The Least We Can Do: Homily for Ash Wednesday 2021

Lent is a season that I doubt many people say that they look forward to. First of all, there is a broad swath of American Christianity that scarcely pays this season any notice. Then there is the common misconception of most things about Lent in popular culture. 

 

Even people who are NOT religious seem to know plenty about Mardi Gras, with its party-in-the-streets, purple green and gold, king cake eating, Southern-Comfort-drinking, bead-tossing, zydeco-dancing, costume-wearing, “laissez le bon temps rouler” attitude. One last chance to party it up before what is commonly held to be seven long weeks of denial and surrender during what in most of the US is the coldest part of winter.

 

After the big party comes Ash Wednesday, the official start of Lent, and to outsiders it can seem to be filled with morbid reminders of human mortality. It’s a day of fasting after the feasting of Mardi Gras—and THIS meaning of the word “fast” is one most of us view with at worst dread and at best resignation.

 

Christians who observe Lent are often asked “What are you going to give up for Lent?” Give up. As in surrender. As in submission. And these are very uncomfortable words. 

 

Then there’s the actual idea that you must offer up some beloved habit or treat for those seven weeks, denying yourself the pleasure of chocolate, or dessert, or soda, or caffeine, or swear words, or refined sugar, or red meat. You know—all the things that help us do the adulating during the day. And the giving up of something that our body may crave with the idea that it will make us more spiritual perpetuates some unhelpful stereotypes about suffering and pleasure, not to mention exaggerating the supposed divide between body and soul. Done right, Lent reminds us that our bodily existence is a gift from God, not something to deny. 

 

Too often, all of the things we associate with Lent can threaten to overwhelm us with distraction rather than leading us into a deeper understanding of how much God loves us and pursues us throughout our lives. Worst of all, it gives us the idea that God wants us to be deprived, or even miserable. As if devotion to God can’t lead us to true joy and praise! 

 

I fear we have allowed Lent, and much of our church-going experiences, to become transactional rather than transformational. We say we believe in Jesus, but we avoid following him. We get hung up on saying the right words to get into heaven, and forget to do the right things so that we can stake our claim in God’s love and abundant mercy right now. Instead of wonder, we scoff. 

 

We spend too much time eating the bread of anxiety. We hold ourselves back, thinking it will keep us safe, or we worry what our friends would think if we started placing God’s commandment to love each other at the center of our existence, rather than our own fears and suspicions at the heart of our day. 

 

Too often, we end up doing the least we can get away with, in the hopes that we can forget that we are God’s, and we are also God’s beloveds. We turn our backs on people and associations if they do not cater enough to us. WE put up our defenses rather than really allow love in, for fear of being hurt—and yet the binding of our hearts does far more damage than any potential heartbreak could cause.

 

Jesus urges us to a better way. In our gospel we are urged to enter into fasting and self-examination with joy and gladness, knowing that offering just this little thing to God still leaves us enormously outmatched by the gifts that God offers to us. 

 

The name of the season on Lent comes from the Middle English word for "Spring." We have it all wrong: Lent is a time of new growth, of anticipation, of hope, and of looking forward in joy and gratitude for the breaking of winter’s grip on our frozen hearts. Jesus calls us to joyfully embrace the turning into the greening of our spirits into a renewed commitment to God and each other.

 

The love that Christ offers to us, especially during Lent, is one of self-giving, of generosity. That love elicits in us the impulse turn upon its head the notion of doing “the least we can do” in our relationships with God and with each other—of avoiding the common responsibility and care we owe each other as fellow-creatures. When we seek to offer a sacrifice to God, may we remember that the purpose of a sacrifice is not pain and denial, but to make ourselves holy, and making ourselves holy is a step toward making ourselves whole. 

As we are marked with the ashes today, ashes derived from the palm fronds from previous Palm Sundays, may we remember that the ashes originated in rejoicing, in proclaiming Jesus as our ruler and Lord within our lives. And let us wear those ashes with joy, with hope, as people of love.

 

As we are reminded that we are dust, and to dust we shall return, may we remember that ashes are not just a sign of mourning but a reminder of our union with all creation, and that being dust makes us kindred of the stars that dance overhead, and set ourselves the task, during these 40 blessed days, to be drawn back into the knowledge of our one-ness with all things, our fellowship with even the most common stuff of creation, and be drawn therefore into love and care with each other and with all the whole earth, that we may we dies to the casual sins of complacency and disdain that so pervades too much of our world, and instead live in gratitude and joy --starting today and for the rest of our lives.

Let Lent begin the thawing of our gratitude—formed by the hand of God, who breathed life into us from God’s own Spirit, the God who then gave us God’s Son as the ultimate sign of how beloved we all are—all of us. No exceptions. I am convinced that living out our days embodying that truth would be the greatest, most holy fast and offering of all. Nothing more, and nothing less, than all we are we are called to offer to each other, and to God.

 

And that is the least we can do.

 

 

 

Amen.

Preached at the online noon service on Ash Wednesday, February 17, 2021, at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville, MO

Readings:

• Joel 2:1-2,12-17
• Psalm 103
• 2 Corinthians 5:20b-6:10
• Matthew 6:1-6,16-21

Perceiving the Light Within: Sermon for Transfiguration Sunday

In her lovely book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the writer Annie Dillard talks about how individuals who had been blinded by cataracts, some from birth, reacted to being given the ability to see when those operations to remove cataracts were first available. For people who had been sighted most of their lives, the operations were miraculous enough. But, as you can imagine, the most shocking was the effect that was visited upon people who had no real memory of sight.

The surgeons found that those blind since birth had no understanding of space and depth perception, no way to name shapes or shadows or tell the difference between them. Instead, they were dazzled by the sheer brightness of the light that now flooded their eyes—vision was more a physically overwhelming sensation rather than a fully functional one of the five senses. Some were filled with delight everywhere they looked. She tells of a girl who sees a tree in a garden and stands before it, transfixed. She takes a hold of it, and at the touch of the leaves and bark names it as a tree, but then refers to it as “The tree with the lights in it.”

Dillard herself seeks to be visually amazed in her perception of the woods and creek near her home, where she walks daily. She seeks particularly to try to untrain her mind for just a moment to see the two-dimensional yet carnival-like swirl of colors and brightness of what is before her described by those with restored vision.

She searches for her own “tree with the lights in it,” what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as kingfishers catching fire, to see beneath the recognition of objects as objects and instead to behold the spark within all creation. Sometimes, she manages the un-knowing of the objects around her until they broke down into their constituent colors and brightness, but only fleetingly, for an instant at a time.

Far more commonly she would look for hours and yet have everything resolve into known categories of flora and fauna. She walked through a peach orchard repeatedly, craving the montage of fruit, leaf, branch, and air to unravel in front of her, to no avail. She admitted:

“I couldn't sustain the illusion of flatness. I've been around for too long. Form is condensed to an internal dance macabre with meaning: I couldn't unpeach the peaches. Nor can I remember ever having seen without understanding; the color patches of infancy are lost. My brain then must have been smooth as any balloon. I'm told I reached for the moon; Many babies do. But the color patches of infancy swelled as meaning filled them; they arrayed themselves in solemn ranks down distance which unrolled and stretched before me like a plane. The moon rocketed away. I live now in a world of shadows that shape and distance color, but world where space makes a kind of terrible sense…. The fluttering patch I saw in my nursery window --silver and green and shapeshifting blue --is gone; a row of Lombardy poplars takes its place, mute, across the lawn.” (Dillard, p. 31)

Finally, one day it happened when she had all but given up after years of effort.

“Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was holy fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, not breathless by a powerful glance.” (Dillard, p. 35)

Dillard, in other words, was looking for the spark of the divine that is embedded in and that makes holy everything in creation. Our readings today similarly writhe and swirl with visions and revelations. The veil of our knowing perception is pulled back to reveal that which has not been seen before, and those who witness it are both charged and changed forever. What are we to learn from these stories of the revealing of God’s presence in the world, what is known as a “theophany,” or showing of God?

In both the story of Elijah’s departure from Elisha, and the disciples’ witnessing of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain, we see awe and wonder—but also bewilderment, confusion, and a sense of looming loss. Scholar and teacher Debie Thomas points out that these visions also represent thresholds, changes in the lives of those who witness these events. With each of these epiphanies, something familiar is lost, and what will take its place is shrouded in mystery. It’s only human to be reluctant and resistant at the approach of such transitions in our lives.

As we have moved through the stages of life, our vision and perceptions are changed as well. We resonate to these stories because we know that life itself involves crossing many thresholds.

We are well acquainted with the bittersweet passages of life: there is no new baby without the pain and risk of childbirth and often the vulnerability and risk of relationship for the parents and then the parents and child. There is no creation of a family without eventually letting go of children as they enter adulthood and leave home to make their own ways in the world. Our own parents, who once seemed so invincible and unerring suddenly begin to become dependent upon our help, and it sends a ringing slap of a reminder about our own mortality as well as calling in the loan of care they first invested in us.

It seems we are just get used to one way of relating to each other, and then another season of life comes by and scrambles our understanding of what we thought we see and know, especially about each other.

If we remember the backstory to our reading from 2 Kings, we recall that old Elijah had taken the boy Elisha away from all he had ever known and become his teacher and mentor. Now, in the reading we hear today, all that has become familiar to Elisha in those succeeding years is coming to a close with a final snap, and Elisha is awash in what today we call “anticipatory grief.” How will he go on without the old man’s guidance? We all have been there, as Thomas notes:

Regardless of the particulars, we all know what it's like to get used to one way of being in the world. One way of knowing God, one way of practicing our vocations, one way of relating to our families, one way of doing church, faith, and religion. By the time Elijah's ascension draws near, his student Elisha is well entrenched in finding both his God and his purpose through his mentor. He can't bear the thought of having that safety net ripped away. Who will God become in Elijah's absence? Who will Elisha become, if he is forced to step into spiritual adulthood? If he is forced to evolve?... Elisha saw God's glory, that's for sure. But he also saw a point of no return, and his response was neither gratitude nor joy. He tore his clothes and grieved. (3)

Because Lent moves in the calendar from year to year, the number of Sundays in the season of the Epiphany can change, and due to the way the Christian calendar is set up, there just aren’t that many weeks between Jesus being born as a baby and Jesus moving toward his passion and resurrection. It is traditional to tell the story of the Transfiguration on the Sunday before Lent starts.

In the wisdom of the lectionary, we began the season of Epiphany with the story of Jesus’s baptism in Mark, hearing the voce of God address Jesus and declare to him, “You are my Son, the Beloved….” It is only right and fitting, therefore, that we close out the season after Epiphany with another declaration from God about the identity of Jesus, and with another revelation of God’s glory. It is a bit disconcerting, considering that we spent six weeks covering just the first two pages of Mark’s gospel, and now suddenly we jet to the fulcrum of Mark’s story like we were teleported. Yet we hear those words twice, and are reminded that we are God’s Beloveds, too, and Lent tells us exactly how much God, through Christ, loves us.

The depiction of the Transfiguration is a singular miracle story. Unlike the other ones we’ve heard this year, where Jesus heals or changes others, it is Jesus himself who is the one who appears changed. But is he really changed—or is the veil pulled back from what we mere mortals can tolerate in seeing the glory of God, so that the disciples get a glimpse of Jesus as he REALLY is?

The Transfiguration reveals to us the profound mystery of God’s intimate involvement in confronting the evil that can overshadow too much of human existence. And that’s a truth we need to remind ourselves of repeatedly, as we witness injustice, oppression and falsehood seemingly reign. We have to remind ourselves that God empowers us as children of God to denounce and stand against evil forces in the world, that lie to us and tell us the world is so broken there is no point in trying. There is a reason why Satan is called “the Father of Lies.”

That evil comes about through our need for domination, mastery, and power over others, which is also the source of much of the suffering for the majority of the world’s population. In the reading from 2 Corinthians, Paul reminds us about the things that keep us from seeing the gospel as it really is. Paul points out that if we focus on the “god of this world,” we are unable to perceive to see God in unexpected places, or to see the gospel with clarity and what it requires of us. Instead, our perception is “veiled.” Humans are the ones who have broken our societies, and God gives us the wisdom to fix it. We just need to understand the power within ourselves. That’s another thing the Transfiguration does—it reveals God’s empowerment of us as God’s children.

Perhaps Paul is too generous to make the “god of this world” singular. Power, status, self-righteousness, money, material possessions, fame, greed, entertainment, yes, even violence, as we remember three years since the Parkland Florida school shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School: all of these things we may worship, as we offer them the priority for our attention, our time, and our striving, hoping they make dependence upon God unnecessary.

There are so many gods we focus upon and elevate that we think will take the place in our hearts that belongs to God. And this is especially true in our lives today, with false prophets all around us proclaiming a gospel that seeks to divide and conquer rather than unite and heal. Our perceptions are scrambled.

The story of the Transfiguration recounts a moment when the veil between the visible and the previously invisible is torn away, like the first time you look at a few drops of pond water through a microscope, or at the milky surface of the moon through a telescope. In both cases where once we saw something ordinary, now color and crater and shadow dance before our eyes, and we become aware that those things were there all along—we just didn’t see it.

This is the turning point, midway between Jesus’s baptism and his death. Now he will turn his face toward the cross. On the cross, Jesus will also be between two figures—the two criminals who were crucified with him. On the cross, his claim to be God’s son will be inscribed over him as a form of mockery, for surely the true Son of God would not be hanging on a cross. While he is on the cross, the crowds will wait around to see if Elijah will come to save Jesus. Three of Jesus’s followers will witness his crucifixion, although they will be women (Mary Magdalene, Mary and Salome).

We now turn toward Lent, a wilderness season of our own, where we are led to being transformed ourselves—transformed by our honest admission of our need for repentance, for perceiving the world and ourselves with a new light. During Lent we are called to let go of all that holds us back and prevents us from crossing the threshold of new life that Jesus offers. Yet if we allow this season to open our eyes to new ways of seeing the gospel of Jesus at work even in the face of evil, violence, and death, we will cross over to the other side of death, to resurrection and joyful discipleship, to full maturity, from belief to faith.

As we prepare to enter into Lent, we are encouraged to lean into the creative power of darkness in order to expand our perception. We end the season after Epiphany each year with stories of transfiguration to give us the courage to allow our eyes to adjust to the seeing of who Jesus REALLY is in our lives, much like those disciples who witness his transfiguration in our gospel.

Too often we seem to expect a bearded man, wearing a loose linen tunic, sandals, gorgeously-tressed hair. We fail to perceive him in other guises: the frazzled dad working three jobs to help put food on the table; the teenager hungry for someone to take her under their wing and counter the story she hears at home about being ugly inside and out; the neighbor with whom we have been feuding for so long we no longer remember why; the panhandler on the corner we sneer at for having a cell phone.

But the point of the transfiguration is not to focus on how Jesus has been changed. Rather, what if we looked upon him and realize that the veil has been pulled back: Jesus reveals just a tiny bit of who he really is, and once we perceive that, it is we who have been changed. In a year when even the everyday and commonplace has sometimes become a struggle, we may not perceive the ways in which the Christ-light has been revealed to us, much less within us.

The season of Epiphany is about drawing back the veil and joyfully encouraging us to see God’s presence everywhere and for everyone. Jesus’s transfiguration calls us to embrace our own, so that we ourselves may perceive that that same glory and light resides within each of us. As Jesus transfigures us, he urges us to leave behind the gods of this world. “Come, follow me. Be the light you need to see within the world.”


Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 am online worship service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville.

Readings:

• 2 Kings 2:1-12
• 2 Corinthians 4:3-6
• Mark 9:2-9
• Psalm 50:1-6

Citations/Links:

(1) Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, 31.

(2) Ibid., 35.

(3) Debie Thomas, “When Everything Changes,” February 7, 2021, at Journey With Jesus, https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2917-when-everything-changes

Pulling Back the Veil: Speaking to the Soul, February 11, 2021

When I was eight, my third-grade teacher suspected that I had something wrong with my vision, and she was right. When I would read out loud, I would skip lines. And sometimes at the end of a long school day, the chalk board would get blurrier, like a gauzy veil was drawn over it. Mrs. Mathews was right: come to find out, one of my eyes had weaker muscles than the other. And so for a year I went to eye therapy.

I remember sitting in the waiting room for my appointments, reading old Highlights magazines. After reading all the stories with my new, extra-fragile glass bifocals, I would enjoy the pages filled with visual puzzles, like where you find lists of hidden images in a picture, or a line drawing where you saw a young woman looking over her shoulder, but if you turned the picture upside down suddenly you were looking at an old hag. Or if you looked at the positive space of a drawing you saw one image, but if you concentrated on the negative space you saw something else. Years later I marveled at how that doctor made sure we were working to strengthen our eyes and our perception even in the waiting room.

The eyes work by collecting and focusing light so that it can be interpreted by the brain.

But unless we have some idea what we are looking for, we will seldom find it, because our brains filter out a majority of the images our eyes take in so that we can make sense of what is in front of our eyes. Our brains perceive what is seen by interpreting, based on context, and by filtering out a great amount of input. We see this people who have had their sight restored either by surgery or by correction, or in studies of what newborns see. When asked what they see, they have no way of making sense of the light flooding their eyes. Of those who have the ability to talk, they describe brightness, and later flashes of color. Eventually, their minds learn to interpret the input coming through their eyes. There is even scriptural testimony to this phenomenon: in Mark 8, Jesus heals a blind man from Bethsaida, and after Jesus attempts the healing the first time and asks what the man sees, he says, “I see people, but they look like trees walking.”

In the reading from 2 Corinthians that we will hear this Sunday, we will hear Paul talk about the things that keep us from seeing the gospel as it really is. Paul points out that if we focus on the “god of this world,” we are unable to perceive to see God in unexpected places, or to see the gospel with clarity. Instead, our perception is “veiled.” Perhaps Paul is too generous to make the “god of this world” singular. Power, status, self-righteousness, money, material possessions, fame, greed, entertainment—all of these things we may worship, as we offer them the priority for our attention, our time, and our striving. There are so many gods we focus upon and elevate that we think will take the place in our hearts that belongs to God. One thing is certain: the gods of this world reign by being easily perceptible all around us, while many complain that they do not see signs of the true God anywhere. Once again, depends upon what you are looking for, and where you focus your attention.

As we prepare to enter into Lent, we are encouraged to expand our perception. We end the season after Epiphany each year with stories of transfiguration to give us the courage to allow our eyes to adjust to the seeing of who Jesus REALLY is in our lives, much like those disciples who witness his transfiguration in our gospel. Too often we seem to expect a bearded man, wearing a loose linen tunic, sandals, gorgeously-tressed hair. We fail to perceive him in other guises: the frazzled dad working three jobs to help put food on the table; the teenager hungry for someone to take her under their wing and counter the story she hears at home about being ugly inside and out; the neighbor with whom we have been feuding for so long we no longer remember why; the panhandler on the corner we sneer at for having a cell phone.

But the point of the transfiguration is not to focus on how Jesus has been changed. Rather, what if we looked upon him and realize that the veil has been pulled back: Jesus reveals just a tiny bit of who he really is, and once we perceive that, it is we who have been changed. In a year when even the everyday and commonplace has sometimes become a struggle, we may not perceive the ways in which the Christ-light has been revealed to us, much less within us.

The season of Epiphany is about drawing back the veil and joyfully encouraging us to see God’s presence everywhere and for everyone. Jesus’s transfiguration calls us to embrace our own, so that we ourselves may perceive that that same glory and light resides within each of us. As Jesus transfigures us, he urges us to leave behind the gods of this world. “Come, follow me. Be the light you need to see within the world.”

This was first published on Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on February 11, 2021.

Each Day a Miracle: Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany

In 1967, what was then the greatest rock group in the world, The Beatles, released their album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Part of the album was the story of a fantastic carnival. As the crowd noise and applause fades, the album segues into an altogether different scene, depicted in the song, “A Day in the Life.” The events recounted in the song reveal the highs and lows of one day in the British news. It moves from someone being killed in a car crash, to a story of potholes so numerous they could fill the Albert Hall. And in the center of the song is a recitation of the way that a British everyman begins his day as recounted by Paul McCartney:

Woke up, fell out of bed
Dragged a comb across my head
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, I noticed I was late
Found my coat and grabbed my hat
Made the bus in seconds flat
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke
And somebody spoke and I went into a dream....(1)

Up until last year, perhaps, many of us could have recognized ourselves in that hurried depiction of our days: rushing around in the morning, caffeinating ourselves to make up for lack of sleep, arriving at every place seemingly just on the verge of not making it in time, and then settling into a routine of the workaday world that passes like a dream.

It’s often the way that we treat our days with a casual disregard. Yet, as the writer Annie Dillard notes, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.”(2)

I don’t know about you, but when you put it that way, I am brought up short. When you apply the microscope to the ways in which I use my precious time in each and every day, it appears I am not doing too well with what Mary Oliver challenges us when she asks: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?(3)  Because my answer is, too often, thinking less about the present than I should, looking too much at the future that the day I am in flows past me unaware.

But what we have seen in the last two weeks in our gospels has been Jesus’s rootedness in the present. We see here in our gospel today and last week a depiction of how Jesus spends one of his days, and not just any day, but a sabbath day, a day that should indicate a particular holiness and dedication to God’s values and God’s sovereignty. He starts it in study and teaching in the synagogue. Jesus teaches with an authority that is previously only granted to the elite scribes who were part of the dominant class in the religious life of that time. Jesus heals, but with an eye to restoring people from being outcast to being welcomed back into being productive members of the communities in which they lived.

Today, in case you did not notice, we see the very first woman mentioned in Mark’s gospel. Now, Mark doesn’t give her a name—nope, she gets defined by what her relationship is with a male relative. She is Peter’s mother-in-law. But then again, at least she gets a mention—Peter’s wife is completely off stage.

Thus the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law is significant in many ways. Jesus moves from the synagogue—a world in which only men spoke and dominated, a less-public space accessible only to insiders who belonged to that synagogue, to a house. This is a public space, as this reading makes clear, where the entire town can approach Jesus. The synagogue was the domain of men. Yet immediately afterward, Jesus now enters a private home, which, although it may belong to Peter, is where women are primarily the actors.

Peter invites Jesus into his home, apparently knowing that his mother-in-law is ill with a fever. Peter has just seen that Jesus is the only one who can heal her, as he's coming off the heels of casting out a demon. Notice that this unnamed woman is defined only in terms of her relationship to a man, and since we get no mention of a husband, we can assume that she is widowed and has been taken into Peter's household to be cared for. Yet in taking in his mother-in-law, the structures of the time would also demand that she is a woman of some in authority in the household, exercising some authority over her daughter by virtue of her status as mother. Therefore for her to be unable to take care of guests entering her home would be a matter of some shame. Hospitality was not a matter of servitude, but honor in this context.

Jesus hears of the woman's fever, goes to her, takes her by the hand, and “raises her up.” The verb used here is the same one used for resurrection. The story then goes on to say that immediately upon her healing, the mother in law gets up and begins to “serve” them, using a verb also used to describe discipleship.

So then the question arises: Was she healed so that she could put together a meal and do the “wimmin’s work” for Jesus and his hungry followers, or was she healed so that she could too, could become a disciple? Perhaps the answer is “Both.” What is clear from this story is that once, she is healed and she has begun serving Jesus and his disciples, she emerges as a disciple herself, and her house gains further honor as the location of Jesus’s healing much of those in the town suffering from any condition that further placed them in a precarious situation of isolation due to their various maladies.

No doubt, after Jesus leaves, the woman who is Peter’s mother-in- experiences a life that is both never the same and yet still places her in a position of servitude that all women in that culture experienced, from rich to poor. But in getting up from her bed, she also becomes, even if it's without the actual recognition by mark, the first Deacon mentioned in scripture. as such she labors alongside Jesus to make Jesus's ministry possible and to enable it -- to empower it. And that is truly honorable indeed. In healing this woman, Jesus also blesses her work and commissions it as being a vital part of bringing about the kingdom. Her service to Jesus enables the rest of his healing mission that day, after all.

What is interesting is that this is also the first time that it is stated that Jesus touches someone, and in this case, the touching happens as a prelude to the healing. He takes her hand and lifts her up. Unlike the healing of the demoniac in last week’s gospel, we do not have any recorded commands of Jesus to the fever—perhaps because it is just a fever. But this is still a miracle, nonetheless. And her service afterward enables more miracles.

There is an everyday miracle embedded in this story that speaks directly to our time in this pandemic in 2021. By entering into Peter's home, Jesus consecrates and hallows the home as a space where Jesus does his kingdom-building work.

Stop and think about that for a minute, and what it reminds us about right now. As we have spent nearly a year being very much confined to our homes more than possibly ever in our adult lifetimes, home has grown ever more important as the place where many of us spend most of our time. Especially for us as a community of faith, as a parish, we have missed being able to be in our sacred spaces. Yet by having Jesus spend much of this day in a home in today’s gospel reading, we were reminded of how sacred a space home can be.

Just like Peter's mother-in-law, we have been confined to our homes because of an illness --or at least because of the fear of an illness. Many of us have rightfully and logically chafed at this enforced domesticity. And yet the story of the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law reminds us but the home can be just as sacred space and as much a source of healing and discipleship as the most beautiful cathedral on earth. Jesus takes an ordinary place and turns it into an extraordinary locus of healing and renewed hope.(4) 

Even by the middle of that one day, Jesus’s fame as a healer has gotten spread about, and people are brought to him to be healed of either physical or psychological/spiritual maladies. Jesus willingly heals those who come to him. Since illnesses made it impossible for most of these desperately poor people to work, Jesus spends a large part of this long day restoring people to independence and hope.

Before the next day begins, Jesus sneaks out before dawn and goes to “a deserted place” or “wilderness place” to pray by himself. Unlike in Luke, Jesus as a person who prays is an incidental in Mark’s gospel. And he only gets a few moments to himself, for, as our text states, the disciples “hunt” for him.

We get a lot of details about what people want from Jesus in these first few verses of Mark, but not much about what Jesus wants from his companions. Number one might be time to pray in peace. Anyone who has been a parent may be able to relate to this. And the disciples are still greatly dependent upon him—they may have followed Jesus, but they certainly don’t yet understand him. Only the evil spirits have that gift. What irony. And, not wanting to be clingy, they cloak their “hunting” and bursting in upon Jesus with the excuse that “everyone” is looking for him.

So Jesus puts aside his prayers for now, and continues upon his mission, stating that they should be moving on into neighboring towns so that he can continue to spread the gospel. Jesus never rests. This remains true today. But he also honors time spent in solitude with God, listening as much as talking-- an important part of prayer that we often forget in our hurried, transactional world. Jesus also never stops praying, teaching, or healing. And neither should we.

This past year has forced some of us into solitude, or at least caused us to drastically contract the places to which we feel comfortable traveling. But what if perhaps we could try to find in our enforced stillness an opportunity for spiritual growth?

As disciples, our jobs are to try to imitate our teacher as much as possible. Jesus is our teacher, and our healer, who calls us to repentance and reclamation of our one wild and precious life. What can we learn from this “typical day” of Jesus’s?

Perhaps this: How can we place ourselves more in the present like Jesus did in this one ordinary, extraordinary day—to see the people right in front of us, in all their need, and rather than flick our eyes on to the next thing, instead reach out to them and lift them up? Can we dedicate ourselves to the same deeply rooted spiritual life that Jesus clings to as he repeatedly is found in prayer, and imitate that, if only to see what effect it might have in our lives?

Can we see even the nameless people around us, like Jesus sees Peter’s mother-in-law, and honor the common life we have together thanks to their labor, and honor them for it, rather than take them for granted, or worse, take pride in our exploitation of their labor at the cheapest rates we can negotiate?

May we never forget that the most visible testimony anyone who claims the name of Christian gives to the watching world is the way that we spend each day. What are we testifying to each day? How can we make each day a miracle for those who would otherwise be overlooked? This is the heart of the life lived by Jesus’s disciples-- which is to say, by you and me.



Amen.

Preached at the 10:30 am online worship service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church, Ellisville.

Readings:

Isaiah 40:21-31

Psalm 147:1-12, 21c

1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Mark 1:29-39

Citations:

1) John Lennon and Paul McCartney, "A Day in the Life," from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967.

2) Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, 1989, p. 31.

3) Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day."

4)Debie Thomas, "A Day in the Life," Jan 31, 2021, at Journey with Jesus.

Bonhoeffer and the Heart of Christian Living: Speaking to the Soul, February 4, 2021

One of the greatest challenges facing our nation, and facing American Christianity right now, is the struggle over how to deal with the anger, hatred, and violence claimed as a birthright by a substantial portion of the population. We witnessed this anger forcefully on January 6. Within Christianity, there is a perceived strengthening of Christian nationalism that makes a mockery of the word “Christian.” Yet, for too many people, this is the face of Christianity that is shown to the world, not the face of a Savior, healer, teacher, and redeemer.

As I wept watching the ceremony honoring Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick in the Capitol Rotunda yesterday morning, I felt a wave of grief sweep over me, and I know I was not alone. Even as he was being laid to rest, the initial shock of that January 6 has seemingly begun to wear off, with even some Congresspersons claiming that the assault really wasn’t as bad as all that, and some people who claim to be Christians espousing the right to spill innocent blood in the name of a country that they claim to have been founded on their version of “Christian principles.” Some of these same people claim to be “pro-life.”

It is at this time that we are called to remember the life and witness of the great German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose birth we celebrate on February 4 in the Episcopal Church’s calendar of saints. His willingness to live alongside the oppressed and to give up his life rather than turn a blind eye to fascist ideology that threatened to engulf the German Church mark him as a modern martyr.

Bonhoeffer wrote one of his greatest works on Matthew’s sermon on the Mount. In Chapters 9-11 of The Cost of Discipleship, Bonhoeffer addresses Jesus’s statement in the Sermon on the Mount that hatred for another person is the equivalent of murder. Bonhoeffer says this:

When we come before God with hearts full of contempt and unreconciled with our neighbors, we are, both individually and as a congregation, worshiping an idol. So long as we refused to love and serve our brothers and sisters and make them an object of contempt and let them harbor a grudge against me or the congregation, our worship and sacrifice will be acceptable to God. Not just the fact that I am angry, but the fact that there is somebody who is been hurt, damaged and disgraced by me, who ‘has a cause against me’, erects a barrier between me and God. Let us therefore as a Church examine ourselves, and see whether we have not often enough wronged our neighbors. Let us see whether we have tried to win popularity by falling in with the world’s hatred, its contempt and its [insulting treatment]. For if we do that we are murderers. (Bonhoeffer, Cost of Discipleship, 144).

Bearing contempt for others cannot be made right just by offering a gift at the altar. No, that’s too easy, and avoids the very real work of reconciliation. The entire point of covenants and commandments is that we live in RELATIONSHIP with God and with each other. Relationships are holy things but also sacramental—for they help us evaluate how strong our commitment to living as God’s children really is. We show our commitment to God by how we treat others—even those to whom we are strangers, or those who are difficult to love. God knows sometimes WE can be difficult to love—but God loves us anyway. That’s called “grace,” and like the song says, it’s amazing.

Now at the same time, loving our neighbor can and must also include holding them accountable. Indeed, people who ask forgiveness and yet refuse to own up to and name the harm they have done are not penitent. They are, instead, self-serving. This calls to “unity” are hollow unless they are accompanied by honesty, humility, and repentance.

We must stop leaving unchallenged speech which denigrates others and seeks to divide. Yet it can never be repeated enough: one of the greatest blessings of Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian theology is our repeated emphasis on the importance of the concept of the incarnation—of how, in Jesus, God comes to take on our human nature and live as one of us, thereby hallowing our frail flesh and giving us the example of a truly enlightened, joy-filled, purposeful life. The emphasis on breaking bread together here on earth, humbly in awe at the spark of divine light that shines for the face of each and every one of us, of offering, blessing, and giving, is the heart of Christian life.

Our incarnational theology, proclaimed, embraced, and celebrated in our weekly observance of the Eucharist, reinforces the sacredness of the image of God that resides within all humanity, and indeed is shot throughout all of creation. That’s why anger, fear, jealousy, or prejudice that leads us to discount anyone’s life—no matter how much we may disagree with them or their actions—as less sacred and worthy of protection than our own lives or the lives of our family and friends is equivalent to the breaking of our covenant with God.

When we choose contempt rather than seeing the holiness and sacredness of any of our kindred people, we are choosing to let death and destruction reign in our hearts, rather than choosing life and love. God calls us step back from hurting other people through our own anger—even those who have hurt us. Whether they are worthy or not is not our concern. God also calls us to worship God alone, not some idol of individualism and base prejudices.

And that’s hard. But all real transformation—the choice of life over death—is of course not going to be easy. It WILL be worthwhile, and will bless us ourselves as much as it blesses those around us.

This was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on February 4, 2021.

Reawakening to Amazement: Sermon for the 4th Sunday After Epiphany B and Rector's Report for 2020

Even though it is annual meeting season, and like many of us, I am busier than a moth in a mitten, I also realized at the end of December that I was absolutely being worn out by the stresses and strains of the COVID pandemic. I needed some little thing for me.

So I promised myself that I would read for pleasure every day for at least 20 minutes. There were plenty of books piled around the house, but many of them were more for my vocation than just for fun or for savoring. So I decided to start reading a book of essays by the poet Mary Oliver entitled Upstream, because I have started writing poetry again—haltingly. Her insights into the creative process are delightful. But within the first thirty pages, I was stopped in my tracks by this sentence:

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

I’ve been turning that small sentence over and over in my head the way your turn a smooth river rock over and over in your hand or in your pocket, tucked away. The more I thought about it, the more the words rang true.

When we were children, the thing we yearned for most was attention from those we admired: our parents, or older cousins or neighbors. When we became the big kids, we noticed little kids wanting the same from us. Hopefully we kindly obliged as much as we had been obliged when we ourselves were small.

Likewise, when we were small, many of us fastened upon often the most ordinary things that completely fascinated us. Chin propped on hands, watching the orderly dotted line of ants moving in and out of an anthill.

Searching through the day for a four-leaf clover, and along the way noticing the variations in the edges, tones, and patterns on all the rejected clover-leafs. Watching the industrious uncoiling of the tongues of sulphurs, Monarchs, or blues as they competed with the bees for the clover or drank from the fallen, exploded sandplums under the trees. Learning how to tamp down your natural reaction when a bee landed on you until you could allow one to crawl across your hand with no fear because you know how not to startle it.

I remember thinking how amazing it was that this bee would have visited this flower, and I would never have known it were I not here to see and notice it right at that moment—and that all around the world, there were millions of bees contemplating millions of clover flower that I would never get to see. I became aware of how many hundreds of bees would visit this patch of clover in my backyard every day, whether I was there to observe them or not. Then later I was given a piece of wild honeycomb by my Dad’s mother, whom we called One Granny, and saw where the bees’ destination as they flew away from me was, and marveled at how they could help create such sweetness from flowers that weren’t particularly pretty or sweet. I learned that bees made honey, but butterflies did not, nor did they make butter.

I learned to start paying attention. And certainly that started me on the path of devotion to creation in to the majority of all its quadrillions of living creatures (not so fond of cockroaches or grubs or water snakes, all of which gave me the heebie-jeebies, to be honest). But I learned something else: the path to devotion ran straight through a way-station called amazement.

I was young, and therefore brave enough to be openly amazed and filled with wonder. I didn’t care if that amazement could be mocked by others as being naïve—I was lucky enough not to even know that some people sought to be above amazement, thinking it made them look knowledgeable and worldly.

And as I listened to Bible stories read to me by my mother, I began to notice when in the Bible it stated that a character was amazed, such as this Sunday, when we hear still in chapter 1 of Mark’s gospel how Jesus’s teaching and healing amazed those in the synagogue who witnessed them.

I like to think of the joy they felt—Mark’s gospel doesn’t have Jesus’s hometown crew them turning on him with a “Just who do you have the nerve to think you are” fury. Instead, the crowds seem genuinely open to the possibility of something new coming from the most unlikely of people. I imagine them going back to their homes and telling the story over and over again to their family, and watching their kindred’s eyes fill with wonder as they themselves open to the possibility of seeing something new. Something they might not have noticed was new had they not been paying attention.

That attention is the beginning of all Epiphany stories, in fact, and it is steeped in the willingness to surrender to wonder and amazement, no matter how foolish it might seem to indulge in hope in a society that seeks to crush our imaginations and dull our senses. And I imagine that was why some were willing to abandon their shovels and their lathes and their nets, and follow Jesus out into a world that needed to be shaken to attention. To be brought back to amazement. And led to devotion.

~~~~~~~~~~

In 2020 we have endured terrible losses, beloved members who have passed away, the fear of pandemic hounding our every step if we are wise. We are fortunate indeed that we have an understanding of faith which is grounded on the words “Love thy neighbor” as much as “Do not put the Lord your God to the test,” so we have made willing sacrifices of our fellowship so that there WILL be a fellowship awaiting our return on the other side of this pandemic. Infection rates and the weather allowed us only a couple of outdoor Eucharists in the fall—but we know there will be more chances.

Every time I speak into a red dot in a tiny black box, I think about how much I miss you all. I miss the choir. I miss the altar guild. I miss Eucharist. But love calls us to place others’ welfare ahead of our own preferences.

While we long to return safely to worship in person, we have adapted as we can to continue offering worship, albeit online. I offer my extreme thanks to those who had the foresight to support this parish in planning for an eventual lockdown—we were not caught flat footed when it came. One of the unintended benefits of this technology has been to expand our evangelism to the outside world.

Just as with our Ashes to Go offering for the last two years, we have been able to worship with people who never might have through the doors into an actual church. We actually have new families joining the parish who have never worshiped inside our doors. We are now reaching out even all over the US who join us in worship, continuing the kind of reaching out to people where they are that Jesus demonstrated in the last few weeks’ gospels.

We offer some sort of programming every day of the week, circumstances permitting, except for Mondays and Thursdays, with Compline and Story Time being broadcast live twice during the week. I am indebted to Loretta Go and Gina Slobodzian for their willingness and their radiant presence as they serve as leaders of Compline.

We have managed to do this in an extremely frugal manner with the support of the diocese and the vestry—and Bill Scoopmire basically clipping coupons. If you pay attention, you can see new features every week, and those features are truly amazing. Where we have had to compromise, we thank you for understanding why that compromise was necessary. We can now broadcast live on Facebook, on St. Martin’s YouTube channel, and on our website, all at once.

I thank each one of you who have shared your appreciation with me or with the broadcast team for the time, study, and effort that goes into our broadcasts every week. Because our system is one that pulls from a lot of services and software packages, I am grateful for those who encourage us each week and whose comments lift us up—the Drakes who are still ushering, Kim Montgomery who is always seeking to help people when they have questions. I especially thank the broadcast team of Bill Scoopmire, Chris Marsh, Jim Fischer, and Scott Scoopmire, who handle so much with grace and a generous application of their time and talent. I am awed by the creativity and innovation of Denise Marsh, and all our parish musicians, who have found safe ways to continue to offer beautiful music for our worship.

In autumn, Bishop Johnson required each parish to form a Regathering Committee, and ours has met every other week and been a great support as we have continually adapted our plans to ever-changing circumstances—I think we might now be on version 9 of our COVID worship plan. My thanks to Tom Allen, Chelsea Brewer, Laura Limbaugh, and Chris Marsh for your dedication to this committee.

Thanks to the Committee and favorable conditions, we were able to have our first pilgrimage experience on Christmas Eve afternoon, in which small groups of parishioners could come, meditate while listening to fabulous Christmas music, and be anointed and receive communion from the reserved sacrament. We even had a gorgeous Christmas tree, thanks to Mary Pomeroy and Judi Batch. We hope to be able to continue with this offering as possible.

I thank Kirt Beckman for helping us obtain a disinfecting mister, and to Lincoln Drake and Tom Warrington especially for tending to the daily checking, disinfecting, and maintenance of the physical plant. Lincoln Drake’s devotion and leadership has saved this parish countless headaches and thousands of dollars—and we owe him all a huge debt of gratitude.

In October we lost a staff member with the resignation of Wendy Sain, and I thank Page, Denise, and Janet for working to help carry the load, especially in bulletins and communications. We are understaffed, but blessed with the talents and energy of these amazing women. When we finally managed to launch our new website, we received immediate benefits in its flexibility and ability to integrate with video—down to making this meeting much more possible than we ever could have experienced before. My thanks go out to Hope Jernigan for her design and redesign of the website once COVID struck, and to my son, our webmaster, Scott Scoopmire, who set up the members-only section and the ability to stream our services on the website.

We began the year with plans to ordain a new bishop with a wonderful diocese-wide celebration: COVID had other plans. Nonetheless, Bishop Smith was able to retire a few weeks after his planned date, and Bishop Johnson was finally formally ordained a bishop in the summer. More cause for amazement, and we had our first episcopal visit in October.

October was also supposed to be celebration of new ministry after I was formally called as St. Martin’s fourth rector, but a need for Bill and I to quarantine postponed that. I am your rector, and I have asked the bishop’s office if we can wait to formally celebrate that until we are able to meet again in person, perhaps this coming fall.

I am also grateful for the creativity and initiative you all have shown in maintaining our presence in the community in a time of lockdown. I am grateful to the Hankemeyers, the Drakes, and other members of the Lunch Bunch for delivering meals to hospital staff all around our parish when COVID first bit, and I am grateful for the outreach committee still attempting to maintain our holiday drives for Circle of Concern and Episcopal City Mission. I am grateful to John Lange and the Garden Committee for their steadfast planning and devotion in still eliciting a bountiful harvest from our garden for the assistance of those in need.

The guiding light who continues to make sure our children are engaged in formation is Sherrie Algren, who has made packets each month for the littlest members of our parish, for which our kids are truly grateful. I am also thankful for those who have met for our Lectionary Bible Study on Tuesdays. And I would like to see much more adult formation become a priority in this parish.

One financial picture starts with an amazing thing indeed: under some incredibly devoted leadership of Steve Brunkhorst, Page Andersen, Bob Ecker, Robin Ragsdale, John Lange, the late Wayne Peters, Bob Pomeroy, Barb Hankemeyer, Lincoln Drake, we completed our first capital campaign in 22 years as part of placing ourselves on a more secure financial footing. And we did this is a time of pandemic. Many thanks go out to each of you who have committed to this campaign—and to those who have already sent in contribution. I remind you that this is a three year campaign. So if you have yet to make or add to a pledge, it is NEVER too late.

Our stewardship campaign was completely conducted via email and mail due to the pandemic, under the oversight of myself with vestry support. The challenges of nor meting every week have meant that the stewardship campaign is still awaiting pledges from a sizeable number of households. Bob Ecker has done an outstanding job as our treasurer these last two years, and Page Andersen has turned over every federal rock she could find to secure PPP loans to help cushion the sustained economic shock of the COVID crisis that we endured. We have ended with a deficit smaller than we anticipated purely through their creativity and through the engagement already of capital campaign funds for capital improvements.

But the only good deficit is NO deficit. There is no deficit of fellowship here. There is no deficit of spirituality and faith here. There must be no deficit in our willingness to not just balance our budget but enable it to grow in discipleship areas that have been previously pruned back too far.

This has reminded us that stewardship is not an unpleasant task to be confined to a brief season, but is instead a year-round attitude of thankfulness, generosity, and courage that calls us to a frank assessment of how much St. Martin’s means in our lives throughout the year. Financially, we still labor under a deficit. And this simply must end. It is in our power to increase our revenue—there is no more cutting to be made. We are understaffed, overworked, and the deficit prevents us from being as nimble as we need to be, as this time of crisis has driven home.

In the last six years, this parish has gone from having four part- and full-time clergy to one. Janet Theiss is both a parish administrator, book-keeper, and woman of all trades, and we would be truly lost without her. Denise Marsh is so talented I believe she could make stones sing and woodpeckers play percussion. They both deserve our thanks—and our financial support to be able to do their jobs right.

There are so many things we should be able to do—send mailed Beacons once a month to parishioners who are technologically challenged, for instance-- but we simply lack the hands and hours to do these things. We can do this. And we must.

Too many people have been forecasting the death of the big-C Church for years in this country and throughout the West. As we hear in our gospel today, Jesus brings a new message of love and healing—and the people who witness it are astonished. Here was some good news they had never heard before.

The world right now is as hungry for this gospel as those townspeople in Capernaum were on that day 2000 years ago. And Jesus has placed this beautiful life-giving work into our hands. How can we NOT take it up with joy and gladness? We start by paying attention to the signs of beauty, wonder, healing, and rebirth all around us. We continue by being brave enough to be amazed, and overflow with that amazement so that we share this treasure with all those around us. It is then that devotion begins.

In her poem, “Mysteries, Yes,” Mary Oliver writes,

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.

How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,

and bow their heads.



We are called to love. To love boldly, profoundly, holding nothing back. This is the action Jesus sets apart as the sign of discipleship in his teachings. When we love each other, we truly live as God commands us to live, fully and radically alive. And they—the world— will know we are Christians by our love. And that love is our strength, the glue that holds our union together, despite this time of isolation, political unrest, and uncertainty. It is that love that makes us a people equipped for a time such as this. Attentive, amazed, and devoted to God’s ministry with all that we have.

Amen.

Preached at the 9:00 am online worship service at St. Martin's Episcopal Church before the 2021 Annual Meeting.

Readings:

• Deuteronomy 18:15-20
• 1 Corinthians 8:1-13
• Mark 1:21-28
• Psalm 111

Prayer, day 2928

Almighty God,

our song is to You
from our rising to our resting:
center us now within your presence,
and guide us in all our steps today.

Tune our hearts to the melody of your truth, O Blessed Jesus,
that we may show forth your mercy
and embody your light and compassion.
Pour out a spirit of reconciliation and concord over us,
that we may bind up the broken-hearted
and turn aside from division and rancor.

Shepherd of Our Souls,
strengthen us in goodness
and lead us into verdant valleys
of peace and contentment,
enlightenment and hope.
Shine the light of your countenance, O God,
over all who make their prayer to you.

Amen.

Prayer, day 2927

Creator God,
come shine your light through us,
that we may be enlightened
and strengthened in our path through this day. 

Drive far from us all hardness of heart,
and guide us to seek reconciliation and amity. 

Come, Lord,
place your hand of peace
upon those who are in strained relationships,
or are alienated from those who love them.

Come, Jesus,
place your hand of power among us,
that we may work in fellowship with the oppressed. 

Come, Holy Spirit,
and place your hand of healing
upon all who are needful, in mind, body, or spirit
as we pray.

Amen.

Attention, Amazement. Devotion: Speaking to the Soul, January 28, 2021

“They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, ‘What is this? A new teaching—with authority!”—Mark 1:27


Even though it is annual meeting season, and like many of us, I am busier than a moth in a mitten, I also realized at the end of December that I was absolutely being worn out by the stresses and strains of the COVID pandemic. I needed some little thing for me.

So I promised myself that I would read for pleasure every day for at least 20 minutes. There were plenty of books piled around the house, but many of them were more for my vocation than just for fun or for savoring. So I decided to start reading a book of essays by the poet Mary Oliver entitled Upstream, because I have started writing poetry again—haltingly. Her insights into the creative process are delightful. But within the first thirty pages, I was stopped in my tracks by this sentence:

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

I’ve been turning that small sentence over and over in my head the way your turn a smooth river rock over and over in your hand or in your pocket, tucked away. The more I thought about it, the more the words rang true.

When we were children, the thing we yearned for most was attention from those we admired: our parents, or older cousins or neighbors. When we became the big kids, we noticed little kids wanting the same from us. Hopefully we kindly obliged as much as we had been obliged when we ourselves were small.

Likewise, when we were small, many of us fastened upon often the most ordinary things that completely fascinated us. Chin propped on hands, watching the orderly dotted line of ants moving in and out of an anthill. Searching through the day for a four-leaf clover, and along the way noticing the variations in the edges, tones, and patterns on all the rejected clover-leafs. Watching the industrious uncoiling of the tongues of sulphurs, Monarchs, or blues as they competed with the bees for the clover or drank from the fallen, exploded sandplums under the trees. Learning how to tamp down your natural reaction when a bee landed on you until you could allow one to crawl across your hand with no fear because you know how not to startle it.

I remember thinking how amazing it was that this bee would have visited this flower, and I would never have known it were I not here to see and notice it right at that moment—and that all around the world, there were millions of bees contemplating millions of clover flower that I would never get to see. I became aware of how many hundreds of bees would visit this patch of clover in my backyard every day, whether I was there to observe them or not, and then later I was given a piece of wild honeycomb by my Dad’s mother, whom we called One Granny, and saw where the bees’ destination as they flew away from me was, and marveled at how they could help create such sweetness from flowers that weren’t particularly pretty or sweet. I learned that bees made honey, but butterflies did not, nor did they make butter.

I learned to start paying attention. And certainly that started me on the path of devotion to creation in to the majority of all its quadrillions of living creatures (not so fond of cockroaches or grubs or water snakes, all of which gave me the heebie-jeebies, to be honest). But I learned something else: the path to devotion ran straight through a way-station called amazement. I was young, and therefore brave enough to be openly amazed and filled with wonder. I didn’t care if that amazement could be mocked by others as being naïve—I was lucky enough not to even know that some people sought to be above amazement, thinking it made them look knowledgeable and worldly.

And as I listened to Bible stories read to me by my mother, I began to notice when in the Bible it stated that a character was amazed, such as this Sunday, when we hear still in chapter 1 of Mark’s gospel how Jesus’s teaching and healing amazed those in the synagogue who witnessed them.

I like to think of the joy they felt—Mark’s gospel doesn’t have Jesus’s hometown crew them turning on him with a “Just who do you have the nerve to think you are” fury. Instead, the crowds seem genuinely open to the possibility of something new coming from the most unlikely of people. I imagine them going back to their homes and telling the story over and over again to their family, and watching their kindred’s eyes fill with wonder as they themselves open to the possibility of seeing something new. Something they might not have noticed was new had they not been paying attention.

That attention is the beginning of all Epiphany stories, in fact, and it is steeped in the willingness to surrender to wonder and amazement, no matter how foolish it might seem to indulge in hope in a society that seeks to crush our imaginations and dull our senses. And I imagine that was why some were willing to abandon their shovels and their lathes and their nets, and follow Jesus out into a world that needed to be shaken to attention. To be brought back to amazement. And led to devotion.

This was first published at Episcopal Cafe's Speaking to the Soul on January 28, 2021.

Prayer 2926: On a Snowy Morning

Holy One,
we thank you for the bright sun
glinting off fresh snow,
blanketing the turning Earth in grace
as we journey through this day.
We lift our hearts to You,
O Creator and Redeemer,
and sing our praise with joy,

and seek harmony in our lives together.

Make us humble and considerate
of the impact our words and deeds have, Beloved Savior.
Grant us the courage to right our wrongs,
and the integrity to heal the breaches we have created
and offer our repentance and honesty
to those whom we have wronged.

May we inscribe your law
upon our hearts
that we may serve You and serve each other
in generosity of spirit.

May we bear each others' burdens with gratitude
for the peace and comfort fellowship brings
as a sign of your universal reign, O God.
What we can do to help each other,
let us do with joy.

What is not in our power to do,
we ask for your aid and comfort,
O Beloved One, Foundation of All That Is.
Ground of Our Being,
extend the shelter of your care
over those for whom we pray.

Amen.

Prayer, day 2925: Giving as We Have Been Given

Come, Holy One,
shine the light of your truth
into the depths of our hearts,
that we may be cleansed of all fear and anger,
and seek to walk in your integrity.

Lord Jesus, we know your abundant grace and mercy:
let us bear those gifts into the world,
and live out your lovingkindness in all we do.

We abide under the refuge of your wings, O God:
may we ever remember
your seeking us and rescuing us
from the famine in our hearts and souls.

Therefore, let us walk in love:
in kinship with the hurting and the seeking,
in compassion upon the slumbering Earth,
in the sure faith of renewal and hope.

As we have received
from the loving hand of our Savior,
so we ourselves are called to give,
embodying your abundance and compassion.

And now, O Merciful One,
extend the hand of blessing and peace
over all those for whom we pray,
as we ask in Jesus's name.

Amen.

Prayer 2924: Your Love Heals Us

O God of Grace, You are our salvation:

may our eyes behold your light
and illumine our hearts with Love.
Your Love, O God, is a soothing balm:
the merciful gift of Love
sets us on solid rock when we flounder.

Let us place before You the hurts that burden us:
your Love heals us and sets us free.

Let us place before You the aches and pains of weary hearts:
your Love heals us and releases us to joy.

Let us place before You our woundedness
and fly free of its pull:

your Love heals us and reminds us to love each other.

Let us place before You the fears
that hold us back from loving others:
your Love heals us and makes us whole.

Let us place before You our failure
to see You in each other:
your Love heals us and calls us to be loving in all things.

May our silences and our words,
our actions and our thoughts,
our hands and our hearts
be instruments of your love today.
May your love rest upon all who cry to You,
O God of Tenderness,
especially those whom we now name.


Amen.

Prayer, day 2023

Blessed Redeemer,

we abide under the awning of your mercy,
and rest within the shade of your right hand:
praise and glory to You forever!

Set our feet firmly in the path of peace,
and give us the determination and the will
to be guided by justice and mercy
as we walk in your Way.

Give us hearts thirsty for your wisdom,
that we may seek the protection of the oppressed
and stand resolute in unity with the humble.

Make us pure in spirit
and steadfast in integrity and love,
faithfully living our lives to reflect your compassion.

Abundant Spirit,
bless and keep us, we humbly pray,
that we may embody your truth,
and grant endurance and healing to all for whom we pray.

Amen.