Proper 6, Year A, 2008

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Sarah had waited twenty-four years.  Twenty-four years have passed between last week’s passage and this week’s passage.  Sarah has been following Abraham around a quarter of a century, waiting to see what God means by his blessing.  Years after the original promise, not long before today’s reading, God told Abraham he would have as many descendents as there are stars in the sky, but still Sarah has not gotten pregnant.

For years Sarah has lived with this hope, only to see her hope dashed over and over and over again.  First, each month that came had the disappointment of a monthly flow visibly reminding her that she was not pregnant.  Now, she is years into menopause, well past the hot flashes and mood swings, and her hopes of becoming pregnant are completely encased in the cement of cold, hard reality.

Sarah has tried to be obedient to God.  She has maintained Abraham’s household.  She has followed him to places she would never go of her own accord.  Sarah even tried to arrange for Abraham to have a child through another woman, her servant, Hagar.  But, as you can imagine, surrogacy did not turn out well.  Sarah soon could not take the painful sight of another woman happily playing with Abraham’s child, and banished them both.  Sarah has tried to be open to God’s blessing, but reality has crushed her dream.

So when Sarah welcomes a stranger into her home and goes out of her way to prepare a lush meal for him, and then overhears this stranger making bold claims about Sarah’s reproductive future, well, I think the visitor was lucky all Sarah did was laugh.  We don’t know if Sarah knew the visitor was God.  But we do know that she laughed.  And we know that laugh was not rooted in joy, but in deep disappointment and disgust that this visitor would so casually claim Sarah would bear a child. This laughter bore the pain of twenty-four years of doing what God had asked of her and seeing no blessing in return.  This laughter bore the pain of her own, personal desire to be a mother, which had been dashed month after month.

To add insult to injury, the stranger tells Abraham that Sarah will bear a child in “due season”.  Due season? Sarah is in her nineties, for crying out loud.  Due season would have been twenty-four years ago when God began making these promises.  Due season would have 50 years ago, when Sarah was still in her thirties and had the energy to deal with child bearing, nursing, and rearing.  “Due season” has come and gone a looooong time ago.

We know, ultimately, that Sarah does get pregnant.  But that pregnancy does not come for THREE MORE CHAPTERS. Our lectionary reading transposes her pregnancy to the end of this passage, but a lot more goes down in Abraham and Sarah’s life before they are blessed with Isaac’s birth.  There are many stories in the Hebrew Scriptures of barren women miraculously becoming pregnant, but Sarah’s story is the only one of these stories in which the time between God’s promise and the ultimate pregnancy is so agonizingly long. 

Remember, Sarah and Abraham are the first couple with whom God is exploring this new covenant.  He has committed to being their God and they have committed to being God’s people.  And what does God do to celebrate this relationship?  (Besides asking Abraham and all the men in the family to get circumcised, of course.)  God asks them to wait.  He asks Abraham and Sarah to follow him and trust that he will provide an heir, and not only an heir, but a nation of descendents that will be God’s chosen people for thousands of years.

This waiting is not unique to Abraham and Sarah.  Waiting is a profound part of the experience of being in relationship with God.  Abraham and Sarah had to wait a quarter of a century to get pregnant.  Job had to wait for answers from God.  The Israelites had to wait forty years to finally arrive in the Promised Land.  Even Jesus’ disciples had to wait three days between Jesus death and his resurrection. 

God calls us to keep following him, and calls us to wait.  And this waiting can cause us terrible suffering.  Those who struggle with infertility, waiting month after month suffer deeply.  Those who wait to find work as the economy struggles, suffer.  Those who wait to heal suffer.  Those who wait for true love suffer.  Those who wait for their sons, daughters to return from war suffer.  Those who wait for grief to subside suffer. This suffering can feel incredibly painful and very personal, but it is important to remember that the suffering of waiting is not a punishment or a rebuke.  In Paul’s letter to the Romans today, he calls us to:

. . .boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,  and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,  and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

When I was a child and had to do something I did not want to do, my father would always tell me, “It will build character, Sarah.”  The word character sours after while, when building character means making your bed, being nice to your sister, staying late to help clean, working on your science project instead of going to the circus when your sister gets to go to the circus with your most hilarious family friend who does magic tricks with his hat. (Deep breath)

But I digress. . .

I don’t know about you, but to me, character and hope do not seem like related words at all.  Character is a stodgy word, and hope is a lofty word.  Character is about hard work and discipline and hope is about dreaming and longing.  Character is about being firm and grounded and hope is about taking big emotional risks.

So, why does Paul link these words to suffering?  How does our waiting give us hope? 

I think the imagery we discussed last week-the imagery of our lives with God as a journey is helpful here.  After all, when we wait, we are not just sitting on our couches holding perfectly still waiting for God to show up.  No, when we wait, we wait actively: going to work, loving our friends and families, and most importantly staying connected with God.  When we wait, whether we wait patiently, eagerly, or bitterly, we pray about that waiting.  We ask God.  We beseech God.  We may rail at God.  But in the waiting, in the praying, God is at work in us, maturing us, developing us to be the people he has designed us to be.

Oftentimes we have transformative experiences while we wait.  We may discover our friends’ deep love for us when we wait, or feel the deep presence of God while we wait.   And when we feel the deep presence of God, we realize that God loves us in a profound way, and that love and that sense of God’s immanence gives us hope.  Paul’s passage is not about pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, but about the intense, personal, transformative experience of suffering in the light of God’s love for us.

Paul suffered. He was shipwrecked.  He was imprisoned.  He was blinded for a time. He had some unnamed “thorn” in his side.  Paul knew what it was to wait for God, to wait for answers.  Paul knew first hand that the suffering he encountered during his long journey of faith was transformed by God into something enriching and life giving, even before his problems were resolved or God’s answers were revealed.

Some who suffer, like Sarah ultimately rejoice.  In the 21st chapter of Genesis we read: 

The LORD dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the LORD did for Sarah as he had promised. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him. Abraham gave the name Isaac to his son whom Sarah bore him. And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.”

Sarah’s bitter laughter is transformed back into the joyous laughter of delight, and she even names her son Isaac, which means “He will laugh.” 

But not everyone who waits receives the object of their desire.  Even for those who get bad news, whose longings never disappear, who still ache with desire for some unmet need, even these people are offered the hope that comes from an intimacy with God.  This hope is not an easy hope.  This hope is born of stodgy, sturdy words like suffer, endurance and character.  This hope is hewn out of the rough wood of prayer after unanswered prayer.  This hope is borne from open raw hearts meeting the living God, and being filled with God’s spirit. 

This hope is Sarah’s hope, and Paul’s hope, and Job’s hope.  This is the hope of the grieving disciples.   This hope is your hope, all of you who wait, and all of you who yearn. 

And this hope will come. It is God’s promise to you, and as surely as he granted Sarah a child, he will grant you this hope.

Amen.

Proper 5, Year A, 2008

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Not very many heroes of epic novels or movies get to stay in one location.  Odysseus, Lawrence of Arabia, Huck Finn, Frodo, Marlow, Dante, Dorothy, Nemo, even the quirky family from Little Miss Sunshine!  All of these characters go on a journey.  Their journeys may be long or short, traumatic or hilarious, sacrificial or selfish.  For each character, the journey is an important, transformative experience, as important, if not more important, than the goal itself.

Journeys are important because they get us out of our normal rhythms.  When on a journey, you do not come home and crash in front of the TV every day, or have the same conversations with your same neighbors day after day.  When you’re on a journey, you don’t even have to show up for work in the morning.  There are no cubicles, reports, or emails on a journey.  A journey bursts us from the constraints of our routines and obligations and opens us to new experiences and new sense of our own identity.  During a journey we find out if we are flexible or rigid; adventurous or timid; brave or fearful. 

Perhaps this is why, throughout God’s history with his people, as soon as he calls us, he sends us on a journey.

You might have noticed over the last few weeks, that in our lectionary we have begun hearing the stories of Genesis, the first book of the Bible.  Genesis is full of stories of people on the move, doing God’s work.  Today, we hear the story of Abram, the father of  Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.  His faith in God would establish the three largest religions in history.

When I went back to Genesis to remind myself of Abram’s story, I had thought I would find out some backstory.  I wanted to know whether Abram and God had any previous encounters, whether they had several conversations before our passage today. Surely, God had been slowly preparing Abram for the life-changing encounter they have in today’s passage.

But it turns out that Genesis tells us nothing about Abram’s personal history with God.  The only information Genesis reveals about Abram before our passage today is that he was the son of Terah, a descendent of Noah and that Abram had a wife named Sarai and a nephew named Lot.

This lack of information makes Abram’s willingness to leave his home and journey off to the great unknown even more powerful.  Abram does not argue with God, he simply packs up his things and goes.  However, if you read the text carefully, you’ll learn that Abram does not follow God’s directions perfectly.  God tells Abram to leave his kindred behind, and instead Abram takes his nephew Lot with him.  Even now, we get a sense that Abram is not a complete pushover and that his relationship with God will not be a simple one.

This ambiguity-this not quite so obedient obedience-is a great introduction to Abram’s journey and the rest of Genesis, really.  God does not choose cookie cutter people to do his work.  You do not have to be sweet and passive and perfect to do God’s work.  In fact, I can’t think of one character in Genesis who is unblemished in some way.  To follow God, all you have to be willing to do is to hear God out and then take a risk.

And what a risk Abram took! 

Imagine-Abram had no context-no Bible stories, no history of God’s faithfulness on which to draw when he made the decision to follow God.  All he had was a family story about his great, great, great, great, great-grandfather Noah and how God preserved his family in the midst of an incredible flood.

But Abram is able to take this family history, and this incredible personal experience of God, and use them to give him the courage to break out of his routine, to burst out of the confines of how he perceived himself, his family and his culture and take a risk to go on what will be an incredible journey.

God promises Abram land and blessings, but for God, the land was not the point.  For God, I think, it was important to send Abram on a journey so that as Abram traveled, Abram could learn to trust God more and more.  I don’t want to spoil anything, since we’ll talk more about Abram’s journey the next couple of weeks, but Abram encounters all kinds of crazy challenges and abundant blessings as he journeys with God.  Abram learns about himself and what it means to have faith in God by journeying away from his ordinary, day-to-day, life.  Abram even gets a new name-Abraham-to mark God’s role in his life. 

What would God need to do to break us out of our routines?  I shudder to think how I would react if God told me to hand over my laptop, my closet full of clothes, and my nice rented house and go wander across the country.  I don’t think I would be as amenable as Abram.  I think I would ask lots of whiny questions, like:  How am I going to eat?  What do you want me to do?  What should I pack? Could I at least have a GPS?

God may not call us to literally leave home like he called Abram, but he still does call us to go on a journey of faith with him. Thinking of our lives as a journey rather than a series of responsibilities gives us a framework to understand our lives in a new way.  A relationship with God is never static.  As we experience each new day of our life, God calls us to journey along with him and to keep our eyes open for what he is doing in the world and how we might fit into that activity.  Occasionally, following God’s journey for us may lead us to do something radical-to travel somewhere we’ve never been, or to talk to someone who has nothing in common with us.  God’s journey may lead us to fight for the disenfranchised or to care for the poor.  God’s journey may lead us toward forgiving someone or even reconciling others in conflict.

Wherever our journey leads us, we can be sure that we will encounter many adventures along the way.  And those adventures will stretch us and shape us into the people God has dreamed we can be.  Thanks be to God.

Proper 4, Year A, 2008

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Noah was a man with a vocation.

God called Noah, clear as a bell, and told him to build a boat.  God told Noah to build a big boat.  God told Noah to build a boat so big that it could hold a pair of every kind of animal under the sun.

Living in Crozet, we have had the unique opportunity to see the Ark in person-at least Hollywood’s version of the Ark-and we know the Ark was one big boat.  But I’ll bet you a dollar that when Noah was in that big boat, on top of the choppy seas, on about day twenty of the rainstorm, Noah felt like he was in a flimsy little basket, floating on the great unknown.

Can you imagine?  All of humanity has been wiped out, and God has chosen you to be cruise director, zookeeper. . .and, oh yeah, put you in charge of repopulating the earth.  Noah must have been one nervous navigator.

Discerning our vocations can make us feel like we’re on flimsy little baskets, floating on the great unknown, too.  We stand side by side with Noah and his poor wife when we ask God, “Who am I?  Who would you have me be?”

After all, our first vocational act is to be baptized, to submit ourselves to the mystery of water and the Spirit in order to be transformed and welcomed as God’s very own.  From that time on, our job as Christians is to pray and discern who God is calling us to be.  When we are children we are called to be children-to play and to learn.  We are to immerse ourselves in the language of our faith through Sunday School and Children’s Worship and prayers around the dinner table.  Then, when we grow up, and we start realizing the gifts God has given us, we leave the playground and go to work.  Sometimes this is our vocation, and sometimes it is just work.  After all, for one person crunching numbers may be an area of excellence AND an area of passion, but their neighbor in the office next door may feel as much passion for numbers as they do for the color beige.

The trick to figuring out God’s call for us, the trick to figuring out our vocation is to find the place, as Buecher said, “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”  As Christians we are called to serve, and our true vocations will always contain some element of service.

Discerning vocation can be frightening.  Having steady work is the opposite of being adrift in a basket on a stormy sea.  Having a good, steady job is like being firmly planted in nourishing soil.  Leaving such an auspicious state can seem absolutely crazy!  But discerning your vocation is still worth it, I promise.  First, because at our core our deepest need is to have meaning, and our vocation gives us meaning.  Secondly, discerning our vocation does not always mean having to leave our jobs!

It is entirely possible to work full time in a job that is not your vocation, and find your vocation doing something on the side:  writing,  volunteering for hospice, taking on more pro bono work, teaching classes in your field to those who can use the knowledge.  One of my favorite parts of being your priest, is getting to hear your stories of vocation.  Those of you who raise service dogs, visit with the dying, serve food to the poor, coordinate after school programs, and the like have such deep joy and meaning in your lives.  Your vocational work is not always easy and can even be heart rending, but you are expressing the deepest part of yourself in a way that serves our community and our God.

When we begin this vocational discernment, we might find it helpful to remember that God doesn’t just send us out in our rickety baskets on uneasy waters.  God also inhabits the very water that upholds our boats.  God bears us gently even as we seek to follow him.  God is present in our vocation and in our search for that vocation.

And today as we baptize Stuart Caroline, she begins her own vocation as the newest, littlest Christian in Christendom.  She joins us on our rickety boats as we go off on our ocean adventure together.

Amen.

Trinity Sunday, Year A, 2008

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Is an anatomy textbook more true than a C.S. Lewis novel?

These are not questions we can answer.  An anatomy text book and a novel are trying to do two completely different things.  An anatomy textbook certainly has lots of facts in it, (Did you know an adult human body contains 206 bones?), but a textbook tells us nothing about our soul.  A C.S. Lewis novel has not one fact in it, but it tells us an enormous amount about what it means to be human.

So why people look to the first chapter of Genesis for scientific information about the beginning of our world is a mystery to me.  The first chapter of Genesis is not a scientific text.  Remember, it was written somewhere between 950 and 500 BCE, and Descarte did not write about the scientific method until 1637 CE.  That is more than two thousand years later!  If the authors thought modern Christians were using their writings to argue scientific points about how and when the earth was created, I think they would roll their eyes.  After all, the authors did not even understand that the world was round.  The dome they refer to in this passage is the sky.  Their understanding was of a flat earth, with a bell jar of a sky laid upon it.  If you read Genesis with a scientist’s eye, you miss the point.

So, if the authors of Genesis were inspired by God to write this passage, but is not a scientific text, than what is it?  Our reading today is part of what Biblical scholars would call mythology literature.  Now, we hear the word myth, and we think it means the same thing as a lie, but that is not what mythology means here.  Mythology is a form of writing that a people uses to describe a mysterious event that they did not witness.  The creation of the world is a common subject of these stories.  The Sumerian cultures that surrounded the Jewish people had their own version of the same story.  By writing this story, the authors are trying to understand who they are, what the earth is and who their God might be.

And just like a poem or a C.S. Lewis novel, the creation story contains an abundance of truth and beauty that can teach us about God and humanity.

First of all, let me just brag about the literary beauty of this passage.  Genesis may have been written three thousand years ago, but the author uses a very sophisticated parallelism here.  Notice that the first and fourth days are both about light.  The second and fifth days are both about water.  And the third and sixth days are both about the earth.  See, the motivation of the order of Creation in this passage is not scientific-the order is literary.  The stars and the sun and the moon were not created after plants and trees, but it is more pleasing in a literary sense to have the balance of the parallelism.

And this passage does not have parallelism for parallelism’s sake.  This literary choice tells us something about God.  The entire arc of the Creation story is the idea that God turns this chaotic, formless, watery nothingness into an orderly, fruitful, life-filled something, and the parallelism echoes that.  In the Creation narrative, God pushes the chaos out beyond the confines of the dome, and forms boundaries that enable light to shine, plants to grow, and animals to walk the earth.  God does not eliminate the chaos; he establishes boundaries to protect us against it.  Through both the form and the content of this passage we learn that God is always moving from chaos to order.

But the chaos still breaks through occasionally, doesn’t it?  In the last two weeks the chaos has broken through in the form of tornadoes across the United States, a cyclone in Myanmar, and that horrific earthquake in China.  This occasional, deadly and terrifying breaking through reminds us that we live in tension, and that the world can still be wild and wooly.

But chaos is not what God desires for us, God seeks to protect us and guard us and encourages us to seek order, as he calls for us to have dominion over and be stewards of this wild and wooly creation.   We are to subdue the chaos and bring order.  And we have.  We have cultivated fields and domesticated animals and pruned trees.  Unfortunately, we’re learning that too much dominion, too much subduing can lead us right back into chaos.  Finding the balance, finding the tension between chaos and order is difficult business.  Our adult forum class on the environment today, should help us with this balance.

As we go deeper in the passage, we learn even more about God, and about ourselves.  We are told that “God made humankind in his image:  male and female he created them.”  We are made in the image of God!

What does it mean to be made in God’s image?  None of us knows exactly.  Perhaps it means that we are creative like God is creative.  We have the capacity to imagine and act on what we imagine.  We can paint and sing and sculpt and build. Or, maybe being made in God’s image means that we are relational, like God is relational.  In the very first chapter of the Bible, God refers to himself as “us”.  We don’t know if the “us” refers to cherubim and seraphim or whether God was already hinting at his Trinitarian nature.  In any case, God chooses to act and reflect in community rather than as a solitary being.  There is a reason that a fundamental part of experiencing both Judaism and Christianity is community.  We gather together, because God calls us as community, not as individuals.  We worship together, because God knows it is not good for us to be alone.

And when God is done making us, he looks us over and says, “Indeed, it was very good.” This is about the most exciting thing I’ve ever read!  This image of creation is so different from the story in the second chapter of Genesis, when humanity immediately starts disappointing God.  So much of religion is focused on our sinfulness and our need for salvation, but in this glorious-and brief-moment, before we start lying and fighting and murdering each other, God looks us over and approves of what he has made.  In fact, he not only approves of us, he also gives us his blessing.

And God never sways from his commitment to us.  From that first blessing he remains committed to being in relationship with us.  He sends us leaders, kings, prophets, poets and finally Jesus and the Holy Spirit so that we can remain in a loving relationship with Him.  There is no way to measure or prove this love of God’s.  This love cannot be titrated or weighed or computed.  But this love is truer than any historical fact, any scientific treatise or mathematical equation.  This love is as true as the light in the skies, the water in the seas, and seed bearing plants on the earth.

Amen.

Pentecost, Year A, 2008

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As a child, I lived in Germany.  I was never fluent in German and so I had the luxury of tuning out conversations almost everywhere I went.  Whether I was at the beauty parlor, or a restaurant or walking along the street, I almost never knew if people were discussing politics, religion, or what they were having for dinner.  I never thought much about this language barrier until we would come back to the States for summer vacation.  Suddenly, I understood everything people were saying!  Sometimes it was loud and obnoxious, sometimes it was dull, and sometimes it was fascinating.  I remember one family dinner at a restaurant in Los Angeles, when my grandfather had to reprimand both my mother and me because we were both leaning back in our chairs, completely absorbed in the conversation happening at the table next to us.

Humans have been divided by language for as far as memory can reach.  Whether we were divided after the Tower of Babel or whether we just each developed our own set of words independently, the difference in understanding has had far reaching consequences.  Our lack of understanding each other’s language causes mistrust, suspicion, and even violence.

Our language is what we use to form images, then sentences, then ideas, then treatises, then Constitutions and Bibles and Korans. . .Language expresses the core of our identity as individuals and as people.  Misunderstandings between two languages can be humorous or serious.  We’ve all heard stories of American travelers abroad introducing their family member as “My noodle” rather than “my aunt” while speaking an unfamiliar language.  However, we as Americans have also seen the consequences of not speaking the language or understanding the culture as we get mired deeper and deeper in Iraq and Afghanistan, with very few Americans being trained in Farsi or Arabic.  Not being able to communicate can have deadly consequences.  Just take a look at the current regime in Myanmar.  Their unwillingness to be open, to invite those of other languages and backgrounds to enter their country has extended even to refusing many aid agencies from coming and distributing needed resources to the tens of thousands of Burmese suffering from the recent cyclone.

How wonderful then, that the first act of the Holy Spirit after it descended upon the disciples was to give them the gift of languages.  We think of the gift of speaking in tongues as incomprehensible babbling, but in this instance, when the flames of the Holy Spirit descend upon them, the disciples are given the gift of being able to communicate using all the languages of the many people living in Jerusalem.  The Holy Spirit’s first act is to bypass differences of nationalities and language and to ensure that everyone within earshot hears about what God has done.

Rather than descending on the Disciples and telling them how special they are and how this new religion is just for the few, for the chosen, for God’s favorites, the Holy Spirit invites everyone to the party.

And how do the people who receive the invitation to the party respond?

They assume the disciples are drunk!  Yes, once again, characters in the Bible respond exactly the way normal people would respond.  They don’t have epiphanies, at least not yet.  Nope, they look up from whatever they are doing and say, “What’s going on with THOSE guys?  They’ve got to be wasted, right?”  They have no idea that they are observing the beginning of an entire new religion.  They have no idea that these excited, goofy, babbling people will go on to be great leaders in a church that will reach nearly every country in the world.  They have no idea that people of all languages, of all backgrounds, of all cultures will encounter the risen Christ, that people of all backgrounds will experience the Holy Spirit.

With Christ’s resurrection and the coming of the Holy Spirit, our allegiances have changed.  Suddenly our identity rests not in language or nation, but in Christ.  Our loyalty is to the One who created all of us, and small differences in the way we speak become meaningless.

I spent the summer between my junior year and senior year of college in India.  Once, in the middle of a long conversation with a Christian single woman from Bho Pal, she stated, “I don’t think I’ll get married.  Indian Men are such MCPs.”  “MCPs?” I asked, excited to learn some native term, to go deeper into her experience of India.  “Yes, she replied, MCPs, Male Chauvinist Pigs.”  It is in small moments like these, when we interact with those of another culture that we realize we have far more in common than we might think.  All people long for security and love and meaning, whatever their background.

Our bishop co-adjustor, Shannon Johnston, has just returned from a very sobering visit to the Sudan.  He traveled to the Sudan in order to attend the consecration of the Episcopal Church of the Sudan’s new Arch-Bishop Daniel Deng Bul.  The clergy in this region met with Bishop Johnston just a few days after his return to Virginia, and he told us stories that made every hair on our bodies stand at attention.  As you no doubt have heard, the Sudan has undergone years of extreme violence.  There is conflict between the Muslim north and the Christian south and there is a separate set of tribal wars going on in the Darfur region.  The population and infrastructure of the Sudan has been decimated.  Children are starving, people live under whatever surface they can find, and militias prowl the streets, torturing and murdering at will.

Bishop Johnston explained to us that in the middle of this utter chaos and violence, The Episcopal Church of the Sudan, the second largest NGO in the country, has been a place of sanity as the church lives out principles of the Kingdom of God.  In the church, Sudanese can find love and friendship, and sometimes even safety.

Bishop Johnston told the story of meeting one Sudanese Bishop with scars all over his face and body.  He was told that this bishop had heard that seven people were being held prisoner in a home and tortured for absolutely no reason.  He went to the house and offered to buy the seven prisoners in exchange for himself.  He substituted his own body and was terribly tortured, all for the love of seven people he did not even know.

The Episcopal Church of the Sudan is the Sudan’s one real hope.  In the midst of awful conditions, the church has kept its humanity, kept its connection to God.  Unfortunately, the church is very low on resources, as is everyone in the Sudan.  They have no way to communicate with each other or to travel.  Bishop Johnston came back from his trip absolutely convicted that his first role as our Bishop was to create a relationship between our Diocese and the Archdiocese of the Sudan.  He sent them a check for computers and cell phones immediately upon his return and is now brainstorming other ways we can partner with the Sudan to help this ravaged country heal from its wounds.

We cannot fully understand what the Sudanese are going through.  They cannot understand the way we live our lives. If we were put in a room together, we might not be able to pick out a single common word.  But, none of that matters.  We are bound together by the same Jesus that sent the Holy Spirit to the waiting disciples.  We are bound by the same Holy Spirit that gave the Disciples the gift of languages-the gift of communication and connection.  We are bound to the Sudanese Church as tightly as we are bound to each other.

We are not the only Diocese helping the Sudan.  In fact, some of the Dioceses helping the Sudan are led by Bishops that want to break ties with the United States altogether, like the Bishops of Kenya and Uganda.  Bishop Johnston hopes that as we all respond to the Holy Spirit, and help the Church of the Sudan, that the Holy Spirit might also heal the wounds of the Anglican Communion and knit us all back together.

We are thousands of years removed from the day the Holy Spirit first fell on the disciples in Jerusalem, but we are part of the same journey.  We continue the ministry of Peter and James and John as we become entwined with the Church in all of its multi-lingual glory.  For our mission is the same:  to love our God as best we can and to invite others through the wide gates to do the same.

Amen.

Seventh Sunday in Easter, Year A, 2008

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Matt and I got our dog Henry from the Augusta SPCA in December.  He was a pitiful little thing when we got him, very sick and very shaken by whatever had happened to him.  He’s fairly healthy now, and very sweet and more or less adjusted, despite a tendency to eat dirty Kleenex and dead frogs.  Despite his good health, I just hate leaving him when we go out of town.  I am never sure how he is going to react when we go.  When we left at Christmas, even with a dog sitter present, he tore up the Christmas tree and a piece of baseboard.  When we left on our last trip in April, he ate a healthy portion of a new book Matt had bought.  When we leave the dog, I am concerned about him on many levels.  First, what if he harms himself? Secondly, what if he destroys our house?  and finally, what if who ever is watching him never speaks to us again?

Leaving loved ones is hard.  While it is stressful to leave a dog behind, it can be heartbreaking to leave people behind, especially if you know you will not see them again.  Letting go is hard.

This is exactly where we find Jesus in our Gospel reading today.

Our Gospel reading takes place during the last supper.  Jesus has just made a long speech to his disciples and now he is offering a prayer on their behalf.  He knows he only has days to live and that during his death, and before his resurrection, he will not be able to contact his disciples in any way.  He will not be able to reassure them, to explain what is happening.  He will not be able to inspire them with his words or calm them with his presence.  And so, Jesus does the only thing he can do.  He prays to his Father.

Jesus prays that he would be glorified.  We think of glory in terms of praise and adulation, but that is not what Jesus means.  When Jesus asks to be glorified, he asks to be restored to the state he was before he was human.  After all, in the beginning of the Gospel of John, John reminds us that Jesus was the Word who was with God before the creation of the world.  Jesus’ prayer jolts us into remembering that Jesus was not just a really, really nice person, he was GOD incarnate.

Jesus does not want to be glorified back to his old self for his own benefit.  He wants to be glorified so his followers can experience eternal life.  And again, Jesus describes eternal life as something different from what we might expect.  We think of eternal life as something linear.  We think eternal life means having an infinite number of days before us, stretched out into the future.  However, Jesus does not describe eternal life in that way.  Jesus describes eternal life as knowing God.  What Jesus wants for his followers in his absence is for them to have a deep, knowing, loving relationship with his Father.

In the second part of the prayer, Jesus describes this beautiful and reciprocal relationship he has with the Father.  Among other things, he says, “the word that you gave to me, I have given to them, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from you.”  Jesus sees himself here as an intermediary between his Father and the people that his father loves.  This prayer reveals an intimacy about the way Jesus and the Father communicate, and what is even more astonishing-that they want to invite us, their followers, into their intimacy.

Saying goodbye to those you love is never easy.  Jesus was not worried about his followers chewing on old Kleenexes or wrecking a house because of their anxiety.  He was probably worried about Peter’s faith-and whether he would be up to the task of leading the Church.  Jesus was probably troubled because he knew that Judas’s act of betrayal would destroy Judas as much as it would destroy Jesus.  Jesus probably grieved the thought of his beloved community being splintered into pieces after they had all gotten to know each other so well.  Maybe he was afraid some of his followers would lose their faith in him and be deeply disappointed.

What Jesus wanted for his followers after his death was for them to be enveloped in the love of his Father.  He wanted his death and resurrection to unite his followers and for them to experience God’s love in a new way.  But even Jesus could not control what happened to his friends.  Even Jesus had to let go and turn to God and offer his loved ones to God.

So, who do we think we are to hold onto people, to control people, to protect people when even Jesus knew it was not his role!  We all have someone in our lives who we just wished made better decisions.  We all have a child who is too distant from us, or a friend who keeps dating horrible people, or a boss we can see making stupid decisions for our company, or a spouse who can’t seem to learn to pick up his socks, or a loved one that struggles with addiction.  Of course we are called to care for them, but we must not forget that ultimately we have no power over them.  Ultimately, the welfare of another person is not in our control and the best thing we can do, is to follow Jesus’ example and turn our loved ones over to God.

Remember, God wants to invite each of us into a loving, reciprocal relationship with the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.  God longs to know and be known to each of us and everyone we love.  It is in that loving relationship where we experience forgiveness, healing and all the things that make us better people.  When we pray for our loved ones who are struggling, we hand them over to the One who made them and loves them even more than we do.  When we pray we are reminded that we are not alone, but we are in relationship with a God who has been in our position, who has loved a group of people and been afraid of what would happen if he were not there to lead them.

This very Jesus, after being incarnate, after being enfleshed, died, became glorified and resumed his pre-embodied state of being all so we could know God better, so that we could freely pray and beseech God and feel God’s presence without the help of any intermediaries.  This is a God we can trust with our loved ones, even my dog Henry.  This is a God who will help us let go.

Fourth Sunday in Easter, Year A, 2008

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

Have you all seen the ATT commercial with Sven?  Sven is a giant blonde Swede. We first meet Sven as he is sitting squarely between a sleeping married couple.  As they wake up, Sven tells them that the wife’s stocks are up, and the husband’s stocks are down. He tells the husband about all his emails as the husband walks to the bathroom. Sven then wakes the daughter and reminds her she has kung fu at 2:00.  Then, as the family has breakfast, he takes out a flip chart and makes sure everyone knows the day’s schedule.  At the end of the commercial, he greets everyone at the front door with giant wool sweaters as he tells them to bundle up because of the cold outside.  The products ATT are selling are their smart phones, but I am left wanting not a phone, but a Sven!

How great would it be to have a chirpy, efficient, tall Swede guide me through my day? Sven would make sure I ate a nutritious breakfast, remembered to do the laundry, wore the appropriate clothes for every occasion.  When I got distracted on Facebook, he would gently but firmly remind me the importance of finishing my sermon in a timely manner.  He would make sure I worked on my quilt instead of watching another episode of Jeopardy.  If I had a Sven in my life I would be more productive, more efficient, more in shape.  (Sigh.)  I want a Sven!

But, I don’t have a Sven.  My phone is not even smart-the only thing it can do is. . .make phone calls. It’s amazing that I remember to show up for church, really.

Sometimes, when I think of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, I’d like him to be a little more like Sven.

I’d like the Good Shepherd to guide this little sheep around and make her more efficient, more effective, more focused.

But it turns out, the Good Shepherd is not a self-help guru.  The Good Shepherd is not Tony Robbins, Dr. Phil, or Stephen Covey.  If we follow the Good Shepherd, we won’t learn a new system for organizing our desks, or an exercise plan that will help us have rock hard abs, or a method to raise our children as productive members of society.

After all, sheep don’t have existential crises or schedules that need to be organized.

Sheep just are.  They eat, they sleep, they follow.

I don’t know about you, but that sounds heavenly to me!

I, like many of you, I’m sure, have a serious case of wanna-be-shepherd-itis.  Wanna-be-shepherd-itis is a terrible condition in which you forget you are a sheep and try to be a shepherd instead.  Instead of peacefully following the shepherd, the sheep tries to take over.

Let me describe to you how this goes terribly, terribly wrong:

My preparations for Chuck’s sabbatical have not been the most calm, centered and spiritual exercises.  Instead of quietly saying my prayers and waiting to see what God would have me to each day, I propelled myself into quite a tizzy.  I cleaned off my desk and filed a year’s worth of paperwork.  I made a giant list of all the tasks I need to accomplish, For some reason, I even insisted on frantically deep cleaning my refrigerator at home and organizing the spice rack, as if having expired tins of cloves and moldy leftovers hanging around might seriously affect the quality of my work this summer.

As I wound myself more and more tightly, the circumference of my anxiety widened and soon had nothing to do with the sabbatical!

Luckily, Matt pulled me from the brink and reminded me gently that I was worrying about things over which I had no control.  Matt reminded me that I am not the shepherd of my future.

What a relief!  In that moment I was able to take a deep breath and take my rightful place as a sheep.  When Jesus reminds us that we are sheep, he tells us that our job is to be responsible for the present.  We don’t need to worry about what has happened in the past, we don’t need to worry about what will happen in the future.  Our job as sheep is to learn our Shepherd’s voice and then be quiet enough to identify that voice among the throngs of voices we hear every day.

And we are inundated with voices, aren’t we?  One of the byproducts of our marvelous technology is that it multiplies exponentially the voices we hear.  Two hundred years ago, you heard the voices of your family, friends, colleagues, newspapers and books.  Then the radio was added, next television, then cable television, and finally the internet.  Now we can have access to almost any voice we want.  Even the soothing voice of Sven the Swedish home organizer.

Jesus refers to thieves and bandits presenting themselves as false shepherds.  At the time, he was probably speaking about the Pharisees or false messianic leaders who came before him.  I think, though, if we look hard enough we can find plenty of thieves and bandits in our own day.  Whether religious, political, or media leaders, there are plenty of people who would happily lead us by the nose, pumping us full of false information. Thankfully, none of these voices are our true Shepherd.  Thankfully, our Shepherd is a Good Shepherd who is full of truth, and honor, and love.

Distinguishing the Shepherd’s voice from the cacophony we hear every day is not easy, but it is worth the challenge.  Listening to that voice is not only the right thing to do, it is also in our best interest.  Remember-the Good Shepherd is not a self-help guru.  The Good Shepherd is not going to help us frantically do anything.  Instead, the Good Shepherd will help us to be-to be still-to know ourselves and to know him.

Our Shepherd longs to guide us to lush green fields, abundant with life’s blessings.  Our Shepherd is armed with a rod to protect us from harm and a staff to gather us when we go astray.    Our Shepherd wants only what is good for us, unlike so many of the voices we hear!

No matter what madness is happening around us, the Shepherd will lead us to a quiet place inside ourselves where we can feel safe and secure and loved.

No other voice, no one else, not even Sven, can lead us there.

Second Sunday in Easter, Year A, 2008

/ Sarah / 2 Comments

When I went through the ordination process, one of the first steps was to have several meetings of a discernment committee at my parish.  My discernment committee at St. James’ Episcopal Church in Richmond was filled with a wonderful variety of parishioners who asked me all sorts of good questions.  Mary Horton, a fabulous woman who single handedly inspired me about the beauty of pointy toed shoes, asked me, “Do you believe in resurrection?”  Now, I was thinking about human death, since my mother had just died, and I told them that I honestly did not know.  There was a long, awkward pause, and all of a sudden I realized she meant JESUS’ resurrection.  I quickly blurted out, “Yes!  Yes!  I believe in Jesus’ resurrection, I’m just not sure if the rest of us have the same kind of bodily resurrection!”

Phew.  I might not be here today if I hadn’t interpreted that long pause correctly!

I wonder if Thomas was met with the same awkward silence when he just could not believe the other disciples had seen the risen Jesus.

You can just imagine Thomas coming back into the locked room, completely innocent of what had just happened.  Maybe he went out to check on a family member, or to grab some lunch.  Maybe he just needed a break from the doom and gloom and wanted some fresh air.  Regardless of why he left, he was the only disciple not to see Jesus for himself.  He came back to the room and everyone was babbling excitedly about seeing Jesus.

Of COURSE Thomas was incredulous.  There are certain things you don’t expect in life-for, example, snipers shooting at cars right here in Greenwood.  Thankfully the thing Thomas was not expecting was not bad news-he had already heard the bad news of Jesus’ death-but really, truly wonderful news.

Thomas was a skeptic.  Thomas wanted more information.  Thomas wanted to see for himself.  He tells his friends that he wants to “see the mark of the nails in Jesus’ hands, and put his finger in the mark of the nails and his hand in his side”.  Thomas wants evidence and sensory proof that what the disciples saw was actually the resurrected Jesus. Thomas is not comfortable with the certainty that his friends are experiencing.

Thomas could be the patron saint of the Episcopal Church.
 
One of the reasons I joined the Episcopal Church is that it welcomes all of us Thomases and all the questions we have. I used to be part of a church community that would tilt its head and tell you, “We’re praying for you.” if you asked too many questions.  Questions were a sign that your faith was wavering, in danger.  To them, real faith looked like an iron clad suit-inflexible and dogmatic. 

John Polkinghorne, the English priest and physicist reminds us that truth is not the same thing as certainty.

Many people confuse the two, but truth is a much broader idea than certainty.

When Thomas finally sees Jesus, Jesus invites Thomas to put his hands in Jesus’ side.  After all his big talk, Thomas cannot bring himself to touch his Lord. Suddenly, Thomas no longer needs the certainty of concrete evidence.  He has a personal encounter with a loving, resurrected Jesus and no longer needs proof of Jesus’ resurrection.

The truth of Jesus, and our relationship with Jesus is much more complicated, and much more beautiful than simple certainty.

If we become absolutely certain about who Jesus is and what God is like, then we close ourselves off to the power of the Holy Spirit to teach us something new.

Our minds are very small.  Even here, in intellectual Charlottesville, our minds cannot begin to grasp the complexity of the living God.  All of our rumination and theology is nothing more than an educated guess, really. 

We like to be organized, so we come up with books and books of theology and all try to agree on exactly what the Bible means, but even the Bible is a complex and multi-layered text.  The Bible is for exploration, not classification.  The Bible is an adventure, not a set of rules.

Being too certain can lead to a limited experience of God.  Being too certain can cut us off from people different from ourselves.  Being too certain can lead to ugly talk, accusations, and even violence.  Being too certain can even lead to personal collapse.

Once I got past the point of just giggling about the whole Elliot Spitzer debacle, I began to get really fascinated at what motivated him to act out the way he did.  For that matter, what made Ted Haggard behave the way he did?  Or any moral leader who has a moral meltdown?  What men like these have in common is an intense and narrow perspective on the world to which they are professionally obligated to adhere.  They built their reputation on moral certainty that left no room for them to explore their own deep thoughts and feelings in a safe and open manner.  They ended up compartmentalizing themselves into irresolvable pieces and that loose construction eventually collapsed in spectacular and humiliating ways. 

If Spitzer and Haggard had been in tune with the complicated truth of who they were and who God is, rather than being so certain of a set of mores for those under their care, they may have spared themselves the humiliation of sexual and financial indiscretions that later came to light.

Asking questions, even taboo questions, about ourselves and about God is one of the healthiest, most faithful acts we can do as Christians.  Thomas teaches us that we are allowed to ask whether God is real, whether the resurrection is real, whether the virgin birth is real.  We are allowed to doubt.

Faith would not be faith without doubt.  Inherently, faith is about taking a risk, taking a chance.  Over our life, our faith will ebb and flow.  There will be Sundays where we can say the Nicene Creed with confidence and other Sundays where we might need to skip a part or just listen to our brothers and sisters recite it.  In the Episcopal Church, unlike most churches, to join you do not need to sign a statement of belief.  You do not have to sign off on specific theological points or agree to a proscribed set of ideas.  In the Episcopal Church we believe faith is expressed by coming together and worshipping, by the act of loving God, rather than the act of believing facts about God. 

We can no longer put our hands in Jesus’ wounds, but we can encounter him at the Eucharist.  The physical contact and assurance Thomas, and we, long for can still be met as we kneel before him and accept his body and blood in the form of bread and wine.  The intimacy that Thomas shared with Jesus, the gift of being in Jesus’ presence is still offered to us. 

And when we come to share that intimacy in the Eucharist, we don’t need to have all our ducks in a row.  We can come confused about God, confused about ourselves.  We can come with robust faith or whimpering faith and Jesus will still meet us and open his arms to us.

Thanks be to God.

Good Friday, Year A, 2008

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

We are a bloodthirsty people.

When I say we, I don’t mean us here at Emmanuel, or even us as Americans, I mean the big “us”, humanity.  For whatever reason, when under the right kind of pressure, and the right circumstances we will kill another person with the same ease with which we might bat an annoying fly out of our eyes.

Last week we killed a few dozen people in Tibet.  The month before that we killed 1000 people in Kenya.  Since the beginning of the war, we’ve killed 3,988 American soldiers and anywhere between 82,000 and 650,000 Iraqi civilians, depending on who is counting.  Since 2003, we’ve killed between 98,000 and 181,000 Sudanese in Darful alone.   In the last fifteen years we killed 937,000 people in Rwanda and 3,800,000 in the Kinshasha Congo.

And that’s just a sampling of political conflict from the last twenty years!  Those figures don’t encompass the 180,000 people who were murdered last year in countries that keep records of that sort of thing.  If you’re interested, the United States has the sixth highest murder rate, behind India, Russia, Columbia, South Africa and Mexico.  Yay us? Only one person got murdered in Iceland, if you’re thinking about moving somewhere a little saner.

We don’t do too well with political figures we admire either.  We killed Benazier Bhutto this year.  We killed Indira Gandhi in the 80s. We killed both Kennedy brothers and Martin Luther King Junior and Abraham Lincoln.  We tried to kill the last Pope, too.  We’ve killed quite a few up and coming politicians in Iraq and I’d list them, but they are just too many to name.

We also kill people who speak the truth to us.  We killed Anna Politkovskaya, the Russian journalist, and Daniel Pearl, the American one.  We killed Kenji Nagai, the Japanese journalist covering the uprising in Burma.  We killed Alisher Saipov in Uzbekistan and 64 journalists in 2007—half of them in Iraq.

Frankly, Jesus did not stand a chance.  A truth-telling, religious and political upstart who claimed he was God?  Yeah, that was going to end well.

Throughout most of history, Jesus’ death has been understood as the will of God—as an act of atonement so humanity’s relationship with God could be restored.  And maybe that is true.  But it might also be true that we have come to that understanding because Jesus’ death being God’s will is a much more soothing sentiment than Jesus’ death being the result of our uncontrollable, murderous impulses.

In two days, we’ll get to experience God’s redemption of the murder of his Son, but for now we’re left with our own culpability.

We’re left staring at ourselves in the mirror wondering what we would have done.  Would we have tried to fight the powers that be, calm down the crowds and take the many moments of opportunity that presented themselves in order to attempt to free Jesus from his captors?

Would we have sat idly by, watching, but congratulating ourselves that at least we know this execution is distasteful?

Would we have shaken our fists and called out for his blood?

Would we have become terrified and run away?

The odds are we would have had one of those reactions. The women who loved Jesus sat silent vigil.  The men who loved him hid themselves out of fear of being caught.  Pilate, when given the option to follow his conscience and not execute Jesus, did what was easier. The crowd as individuals might have been reasonable people, but when massed together they became a vulgar, violent mob.

In a way, the death of Jesus is terribly ironic. After all, it is just because of our selfish, murderous, detached, lazy, hypocritical natures that we need a savior in the first place.  When God was gracious enough to give us that savior, what do we do?  We kill him.  Of course.

So, where does this leave us?  Are we soulless, moral-less people who are a danger to everyone around us?  Of course not.

But we are capable of such things.  Each of us.  We carry with us the potential for hate, for violence, for betrayal, for deadly inaction.   Thankfully, through the grace of God and events that will unfold over the next two days, we are not stuck in this mire.  Thankfully, we are also capable of forgiveness, grace, understanding, and reconciliation.  We are never stuck where we are–God is always shaping us to be more whole

In light of various events in the last week and a half, I’ve been thinking a lot about the remarks Bobby Kennedy made when he found out Martin Luther King had been shot.  At one point he said,

My favorite poem, my — my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:

Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget
 falls drop by drop upon the heart,
 until, in our own despair,
 against our will,
 comes wisdom
 through the awful grace of God.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

He went on to say,

And let’s dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.

“To make gentle the life of this world.”  What a beautiful expression and what difficult work.  However, difficult, it is our work.  For our work is to follow Christ, the rabble rouser and the peacemaker, wherever that may lead us.