)

Psalm 139:1-5, 12-17

2 Corinthians 4:5-12

Mark 2:23-3:6

References:
(1) Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (FSG Classics), pp. 5-8.
(2) Bruce Hornsby, performed by Bruce Hornsby and the Range, from the album The Way It Is, 1986.
(3) Wendell Berry, 1995, from This Day: New and Collected Sabbath Poems, 2013, pp. 160-161.

Images:
(1) Jesus heals the man with the withered hand, unknown orthodox icon.

Prayer, day 1951: The Visitation of Mary (based on the Magnificat)

The Visitation of Mary to Elizabeth.

Holy One,
I lift my heart before You
and amplify the proclamation of your glory.

May I proclaim your greatness, O God,
from the depths of my soul
with a shout of joy and victory.
May I give thanks, Lord,
for your manifold blessings and great mercy
that maintain my life and my spirit.

Your love, O Almighty One, forever will I sing
joining the chorus of generations in praise.
May I walk in paths of justice and mercy
that my life may testify to the power of the Holy One.

For You, O Sustainer,
call us to stand alongside the oppressed
and fill the hungry with good things.
You, O Mighty One,
cast down the oppressor
and scatter the schemes of the powerful.
You, O Savior,
have lifted up the humble
and exalted the ordinary,
but chasten the tyrants
and call them to justice.

Your promises are our foundation and hope, O God:
we appeal to You in trust and faith as we pray.

Amen.
1727


Scripture reference: Luke 1:39-56

So Loved: Sermon for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year B

We are here today to talk about blessings.

It may be hard to think about blessings on the day that Daylight Savings Time starts, when we’ve all been deprived of an hour of sleep, but here we are, we the proud, the brave, we who are planning on a nap later on today.

Last week we heard Jesus compare his body to the Temple, and we were reminded that God blessed and sanctified us in our bodies, too. In taking on our flesh, our human life, God continues to tear down the walls WE build to separate ourselves from God, and to remind us that God lives and loves within each of us right now, and through Jesus God keeps reaching over those walls and pulling us all over the top and never giving up on us.

In today’s readings, we hear about the blessings of light, of healing, and especially of love.

Light and darkness are important signs or symbols in John’s gospel, which makes sense, because they are important symbols to us. Our gospel today starts in the middle of Jesus’s conversation in the middle of the night, in the darkness, with a Pharisee named Nicodemus. Nicodemus comes in the night also because he lacks true understanding of who Jesus is, but at least he is straining toward the light. When Nicodemus first approaches Jesus, in verses we don’t get to hear to help us understand the context, it is clear that Nicodemus is drawn to Jesus. Nicodemus is beginning to be drawn to the light of Christ, for at that start of chapter 3, he states: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who is coming from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.”

As a Pharisee and yet a seeker, Nicodemus is a man torn between two worlds, just as the church members in Ephesus were, and frankly much like many of us are. He recognizes the delicate situation he is in. Following Jesus will probably cost him everything that has been important to him thus far in life, including his reputation and position within society. And Jesus doesn’t make it easy for him, speaking and what must’ve seemed like riddles, as Jesus is prone to do throughout much of the Gospel of John, in particular. It must have been a long, humbling night for Nicodemus.

Yet thinking about being born to a new life in Christ is a fruitful metaphor. We are born with an abiding hunger for connection, and for meaning even from the time we are infants. Babies want to be embraced, and they want to be fed. God helps this along by making babies helpless and also adorable, which goes a long way toward making up for the smell. With our poor eyesight, as infants experience the world as infants mostly through out hearts, and our bellies. Babies get anxious when either of these are not full—and I am persuaded that frankly, those feelings of hunger, especially spiritual hunger, remains one of the driving forces in our lives—one that we ignore or misuse at our peril. 

Nicodemus feels a spiritual hunger, and rather than ignore it, he sets out to try to find what would fill it. And so, he is drawn to the light of Jesus. I wonder if many of us don’t identify with Nicodemus’s hunger, with his search for understanding that will lead to peace? It’s what we all want. Yet, another truth about sudden bursts of understanding is that they change you. They open you up in ways you hadn’t anticipated. And the knowledge Nicodemus and all of us are being asked to take hold of promises nothing less than to change the entire orientation of our lives, from inward to outward. We are being asked to embrace Jesus as our Savior, as the source of life—right now.

Our hunger for God within us brings us to this point, and calls us to repentance, to change. That change is scary. It means letting go of the familiar. But what will we gain?

How is a Christian’s life changed when he or she embraces Jesus as Savior? In our epistle, Paul states here that it is the difference between death… and life. We are asked to embrace our brokenness, and allow the light of Christ to wash over it. Paul equates sin with death and that can scare us as only Paul can—he’s really good at it. But when we are weighed down in a life of sin, we are dead to all the beauty of the world, and dead to living a life of love and faithfulness to something outside ourselves. And that means being honest about our own sinfulness, both individually and collectively.

As famed preacher Barbara Brown Taylor has noted, “We spend a lot of time in the Christian church talking about God’s love for sinners, but we sure do go to a lot of trouble not to be mistaken for one of them…. When we confess our sins here, we do not simply confess our own personal sins. We kneel and talk to God about the sins of all humankind—all the things we, as people, have done and failed to do, all the ways we have fled from the love of God because we are afraid to be seen, known, and changed.”

We are afraid to be seen.
We are afraid to be known.
We are afraid, especially, to be changed.

Yet all our fear aside, we ARE seen by God. We are known by God. Psalm 139 beautifully reminds us of this when it begins, “Lord you have searched me out and known me!” and goes on to recount God’s intimate love and intimacy with each of us. It’s the change thing that requires our active engagement. To fully step into the light of Jesus, we need to leave behind those things that tie us to darkness, and that, in the end, don’t nourish us.

Too often we concentrate on how we are separate from others, and fearfully seek to protect ourselves against the perceived threats that others may pose to us through competition in seeking to fulfill their OWN desires. This, to me, seems to be the ultimate crisis in our modern western society. For every passage like this, Paul also usually provides another passage reminding us that we are part of the Body of Christ and thus part of each other (such as 1 Corinthians 12-13). When we look at THOSE passages, we are reminded that the gospel of Christ is one of abundance: abundant mercy, abundant grace abundant kindness, and abundant healing. And that abundance is found within community, not against it.

As both our gospel and epistle attest, Christians are saved by faith and through grace, given to us by God’s immense love for us. We have not done anything to earn this salvation from death to life. And yet, Paul’s words attest to the abundance of God’s love—abundant beyond our imagining, especially. Listen to the words again! The description of God in our epistle is borne out in our gospel today. Paul states that “God is rich in mercy,” bearing us “great love” as we benefit from the “riches of his grace,” --even when we have completely rejected calls to repentance.

And here we see the blessing of healing that runs through all our readings, as well. Living as one of us, and dying as one of us, Christ in particular can reach into the shattered places in our spirits, and restore us from the shadow world in which we have lived into newness of life. Sometimes those wounds we bear were inflicted on us. Yet, other times, our own choices have wounded us. But God is always there.

Our psalm reminds us that God hears our cries in trouble, and reaches out to heal us. Sometimes, when we consider the pain our choices have brought ourselves and others, we cannot believe that God loves us that much. Yet our gospel addresses this too, in probably one of the most quoted verses of all time.

John 3:16 is probably one of the most quoted verses in all of scripture, but it is also an important link that holds together all of today’s readings. God’s gift of Jesus to the world, as God’s son, can draw those who truly see Jesus’s light to a life with God if they believe in Jesus—only through faith (vv. 16-17). Yet that same verse can be misused, and can become a magic talisman—kind of like that serpent on a pole in our first reading, which eventually was destroyed hundreds of years later, because the people had started worshiping it instead of seeing it as a reminder of when they had once again responded to God’s love with muttering.

One of my personal, petty frustrations is the commercial that sometimes come on TV with this goateed, jeans-wearing preacher intoning that, if you feel lost, all you have to do is pray something similar to the sentiment in John 3:16, and you shall be saved. And then presumably go about your business, having checked off that box to keep your soul from hell, but the implication is that nothing else is required. Our readings from Paul and from our gospel specifically make clear that merely stating a formula is NOT enough.

Too often, people use John 3:16 to talk about condemnation, or worse, to put off accepting God’s main blessing for us. Too often, people use it to focus on the afterlife, rather than talking about our lives right now. And that’s not the case: the English teacher in me wants to point out that Jesus is talking in the present tense.

Eternal life is within us right now. We don’t have to wait for it. But we do have to allow it to take root in our hearts and change us. The problem with the usual use of verse 16 is this: It reduces being a Christian to the fulfillment of a formula, and leaves out repentance and discipleship. That’s why John 3:17 must also be included to complete the thought: “Indeed, God did not send God’s Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.” Jesus then again identifies himself with light—light that enables us to see, and choose the path of salvation—not salvation in some distant time in the future, not eternal life some distant time in the future, but salvation—starting right now, right where we are.

That change leads us to this wonderful knowledge: that God’s presence is within us. We are called to open ourselves to that knowledge, acknowledging that we need God’s healing presence in our lives, and allowing that healing to work within us to change us. It means taking seriously the amazing gift of God’s love for us, as flawed and worn down as we can sometimes be, and let that light of that love pour over us. 

Eternal life starts right now. It starts with understanding ourselves as living—right now-- in the presence of God. Right where we are. God loved us in this way, that God gave us God’s only Son. And why? So that NO ONE feels hungry, or empty, or lost—so that everyone can have a whole and lasting life. That Son didn’t come into the world to condemn us, but to save us, and remind us of who we are: Beloveds of a God who loves us and longs for us so much that God continually reaches out to us, asking us to align ourselves with God’s economy of abundance, grace, and peace.

We are Beloved of God.

And as God’s Beloveds, we are called to bear God’s light into the world.

Amen.

Readings:

Numbers 21:4-9

Psalm 107:1-3, 17-22 

Ephesians 2:1-10

John 3:14-21

Notes:
(1) Barbara Brown Taylor, in “The River of Life,” in Home By Another Way, 36.

Images:
(1) Crijn Hendricks (1616-1645), Jesus and Nicodemus, from wikimedia.
(2) A random sports fan holds up the ubiquitous John 3:16 sign at a sporting event.
(3) Welcoming Jesus, statue at Mission de Carmel, California. Photo by Leslie Scoopmire



Preached at Church of the Transfiguration, Lake St. Louis, MO, on March 11, 2018 at 8:00 and 10:15 am.