Trinity Sunday, Year C, 2007

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

I spent last week at Virginia Seminary, at an annual residency as part of the First Three Years Program.  This residency is a time to reflect on our ministries with our seminary classmates, hear each others’ stories and learn.  Coincidentally, the theme of this year’s program was storytelling-I don’t think Chuck secretly influenced them, but who knows!

The first story we read was called The Expert on God, by John L’Heureux.  It begins like this,

From the start, faith had been a problem for him, and his recent ordination had changed almost nothing.  His doubts were simply more appropriate to the priesthood now.  That was the only difference.

As a child of ten, he was saying his evening prayers when it suddenly struck him that Catholics believed in three gods, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.  He blushed and covered his face.  What if the kids at school found out?  They were Protestants and therefore wrong, but at least they had only one God.  Instantly it came to him that there were three Persons in one God.  It was a mystery.  He was very embarrassed but very relieved, and he actually looked around to see if anyone had heard his thoughts, and for the rest of his life it remained for him a moment of great shame.

This beautiful short story begins with a young boy’s meditation on the Trinity.  For him, this contemplation is a shameful experience because initially he thinks non-doctrinal thoughts about the Trinity.

The doctrine of the Trinity has caused a lot of problems for many years.  We in the church like to get our I’s dotted and our T’s crossed.  We don’t like to leave room for error, so we describe abstract theological concepts until we’re blue in the face.  Many churches won’t let you join them until you sign off on their interpretation of doctrine.  The doctrine about the Trinity is tricky, because it is really important to us as Christians that we only worship one God.  But, scripture tells us Jesus was not only God’s son, but was fully God himself.  Scripture also tells us about the Holy Spirit, who pre-existed with the Son and the Father. 

Theologians have been trying to wrap their brains around this for a long time.  The Bible never expressly lays down a theology of the Trinity, so it has been up to the church to develop one.  The Councils of Nicea and Constantinople in 325 and 381, respectively, dealt with the question and developed the creeds we read today.  The consensus was that there was one God, one Divine essence, and the Father, Son and Holy Spirit were all made of that essence.  Theologians fought over the words essence, subsistence, substance-words you and I might think mean the same thing!  As I was preparing for this sermon, I was reading some of John Calvin’s work on the Trinity and at one point he starts making fun of other theologians’ descriptions of the trinity.  He calls Augustine’s explanation on the Trinity, “extravagant.”   Those doctrine wars can get downright nasty!

The little boy in our short story grows up and becomes a priest, but continues to have deep doubts about faith.  He has these doubts in a very systematic way and takes turn doubting the Trinity, the virgin birth, the divinity of Christ, in order, and never more than one at a time.  He gets so caught up in doctrine that he isolates himself socially and has no personal friends.  His doubts become his life.

As I mentioned before, nowhere in Scripture does the Bible lay out the doctrine of the Trinity for us.  Nowhere does Jesus sit his disciples down and start lecturing about the Divine essence of God and how Jesus is a subsistence of that divine essence.  No, when Jesus talks about the Father or about the Spirit, Jesus talks about relationship.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus describes his close relationship with his father-how Jesus bases every decision on following his Father.  The Father feels pain when Jesus is killed on the cross. Jesus also describes how the Holy Spirit will glorify Jesus and speak truth about him.  Jesus describes how the Father sends forth that Holy Spirit.

All three persons of the Trinity are caught up in this beautiful relationship in which they bring honor to one another, love one another and stay completely attuned to one another.  Theologians call this the immanent Trinity-Think of an image of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit in some kind of holy dance “up in heaven,” dwelling in glorious realms on high.

In the last few decades, theologians like Catherine LaCugna have been developing the idea of the economic trinity. Though the idea of the immanent trinity is beautiful, they believe the image of the members of the trinity in deep relationship with each other is incomplete.  The economic trinity is not a trinity that is interested in the stock market.  Here the word economic refers to the idea of exchange, in the sense of how the Trinity interacts with its creation, particularly human beings. 

After all, if there is anything about which the Bible is explicit, it is the members’ of the Trinity relationship with human beings.  God the father creates us and loves us, Jesus offers us grace, the Holy Spirit guides us.  In effect, the members of the trinity are opening their arms and inviting us to participate in the dance of their relationship.

The priest in our short story gets invited into this relationship in a very intense way.  He is driving home after church on an icy Christmas Eve, when he has decides to give up his faith, which for him, is deeply doctrine based.  As soon as he’s made this decision, he notices a car accident.  He pulls over and enters one of the cars, and encounters a dying teenage boy.  Even after renouncing his faith, he pulls his anointing oil out of his pocket and says the last rites.  He holds the boy for a  long time and the story ends when the priest is able to tell the boy.  “I love you.  I love you.  I love you.” 

Though we first think the priest giving up his faith is tragic, soon we realize that in giving up his faith-which was incredibly rule and doctrine bound, he is able to open himself up to true faith in God-relationship.  He is able to be an open vessel that communicates God’s love to a dying boy. 

While this short story is a grim one, it reflects what can happen when we let go of doctrine and open ourselves to relationship with God. 

All of us will doubt elements of our faith at some point or another.  Even I, occasionally, will have a moment in the middle of the Eucharist in which I think to myself.  “Well, this is a strange ritual we have here.”  The important part of faith is not believing all the right things at the right time, but to be in relationship-in relationship to God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit and in relationship with each other.

There are different kinds of knowing.  In German they are distinguished by the terms “wissen” and “kennen“.  Wissen refers to the knowing of facts-You can “know” John Calvin was born in 1509, or that the Trinity is one essence, but three persons, or that the person of Christ dwells in the Eucharist.  Kennen refer to the knowledge of another person, or something more intimate.  Kennen has connotations of time spent together, face to face.  Kennen invokes the image of something familiar and loved.  We may “know” all about the Trinity, but that does not mean we know the Trinity. 

Spiritual maturity comes with knowing not just the facts, not just the doctrine, but knowing the persons of the Trinity.  We come to know them through study, but also through prayer and reflection.  We nudge open the doors of our hearts and take the risk of letting the Father, Son and Holy spirit in our hearts.  Doctrine is the bowl in which the relationship is help, but the relationship is what is really important.

Today, we celebrate the baptism of little Madison-as she begins her own relationship with the Trinity when we baptize her in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we also celebrate our own relationship with the Trinity.  Thanks be to God.

Easter 7, Year C, 2007

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

Do you ever have moments during which you realize you’ve been burying your head in the sand? I tend to be a pretty focused person, so when I am consumed by something-such as implementing children’s worship, writing a sermon, or planning a wedding-that is where I keep my focus.  This January, at Diocesan Council, I felt like someone was opening my eyes.  I literally had the thought, “Oh, right!  There are other churches besides Emmanuel!  There are Anglican churches around the world!”  I found it refreshing to see what ministries were going on in other places and be reminded that no matter how fabulous we are, we are not actually the center of the Universe.  In that Spirit, this sermon will be an attempt to do a brief overview of the current conflict in the Anglican Communion.

Last week, we read part of Jesus’ farewell discourse to the disciples.  The reading we have today is part of a longer prayer immediately following his discourse.  If the Gospel of John were a novel, this prayer would be the climax.  The prayer sets out Jesus’ vision for the church, and the vision is one of unity.  John writes, “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one.”

When Jesus said this prayer, he had maybe a few hundred serious followers.  The concept of unity was a pretty reasonable expectation.  Now, of course, there are millions of Christians, and thousands of denominations.  The Christian church has split over and over and over again, over issues profound and silly.

And while we may not have been paying much attention over here in our idyllic part of the world, our own Episcopal denomination and Anglican Communion are going through their own conflicts.

I’ll be honest.  One reason I haven’t preached much about this, is that I don’t really understand what is going on.  Every once in awhile I’ll see some news item about a church that has left, or a report that’s been published by some committee, but the language is generally pretty dry and confusing, so I end up reading some celebrity gossip instead. 

However, this week, just in time for this passage about unity, a friend passed on a speech given by the Archbishop of South Africa, which contained a Cliff’s Notes history of the Anglican Communion and the current conflict.  I will now attempt to condense his work even further give you a Sarah’s Notes version of his insights. 

The Anglican Communion was actually started the same year Emmanuel began, in 1860.  The Church of England had started churches in all the areas where England had its empire.  After England began losing its power and withdrawing from all these countries, the churches remained.  Unlike the Catholic church, where there was one central authority, these individual Dioceses were politically independent from one another.  What tied them together was each of their relationships to the See of Canterbury, their use of the Anglican prayer book, and the ordination of deacons, priests, and bishops.  They stayed only loosely connected until the late 1840s when two bishops in South Africa began a series of arguments which continued for twenty years and led to accusations of heresy until one bishop excommunicated the other bishop!  Now, the diocese realized they could not handle this problem on their own, and so the first meeting of bishops from Anglican churches throughout the world began in 1867 to help solve this problem. 

While other denominations had official dates of formation or confessional statements everyone needed to sign in order to join, the Anglican Communion developed more organically, and was always a consultative body, rather than a body that formed rules that everyone had to follow. 

Over time several “instruments of unity” were formed, in order to help different provinces of the Anglican Church stay connected to one another.  The instrument that has been around the longest is the Archbishop of Canterbury.  This Archbishop is a leader among equals.  His job is to initiative meetings, and be a central point for the church to gather, and not to “rule” over the church.  Another instrument of unity is the Lambeth Conference-which is the meeting of every bishop in the church, every ten years.  A third point of unity is the Anglican Consultative Council, which is made up of lay people, priests, and bishops.  The fourth is the primates’ meeting.  This is not a meeting of apes, but a meeting of all the Archbishops around the world. These Archbishops meet every couple of years, or as needed.

So, fast forward one hundred years to the late 1960s.  Over time, these different parts of the Anglican communion, including our own Episcopal church, have developed relationships that have largely been about connecting, sharing resources, and learning from one another.  Suddenly, the issue of the ordination of women arises and now these instruments of unity have a slightly different role.  Together they are going to work to find a solution to a complicated question.  In 1968, the Lambeth Conference-the large meeting of all bishops-asks the Anglican Communion to study the question.  So, the Anglican Consultative Council, takes that mandate and spends several years debating the question.  By a narrow margin, they decide that it would be okay for individual dioceses to ordain women if they would like to, but it should not be forced on the entire communion.  In 1978, the Lambeth Conference affirmed that decision. 

Over the following twenty years, the issue of homosexuality and the church came up and began to be a point of discussion.  In his speech the Archbishop reports, In 1978 Lambeth “passed a resolution which affirmed faithfulness and chastity within and outside marriage, and called for a wider theological study of sexuality. Its final clause said, ‘While we affirm heterosexuality as the scriptural norm, we recognise the need for deep and dispassionate study of the question of homosexuality, which would take seriously both the teaching of Scripture and the results of scientific and medical research.’ It also encouraged dialogue with homosexual people, and affirmed their need for pastoral care. ”

What ended up happening was that the primates of many parts of the church latched onto the idea of heterosexuality as the scriptural norm, and neglected to pursue the part of the call to dialogue with homosexual people.

Fast forward to three summers ago.  Despite there being no decision by any one of the four instruments of unity, the diocese of New Hampshire consecrated an openly gay bishop.  And, pardon my French, all hell broke loose.

A few individual churches and dioceses within the Episcopal Church wanted to disassociate from the larger Episcopal Church.  Many African dioceses wanted to break off relationship with the Episcopal Church.  So, over the last three years, some African bishops, in order to support the breakaway Episcopal congregations, have been flying to the United States to ordain priests and consecrate formerly Episcopal priests into African denominations.  Our Diocese, the Diocese of Virginia, has been the center for a lot of this.  You may have seen news reports of The Rev. Martyn Mims, formerly of Truro Chruch, being ordained as a bishop by an African bishop, so he could oversee breakaway churches in the Episcopal Church.

Phew!

So, in response to all of this, something called the Windsor Report was published.  A committee of people with varying perspectives wrote it, and asked the Episcopal church to repent of their actions and asked the African bishops to back off from our church’s business.

The complicating factor is, that while General Convention has complied to some degree with the Windsor Report, individual dioceses continue to ordain homosexual persons and bless same sex unions, which lights a fire under the conservative bishops.

Members of the Anglican Consultative Council, who were again charged with sorting all of this out, spent months carefully working on a draft covenant, but before they could publish it, some of the Primates-those are Archbishops-put out a Communique this spring using very strong language saying that the American Episcopal Church has not done enough to repair broken relationships.   This did not make the group working on the covenant very happy, since it undermined their hard word.

So, here we are.  Some kind of unity, huh?  I have given you only the roughest sketch of what is going on.  If you request this sermon from Janice later on, I will attach links so you can read some of these documents yourself.

But do not despair!  In the midst of all this controversy, I want to tell you about the group of Anglican women that meet annually at the United Nations, during the time when they study the status of women throughout the world.  The meeting this year was in the early spring, right when the latest communiqué from the Primates was published.  These women-from all provinces, all walks of life, all races-released this statement:

We, the women of the Anglican Communion gathered in New York as the Anglican Consultative Council delegation to the 51st Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, and as members of the International Anglican Women’s Network representing the diversity of women from across the world-wide Anglican Communion, wish to reiterate our previously stated unequivocal commitment to remaining always in “communion” with and for one another.

We remain resolute in our solidarity with one another and in our commitment, above all else, to pursue and fulfill God’s mission in all we say and do.

Given the global tensions so evident in our church today, we do not accept that there is any one issue of difference or contention which can, or indeed would, ever cause us to break the unity as represented by our common baptism. Neither would we ever consider severing the deep and abiding bonds of affection which characterize our relationships as Anglican women.

We have been challenged in our time together by the desperately urgent issues of life and death faced by countless numbers of women and children in our communities. As a diverse delegation, we prayerfully reflected on these needs.

We thus reaffirm the conclusion of the statement presented by our delegation to this year’s Session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women:

This sisterhood of suffering is at the heart of our theology and our commitment to transforming the whole world through peace with justice. Rebuilding and reconciling the world is central to our faith.

I love this statement, because these women are so deeply invested in the unity of the church-the real unity, where we work together with Christ to ease suffering and bring hope where there is no hope-that they are basically thumbing their noses at the leaders of the church and saying, “You can’t make us break communion with one another.  No matter what papers you may publish, or decrees you hand down, we will continue to be in relationship with one another.”

I can think of no more response in keeping with John’s gospel.  These women challenge us to think about how we can stay in unity with one another-not just within our own happy parish family, where unity is easily achieved-but with our brothers and sisters across the world.  Are we willing to pursue unity with the passion of our Anglican sisters?

Resources

Speech by South African Bishop

Primates’ Communique

Response to Primates’ Communique by Kathy Grieb, member of covenant drafting committee

Statement by Anglican women on unity 

Windsor Report


 

 

 

Easter 6, Year C, 2007

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

Don’t you love receiving a gift?

Someone hands you a package and first you notice its shape and feel how heavy it is. You admire the gift’s packaging and if you’re polite, you read the card, which expresses the giver’s intent and affection.  Finally, after an appropriate period of time has passed, you begin untying bows, and tearing through paper to discover the mysterious object you can now call your own.  When you’re done admiring the gift, you thank the giver, completing the exchange. 

Gifts are a symbol of relationship, affection, love, or obligation.  We give gifts to welcome, to celebrate, to honor and occasionally to assuage guilt.  We also give gifts to mark thresholds in people’s lives.  Matt and I get married in roughly. . .27 days and many people have been honoring this transition through gifts.  This tradition is so formalized now, our society even codifies it through registries where the engaged couple goes to a store and tells the store what they want people to buy for them! 

Thankfully, even though the disciples are entering a new threshold of their lives, they do not get to register for which gift they’d like to receive.  Our Gospel reading today is John’s record of Jesus’ farewell discourse.  Jesus makes a long speech at the last supper, trying to prepare his disciples for his death.  In the section we read today, Jesus is reassuring his followers that they will still be in relationship with him after he leaves.  He says they will receive two gifts:  Jesus will give them his peace, and the Father will send them an Advocate-the Holy Spirit.

We don’t always know what gifts are good for us.  Matt and I recently went through our registries, taking out some of the excessive stuff that we registered for during a greedy binge.  For instance, we realized that just because we thought a Kitchen Aid mixer was cool didn’t mean we would ever use it or even have the space for it in a kitchen.  Sometimes the gifts you think you want, are not the wisest choices.  If the disciples got to choose their gift, they would choose to have Jesus stay with them, in bodily form, forever.  Like most of us, the idea of change makes them a little nervous and the idea of losing a dear friend makes them incredibly sad. 

But Jesus has better things in store.  Jesus knows that his death is not the end of a story, but the beginning of a new relationship between his Father and humanity. Jesus knows that the gifts he and the Father are giving will nourish God’s followers for the next two thousand years.

The first gift Jesus tells his listeners about is the gift of the Holy Spirit, whom he describes as our Advocate.  We’ll celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost at the end of May.  But before the Holy Spirit came rushing down upon those disciples waiting in the upper room, Jesus told his disciples about the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is God, and a gift from the Father.  The Holy Spirit’s role in our lives is twofold:  to teach us and to help us remember what Jesus has already told us. 

The word Advocate can also mean helper.  The Holy Spirit is sent to help us, specifically in terms of our relationship with the Father.  Jesus told us about the Father, and lived a life in complete union with the Father and through his death and resurrection united us with the Father. 

Remembering these things about Jesus is not easy, especially once Jesus ascends and no longer present to remind us.  God knows we humans need daily reminders.  Moses had only ascended to the mountain a few days before the Israelites started worshiping Golden calves!  We do not have a good track record with keeping God in our mind. 

So, to help us remember Jesus and follow Jesus, the Father sends the Holy Spirit to be our helper.  Not our nagger, not our judger, but our helper.  We can pray to the Holy Spirit to help us understand scripture.  We can pray to the Holy Spirit to help us know how to follow Jesus in our lives.  We can pray to the Holy Spirit for guidance when the church tries to sort out what Scripture means in relation to our modern society.  The Holy Spirit is a living, moving part of God that interacts with us directly

Today, [at the 11:00 o’clock service] we, with Greer’s parents and godparents will reaffirm our baptismal vows.  We make vows that are very profound and very difficult.  By saying our baptismal vows together, we remind ourselves that we have promised to turn away from Satan, evil, and our own sin and turn towards Jesus.  These promises are profoundly difficult to keep!  You should see the way Matt and I lick our chops as we check out the status of our registries online.  You can almost see the greed pouring out our ears.  As we turn away from Jesus and towards material things or other temptations, it is the Holy Spirit that can help us get back on the right track. 

Whatever temptations Greer may face, she can know that the Holy Spirit is her Advocate.  The Holy Spirit is for her and with her and will help her to follow Jesus.

The second gift is one Jesus leaves us.  Jesus gives us the gift of  his peace.  Worshiping a God for whom we have very little tangible experience is an anxiety producing experience at times!  Remember the golden calf.  Thankfully, we have access to Jesus’ peace, so we don’t need to create any golden calves.  Remember that Jesus was in complete union with his Father, so his peace is a peace beyond anything we can imagine.  His peace is the peace of God. 

I have a friend of mine who is job hunting at the moment and she tells me she is waiting to feel God’s peace to know she has found the right job.  The peace of God can be an indicator of a right path, but it can also be a spiritual soothing in a time of unrest.  One of the reasons we do healing prayer once a month here is to invite the peace of God to rest on people who are in some way in pain.  The peace of God is mysterious and can be elusive, but Jesus has given this peace to us as gift. 

Just like Matt and I can take back unwanted gifts to the store, we can refuse God’s gifts to us.  We can decide that we have enough of our own resources and we don’t really need the Holy Spirit or Jesus’s peace.  We can decide that we know absolutely what the Bible says and don’t need the Holy Spirit to gude us.  We can decide we need to be anxious and uptight and driven in order to succeed rather than inviting Jesus’ peace to rule our lives.  It is possible to reject the Father and Jesus’ gifts.

But why would we?  Why would we want to reject these wonderful gifts of relationship and connection.  Why would we not want to learn more about God, or feel a touch of the peace God feels when he looks upon us.  In these confusing and anxious times, why would we refuse these gifts?

God’s gifts for us are good gifts.  They may not be gifts we would register for or dream up for ourselves, but ultimately we don’t have really great taste.  The gifts we would register for are misguided.  Like the disciples, we want concrete answers.  We want to pin God down.  We want to pin our own lives down.  We want to know what will happen to us.  We want to know whether we’ll always be healthy or whether our children will do well for themselves.  We would register for the gifts of certainty, of uneventful lives.

But God’s gifts-the Holy Spirit and Jesus’ peace-are exactly the gifts we need to navigate the choppy waters of our lives.  They comfort us in times of trouble and give us deep joy when times are good.  They connect us when we are feeling lonely, and enter our relationships when we are surrounded by loved ones.

Jesus and the Father are handing us to fantastic packages, that contain gifts beyond our wildest imagination.  Are we going to open them?

Easter 4, Year C, 2007

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

A few years ago, my favorite show on television was Alias.  The premise of the show was this:  a young woman graduate student gets recruited by what she thinks is the CIA, only to learn it is actually a nefarious organization.  She then goes to the actual CIA and works as a double agent, to bring the bad organization down.  While I loved the show for its tough, yet sensitive main character-Sydney Bristow-one of the campy, fun things about the show is that no one ever, ever, ever stayed dead.

When the show begins, Sydney believes her mother drowned in a car years ago.  At the end of the first season she discovers that, in fact, her mother used the air from the tires to breathe and survived the drowning!  It also turns out her mother was a KGB spy, but that is an entirely different story.  In fact, this same character, Sydney’s mother, “died” at least two other times during the course of the series.  I think the third time finally stuck, but we’ll never know, since the series ended.

Sydney “died”, as well, or at least everyone thought she had.  In fact, she was kidnapped, became an assassin with an assumed name, and then lost her memory.  When she “came back to life” all her friends were shocked, particularly her boyfriend, who had since remarried.  (The new wife was an evil double agent, of course.)  And of course, that boyfriend “died” for awhile, too.

Sydney’s best friend, Francie, died, too.  But, Francie came back to life as an evil clone.  Her boss’s wife, Emily, died of cancer, but was actually holed up on an island, waiting for her husband.  The list goes on and on.  No one on Alias ever stayed dead!

Alias was not the most realistic television series ever, but somewhere in its soap opera twists and turns, it captured humanity’s deep desire for life, especially the power of life over death.

This power of life over death is a fundamental tenet of the Christian faith. 

God’s power over death was shown in Jesus’ ability to rise Lazarus from the dead, and then, of course, God the Father’s ability to raise Jesus from the dead.  Our reading from Acts today, when the apostle Peter is able to raise Tabitha from the dead is the next link in the biblical chain.  The book of Acts tells the story of the very early church.  Acts is the sequel to the Gospel of Luke, and begins with the disciples gathering in the upper room, waiting for the Holy Spirit, per the risen Jesus’s instructions.  The Holy Spirit does, indeed come, and the fledgling Christian church is born.  Can you imagine being on the first vestry?  These new Christians had to make tons of decisions every day-do we let in Jews and Gentiles?  Do you have to be circumcised to be a Christian?  Who is going to take care of the poor?  Who is going to take care of widows? 

The new believers had to have faith in their new leaders-men like Peter and James who had been with Jesus as his disciples.

Part of the coming of the Holy Spirit was imbuing these leaders with some of the same powers Jesus had-so that their followers would know they had God’s stamp of approval.  So, when Peter is able to raise Tabitha from the dead, God is showing the early believers that Peter is a chosen leader of the church, but also, that the theme of life triumphing over death will be a hallmark of the Christian faith.

We celebrate this triumph every Easter, at every Christian burial, and every time we consume the Eucharist.

But maybe, this is not enough.

Life is precious.  Life is the very breath of God.  From a baby’s first yelp to a dying person’s last jagged breath, the air we breathe reminds us we are also full of God’s breath, God’s spirit.  We are made in God’s image.  But are we behaving as if we believe in the deep value of life?

The church tends to focus on the quality of life issues either at the beginning or the very end of life-with abortion and the death penalty the most public issues.  What would it be like, if we expanded our energies to focus on the years in-between birth and death?

I grow increasingly concerned that we as a culture are losing touch with the preciousness of life.  I perceive it happening in two ways.  First, the obvious-the increase in acceptability of violence as entertainment.  Recently the New Yorker published an article about the television show 24.  (Now, before I continue let me make it clear that until recently I watched and enjoyed 24.  And I didn’t stop because of the violence, I stopped because it got boring.) 24 is the first television program to show Americans government agents using torture that is outside the bounds of American law and being rewarded for it.  In the past, television shows or movies showed the enemy using torture as a way to demonstrate the inhumanity of the enemy. 

This normalization of torture began having an affect on the real world American military. U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point, actually traveled to Los Angeles to meet with the producers of 24 because the show has such a problematic impact on U.S. soldiers.  These young soldiers have spent their teenage years watching 24 and coming to believe the kind of torture its hero, Jack Bauer practices is acceptable, even though it is, in fact, illegal.   These young soldiers are having to be reigned in again and again as they cross the boundaries of acceptable treatment of prisoners. 

The culture of violence pervades many of my favorite shows and movies, and certainly some of the video games Matt plays.  But at what point do we cross the line as a culture?  Where is the line between acknowledging violence as an unfortunate, but interesting, part of life and glorifying it as a glamorous way to conduct one’s life?  Once again, I have no answers for you, but I think these are important questions to think and pray about as we go about making our daily choices.

The second way of disrespecting life that I’ve observed lately is the way we treat one another verbally.  For some reason, this seems to be the year where out of control stars seem to think it is okay to insult Jewish people, black people, gay people, heck, even their own children. 

In March of this year, a blogger, Kathy Sierra, who blogs about the one-would-think uncontroversial topic of computing technology began receiving more and more threatening anonymous comments towards her on her and others’ blogs, culminating in a death threat.  This began a conversation in the blogging community about the problem of increasingly sexist, sexual, and violent language being used against women in the commentary section of even mainstream websites like Salon.com and Slate.com.  Measures are being taken to filter out such comments, but even that they were made in the first place is deeply disturbing.

The hip-hop community has responded to Don Imus’s comments about the Rutger’s women’s basketball team by beginning a conversation within the hip-hop communitiy about what words are and are not appropriate to promote in albums and videos.

While they may not kill, words can contain incredible violence.  Words can undermine someone’s entire sense of identity, even humanity.  The language we use to speak to one another reflects how we see the other person.  Do we see them as a threat?  As less than ourselves?

Part of respecting life is respecting those made in God’s image.  Everyone on this planet has been made in God’s image.  Everyone has a soul.  One of the first jobs human beings were given was the job of naming-Adam was asked to name all the animals and then his wife, Eve.  This power of naming is the power of giving life and identity. 

My neighbor just had a baby and already we’re calling her names.  Sometimes they are meaningless names like Pepper Pot or Anna Banana, but just as often we’re calling her precious, lovely, smart, perfect-we are identifying the precious humanity in her and calling it out. 

There is no reason to stop this kind of naming once babies become children or children become adults.  Part of our job as Christians is to remind each other who we are-We are beloved, precious in the sight of God, favored, part of a human family.

Celebrating and respecting life is not just about deciding when human life begins or debating end of life issues, but valuing our own life and the lives of those around us.  When Peter raised Tabitha from the dead, he was not just doing a magic trick, he was affirming the goodness of life, of Tabitha’s life.  The writer of Acts tell us that she was a woman who did many good works.  Tabitha was a whole person with a story and relationships-her resurrection was not just to impress the new Christians, but to bring life where there was death, wholeness where there had been grief.

Her resurrection was a reminder that no matter how much evil or violence or death may lap at our heels, ultimately we belong to a God who pours such abundant life upon us, we cannot help but give that life to others.

Easter Sunday, Year C, 2007

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

A friend of mine, a New Testament scholar, has a very clear idea of the perfect Easter sermon.  The minister would climb in the pulpit, say, “Alleluia!  Christ is risen!”, promptly sit down, and let the choir do the real preaching.

It’s a little early in my ministry to attempt such a feat, but I understand what she means.  No spoken words can capture the awe-filled experience of the women at the tomb. 

Mary Magdalena, Mary the mother of James, Joanna and their friends, have faithfully followed Jesus from Galilee.  They have watched him be betrayed, anxiously awaited the results of his trial, and watched, aghast, as he was crucified.  Then, as they make their way toward the tomb, their spices in hand, they realize something is terribly wrong.  Jesus’ body is nowhere to be found.

We now have the scope of history and years of theological reflection to guide our understanding of this empty tomb, but for these women the empty tomb was horrifying.  Mary, Mary and Joanna had been on an emotional rollercoaster the last few weeks. Following a leader they thought would save them somehow, only to watch his story end, not with victory, but with death.  An empty tomb was just adding insult to injury.

Imagine their shock when the men in dazzling white approach them and tell them the reason Jesus is not in the tomb-he is risen!  Dazed, they return to the disciples to tell them the good news.

The Marys and Joanna may not have had the benefit of the long view of history, but we do.

During our Easter Vigil [tonight/last night] we read passages from the Old and New Testaments that give us context to help us understand the enormity of the resurrection.  After all, the resurrection is not an independent event, but the culmination of thousands of years of relationship between God and humankind.  This story-of God’s relationship with humanity was also told during the seder dinner on Thursday.

The Old Testament tells the story of a God who carefully created a world filled with beauty and meaning out of chaos.  This God created humans in his own image-creatures with the capacity to think and love and choose.  For better or wrose, these early people are too curious and independent to follow God the way God expects.  God goes on to try again and  chooses a particular group of people-the nation of Israel–to follow him.  He creates this nation through Abraham and Sarah’s bravery and years later, calls Moses to free the Israelites when they are captured as slaves by the Egyptians. 

The Isralites successfully escape, but unfortunately, like all people, the Israelites are unable to follow God perfectly.  They have a hard time trusting a God who is so mysterious and ephemeral.  They want evidence and constant reminders of his faithfulness.   Even in the midst of God giving them a law to govern themselves, they betray him and begin worshiping a Golden Calf. 

As a consequence, these Israelites then spend 40 years wandering in the desert, before they enter the Promised land.  Again, they are unable to follow God even when they have this land.  Their society ends up being an unjust one-that takes advantage of orphans, widows and the poor.  Eventually, God calls the prophets to warn Israel that it must change its ways.  However, the prophets also hint that God is preparing a new kind of relationship between himself and humankind. 

The Prophet Ezekiel records God as saying, “I will sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses, and from all your idols I will cleanse you. A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

Rather than trying to change his followers’ behavior, God promises to change our hearts.  And to do this, he sends us Jesus.

Mary Magdalena, Mary, and Joanna have seen the enactment of this promise first hand.  They have felt the shift in their own hearts as they came to love this Jesus who was more than just a man.  They have seen his ability to love people from all walks of life.  They have seen his power to heal the sick, restore sight to the blind, and restore the ability to walk to those who were lame.  They have heard Jesus teach with confidence about God and the Kingdom of God.  They have seen his bravery as he stood up to the powers of the day, challenging their empty faith.

Imagine with me, the wonder these women must have felt when they realized their Jesus, their friend, their Lord, whom they thought was dead, was alive again.  Imagine integrating this mind blowing news into your idea of who Jesus was.  Imagine the fear and joy and awe these women must have felt as they fully understood, for the first time, that Jesus truly was more than a human being-Jesus was God.

No longer is their image of God an abstract one.  In Jesus, they have found God enfleshed.  They now know God as someone who cares for them deeply, personally.  Their hearts now respond to God not out of fear or respect, but out of love.

You and I have known Jesus was God for as long as we first heard the Christmas story, but our minds still have a difficult time deeply understanding the joyous implications of the incarnation and the resurrection.  In coming to earth in bodily form, Jesus blessed our lives.  He hallowed what it meant to be a human, so that we, too, can live holy lives.

By rising again from the dead, he transformed our lives.  No longer are we trapped by the limitations of this world or by our bodies’ natural infirmities.  Not only do we now have free access to God, but when our physical lives are over, we will join God fully in the Kingdom of God. 

That transformation is not limited to what happens to our bodies after we die.  The resurrection transforms the way we live here and now. With the resurrection, with Christ’s victory, we can trust that in the cosmic scheme of things, God wins.  Good wins.  This knowledge can give us a deep rooted confidence as we face seemingly insurmountable odds when helping the poor, the sick, and the uneducated.  We do not need to fear governments as we hold them accountable to be governments of justice.  We do not need to tremble in fear as we begin to right the wrongs that have been done to our planet.  The resurrection frees us to pray and to act with a holy abandon.

The new life Christ gives us in his resurrection is for our whole lives-our spiritual lives, yes, but also our intellectual, physical, and emotional lives.  The resurrection calls us to an intimate relationship with God, who has experienced all our joys and sorrows, and then broken the power of death over us.  If we give God a chance, by opening ourselves and our lives to him through prayer and discernment-we, like the Marys, Joanna, and the disciples, can live transformed lives, resurrection lives, lives marked not be fear and timidity, but by wholeness and joy.

Alleluia!  Christ is risen!

Lent 2, Year C, 2007

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

What are you afraid of?

Are you afraid of dying?  Are you afraid you’ll never find meaningful work?  Are you afraid because you don’t have the power to help someone you love?

Fear is something we all experience.  If we are observing Lenten practices, we become even more open to fear, as we strip away the things in life that soothe us and face the reality of our thoughts and spirits. 

This week in the magazine the Christian Century, Peter Steinke reminds us of the theologian Paul Tillich’s work with human anxiety.  Tillich believed there were three kinds of anxiety that all humans face.  First, the anxiety of non being (which is a fancy name for the fear of death).  Second, the anxiety of meaninglessness.  Third, the anxiety of fate. 

We are all too familiar with the anxiety of non-being, the anxiety of death.  We exercise, go to the doctor regularly, watch our cholesterol, get plastic surgery: all attempts to delay our inevitable meeting with death.

The anxiety of meaninglessness is more subtle.  The phenomenon of the mid-life and quarter-life crisis come from this anxiety-the anxiety that we are not fulfilling our destiny, that our lives lack import and consequence.  Moms who struggle with whether to work or to stay home are dealing with this anxiety.  College graduates who have not quite found their way are looking to ease this anxiety with work that is fulfilling and financially prudent.  Those who struggle with this anxiety often end up at church, seeking deeper meaning for their life.

Finally, the anxiety of fate.  We can only control so much of our lives.  We don’t know how long we’ll be in our job, or whether our children will succeed in life, whether we’ll always be healthy, whether our country will always be secure, and this week-whether the stock market was going to recover from Tuesday’s crash.  This finitude, this inability to predict or shape so much of our lives causes us great worry! 

In our scripture readings today:  Abraham, the Psalmist, and Jesus each faced anxiety, and illustrate different ways of dealing with anxiety.

We meet with Abraham as he encounters the presence of God.  Previously, God has told Abraham that he and his elderly wife Sarah will conceive a child, but this event has not yet occurred.  So, God meets with Abraham and makes a profound covenant with him-promising Abraham will have as many descendents as there are stars in the sky.  Well, Abraham and Sarah have a serious case of anxiety about their fate and take matters into their own hands.  Immediately after this profound spiritual experience, Abraham rushes home and lets his wife talk him into having their servant, Hagar, carry their child!

Abraham faced the challenge so many of us face: letting go.  How many of us, five minutes after relinquishing a problem to God in prayer, immediately begin trying to solve the problem using our own intelligence or creativity. 

Our psalmist, on the other hand, seems to have such a deep understanding of God’s love and provision for him that he is able to say, “The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom then shall I fear?”  The Psalmist comes to this conclusion as he meditates on his fear of death from his enemies’ hands.  Even as they surround him and he cannot control their movements he finds the place deep inside himself where he can wait on God patiently.  He writes,

O tarry and await the LORD’S pleasure;
be strong, and he shall comfort your heart; *
wait patiently for the LORD. 

The Psalmist has a profound understanding that God’s timing and provision is mysterious but reliable.  I, for one, am much more likely to tell God exactly what he’s supposed to do, rather than being patient and waiting on God.

Our gospel passage today is a really unusual reading, in that the Pharisees, who usually give Jesus such a hard time, actually warn Jesus that Herod is after him.  The want Jesus to run away and protect himself.  However, Jesus, being God, shows absolutely no fear.  He moves beyond even the Psalmist’s faith-telling the Pharisees that there is no way that Herod could be a threat to him, for Jesus knows he is not supposed to die until he reaches Jerusalem.  Phew!  I cannot imagine the kind of faith that is required to disregard a death threat so casually.  Jesus’ response was not a denial of his ultimate death-in fact, he fully acknowledged that his own death was imminent, but seems totally calm about this fact that would have most of us shaking in our boots!  Jesus knows that God is with him. 

One of my favorite gospel hymns comes from our psalm today, “The Lord is my Light and my salvation, whom shall I fear?”  I am always moved that a group of people who had so much to fear-slaves-were able to sing this hymn as a meditation, as a cry for hope, as a testimony to their faith.  Like the psalmist, like Jesus those who sang this hymn were able to claim God’s presence in a very powerful way.

We, too, can claim the hymn’s promises.

As Americans, we are famously independent.  We are supposed to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and succeed through commitment and hard work.  While these are fine principles, what ends up happening is that we mistakenly come to believe that we are completely in charge of our destiny.  Recently a video of motivational speakers called, “The Secret” was published.  The thesis is basically this:  The energy you send out into the world will come back to you.  Focus on what you really want on life and it will come to you.  Well, positive thinking is well and good, but positive thinking will not cure infertility or make the stock market bounce back or protect us from floods or terrorist attacks.  When we start putting our faith into positive thinking, putting faith into ourselves, we deny the reality that part of life is pain, part of life is suffering. 

What the psalmist is not saying is that God will rescue us from suffering.  What the psalmist is saying is that God will be with us in suffering.  We do not have to fear because God will be with us in the midst of both our joyous celebrations and our deepest grief.  God is with those we cannot protect or control.  God is even working somewhere deep inside people who torment us. 

So whatever it is that makes you anxious, makes you afraid, I invite you to meditate with the words of our psalm today:

The LORD is my light and my salvation;
whom then shall I fear? *
the LORD is the strength of my life;
of whom then shall I be afraid?

 God is with you.  Thanks be to God.

Ash Wednesday, Year C, 2007

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

Today we observe one of the most solemn days of the church year:  Ash Wednesday.  On this day we remember our mortality and begin 40 days of Lent, during which we prepare ourselves for Christ’s death and resurrection.

Last week at Children’s worship, Jane Lynch spoke to the kids about how Lent is a time to prepare for Christ’s death and resurrection.  When one little boy got back to his mother, he tugged at her anxiously and said, “They killed Baby Jesus!”  Because this was new information to this almost-three year old, he was able to experience the deep shock and pain of Christ’s death.  Just wait until he hears that Christ comes to life again!  He’s going to be blown away.

As adult believers, it is difficult to keep the sorrow over Christ’s death and the joy over the resurrection fresh.  We have heard the story over and over again, but the meaning of the story begins to recede as time passes.  We go about our days getting more and more caught up in the details:  what to make for dinner, what needs to be crossed off our to-do lists, where the kids need to be when.  We don’t have a lot of time to think about theological issues.

Ash Wednesday pulls the rug out from under us.  As we have ashes imposed on our foreheads, as we hear the words, ‘From dust you came and to dust you shall return,” we remember that no matter how many errands we run, how many meals we cook, how many days we go into the office, all that will stop one day, and we will die. 

Suddenly Christ’s death and resurrection take on a great deal of significance.  For, through this miraculous event, our deaths are no longer meaningless and terrifying.  Because of Christ’s resurrection, we know we have a hope and a future. 

So, now that we have been stopped short from our crazy lives, how can we live the next 40 days in such a way that will ready us to hear the good news of God’s salvation?

Our Gospel passage today, guides us, through telling us what Jesus does not want.  What Jesus does not want is for us to beat our chests in public, shouting “woe is me!” so that everyone knows how fabulously penitent we are this Lent.

Like most of our faith, Lent is about relationship. 

When we sacrifice something we enjoy, we open space in our lives for God to enter.  Each time we reach for that cookie, or the remote, or whatever it is we have decided to sacrifice, we are reminded of God’s presence.  Think of that object of sacrifice as a little post-it-note reminding you to say hello to God, reminding you to meditate on Christ’s suffering and glory.  Sacrificing is difficult, but it turns us toward our maker, the One who gives us strength when we are weak and forgiveness when we are even weaker. 

Lent is not about how much you can punish yourself.  Lent is about finding a way to open yourself to the One who created you and who sacrifices his own identity for you.   Lent is about drawing near to God’s presence.  Sacrifice reveals to us our own weaknesses and the strength of our desires for things that are not essential, maybe even not good for us.  When we are reminded of our own weakness, we turn to God, for help and for mercy.

This last week, Chuck and I have been spending a lot of time with a young couple whose twins were born nearly three months early.  We’ve also spent a lot of time with families planning their matriarchs and patriarch’s funerals.  In both these cases-at the fragile beginning of life and the quiet end-these families were turned to God, seeking comfort, healing, and understanding. 

For these families, sacrifice is not an abstract concept, but a very concrete one.  They know that when their security is taken from them, turning to God can bring meaning and comfort. 

In a similar, but much smaller way, our sacrifices help us to cling to God.  For as our psalmist reminds us today:

As a father cares for his children, *
so does the LORD care for those who fear him.
For he himself knows whereof we are made; *
he remembers that we are but dust.
Our days are like the grass; *
we flourish like a flower of the field;
When the wind goes over it, it is gone, *
and its place shall know it no more.
But the merciful goodness of the LORD endures for ever on those who fear him, *
and his righteousness on children’s children.

God loves us and desires relationship with us.  This Lent we are invited to enter more deeply into that relationship.

Amen

 

 

 

 

 

Epiphany 6, Year C, 2007

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

Jesus has been hanging out around Richmond, doing some miracles, recruiting followers and attracting a lot of attention. The religious leaders in town are not pleased.  Big shot representatives from St. James’s Episcopal, First Baptist, Centenary United Methodist and other “important” churches have sought him out to ask him challenging questions and to publicly dispute Jesus’ claims about himself.  But these big shots are not the only ones who have heard of Jesus.  Other people, less important people, have been healed and they are calling their friends and family members all over Virginia. 

So, after awhile Jesus escapes to Afton Mountain, where he can take a breather and regroup from all the attention that has been given him.  He gathers himself, and then comes down to Greenwood to teach his disciples.  When he gets down here, he realizes that huge crowds have gathered.  These aren’t the same stentorian religious leaders that challenged him so decorously in Richmond.  This is a ragtag group from all over the state.  People have packed up meals for several days and walked from Tidewater, from Alexandria, from south Boston, even from Wise.  Hearing stories of healing, they come seeking an encounter with the living God, hoping to see a miracle or be healed themselves. 

In this crowd are the unemployed, meth addicts, migrant workers, high school dropouts, the terminally ill, the elderly, children skipping school, widows, and of course, the curious.  This is not a group you would want to bring home to your mother.  You’re in the group, too.  But, you never went to college or got the job you had now.  You never fell in love, got married and had children.  You’re pretty lonely and you’re definitely broke.  You look around at the people surrounding you and you start to laugh because they are so pitiful.  You’re pitiful.  Finally, Jesus arrives and when he starts speaking, the hairs on the back of you neck rise. 

Your whole life you have been led to believe that the blessed are those who have a steady income, and family that loves them.  You believed that the blessed are those in power, who drive fancy cars.  You believe that the blessed are those who never shed a tear and cruise along in life without any challenges.

Imagine your surprise you over hear Jesus say the following sentences to his disciples.

Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
Blessed are you who are hungry now,
for you will be filled.

Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.

Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.

These words of Jesus pierce your heart.  He is calling you blessed, your life blessed. 

Your whole life you have been told that you aren’t worth anything, because you’ve never achieved anything the world considers valuable.  Yet this holy man, who has the power to heal, the power to do miracles is choosing to call you blessed. Jesus is saying that you are loved by God, favored by God. 

Next, Jesus’ words get even stranger. 

He says,

But woe to you who are rich,
for you have received your consolation.

Woe to you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.

Woe to you who are laughing now,
for you will mourn and weep.

Woe to you when all speak well of you,
for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.

Jesus is flipping everything your culture believes on its ear.  You can hear the murmurs in the crowd, especially from the folks who have a little money.  They don’t really like what they are hearing.

You on the other hand, are too busy having your mind blown to murmur.  Your whole concept of who God is and what God is like and what the kingdom of God will be like is being turned topsy turvy.  You start to understand that just because your church or your society says something about God or about you, does not mean it is true.  You start to understand that God’s values are about relationship rather than acquisition.  You start to understand all the great stuff rich people have, rather than being a reward from God, can actually function as a block between people and God. 

You watch some of these rich folks as they realize the cost of following Jesus.  Some of them are up for the challenge.  They know that a relationship with God is such an incredible, unique experience that in perspective, money and possessions aren’t that big a deal.  You can tell other folks are really weighing their options.  It is not easy to create a life that is rich of wonderful experiences and possessions.  That kind of a life takes years of effort, hard work, and sacrifices.  Following Jesus has no guarantees of earthly pleasure or reward.  A third group of rich people do not need any time to think.  They walk away, convinced Jesus is a nut.

They don’t quite understand, like you do, this blessedness that Jesus describes is the deepest kind of well-being that exists.  Blessedness is a kind of well being that no material object can match.  Blessedness is being loved not for what you have acquired or what you have done, but for being exactly who you are.  Blessedness fills the deepest sadnesses of our hearts with joy.  Blessedness is undeserved, unasked for and always surprising.  Blessedness forces us to acknowledge that all the “stuff” of this life is just. . .”stuff”, ephemeral and transitory.  In contrast, blessedness is eternal and real. 

Blessedness turns the world upside down and forces us to look at life an entirely different way.  Blessedness is grace.

As you watch all the different reactions to Jesus, you process what you are seeing and you understand that the real blessedness comes from knowing Jesus better, from being in relationship with God.  So, when Jesus leaves Greenwood, you follow him.  You don’t pack up your things, you don’t say your goodbyes, you just follow him, so your journey of blessedness can begin.

 

Epiphany 3, Year C, 2007

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

Have you been watching the NBC show Heroes?  The premise is this:  All of a sudden, a small percentage of “normal” human beings discover they have superpowers.  The high school cheerleader Claire learns that her body heals instantly after being wounded.  The politician Nathan discovers, much to his chagrin, that he can fly.  The artist Isaac discovers he can paint the future.  Matt, the police officer, can read minds.  The office worker Hiro, can travel through time.  Most interesting, perhaps, is Peter, who can pick up the superpower of whomever he is around.  When he is around Claire, his body can regenerate.  When he’s around Nathan, he can fly, and so on.

The first part of the season has been about each of these characters discovering their superpowers.  Some, like Hiro, are thrilled, and can’t wait to fulfill his superhero duties. Some, like Claire the cheerleader are really scared about being different.  And some, like Nathan, are just angry because they are afraid their superpower will diminish their political or social power.  All of them are confused about why they have been given these powers and for what purpose they should use them.

I suspect over the rest of the series some will use their power for good, some for evil, but ultimately these individual heroes will have to come together as a team to vanquish some as of yet unknown evil.

None of these heroes have the power to defeat much of anything on their own, but together they will make an incredible team.

Does any of this sound familiar?  If you change superpowers to spiritual gifts, you’ve got our reading from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians today!

The church at Corinth, like all churches in Paul’s time, was just a few years old.  People from all walks of life, all different backgrounds found themselves thrown together by their common faith in Christ.  Like any group of people trying to come together in a community, they faced bickering, power plays, and mistrust.  In this part of his letter to them, Paul is trying to convey what it means to be a community rooted in Christ.

No matter how different the members-some were Greek, some were Jewish, some were free and some were slaves-they all had the same standing in Paul’s eyes.  And success as a community was rooted in its members ability to see each other as important equals.

For Paul, any Christian community represents the body of Christ.  We represent Christ, manifest Christ in the world.  Because we are all part of this body, there are no unimportant parts. 

We all have different gifts.  Some of us are great at hospitality.  Others are wonderful listeners.  Some are gifted in financial management.  Some are gifted in prayer.  Some are gifted in leadership.  Some are gifted in teaching. Some are gifted in inspiring speech. 

Some of us know our gifts, and some of us, like the characters in Heroes, need to spend some time discerning what our gifts are and how we can best use them.

Even when we do each know our gifts, none of these gifts are enough on their own.  Paul’s point is, that, like a group of superheroes, each member of the Body of Christ needs the other.  Being a Christian means being a part of a community.  And there are no unimportant parts of the community.

Many Christians, women in particular struggle, with doubt that they have any gifts worth contributing to the Church.  We all have days where we feel more like a hang nail than a heart, more appendix than brain.  But Paul reminds us that every part of the Body of Christ is just as important as any other.

Remember, all Christians are the body of Christ-and that is an amazing, powerful image.  When Christ was on this earth, people followed him around for days just to get a glimpse of that body, or to touch a hand or the hem of his garment.  Christ’s body was incredibly powerful.  It embodied God. 

Together, we can embody Christ to each other and to the community around us. 

Today, as we meet together as a congregation during our annual meeting, we make decisions together about how we want to embody Christ.  Each of us are important both to the ministries of our church and in our decision making as a church body.

We may not be tasked with saving the world, like the characters on Heroes.  But we are tasked to the wonderful privilege of being in community together.  Sometimes that looks like bountiful potlucks, sometimes it looks like worshipping together, and sometimes it looks like the rather unglamorous, but important task of meeting together as a decision making body.

I look forward to seeing you at the annual meeting.

Baptism of our Lord, Year C, 2007

/ Sarah / Leave a comment

I don’t know how many of you are former evangelicals, but I spent most of my later adolescence as a hand clapping, power point watching, profoundly guilt-ridden modern American conservative evangelical.  It was good times. 

Though now I prefer Anglican chant, complicated motets and authentic gospel music, at the time I loved praise music.  My favorite praise song was based on our passage from Isaiah today.

When you pass through the waters, I will be with you.
The wind and the waves shall not over come you.
Do not fear, for I will be with you.

and so on and so forth. 

For a nerve-wracked college student trying to figure out what to do with her life, the comforting idea of God’s omnipresence in difficult times was very reassuring.  In fact, I still love an image of a God who is with us, even in our most difficult experiences. 

In the passage from Isaiah today, God is responding to the people of Judah who have been complaining that God has abandoned them because Jerusalem has been destroyed. He reassures them that, despite appearances, He is, in fact, with them.  And no matter what deep waters or hot fires might try to consume them, God will not leave them.

How poignant then, in our Gospel passage today, to see Jesus joining the throng as they are baptized by John the Baptist.  While in many ways, this scene of Jesus’ baptism is familiar to us, there is one key difference between Luke’s account of the baptism and the account of other Gospel writers.

While the authors of the Gospel of Mark, Matthew and John remember Jesus’ baptism as an individual event, independent from the baptisms of the crowds that gathered to hear John the Baptist, in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus is one of many who are baptized.

But why did Jesus even need to be baptized?  The baptism that John the Baptist performed was a baptism for the remission of sins.  Why in the world would God need to repent of sins?

Imagine with me the setting:  John has set up shop on the banks of a river and hundreds of people of every shape and size are crowded around, waiting eagerly to be baptized.  They enter the water one by one or perhaps as a crowd.  As they are each baptized and washed clean, the water around them gets less clean. The dirt that collected on each person’s feet as they made the long trek to the wilderness, drifts into the water.  The sweat from the heat, joins the dirt.  The sin that has built up over a life time of being human, pollutes the water.

Jesus enters into this murky water, embodying Isaiah’s words.  God is not only figuratively with us when we’re in deep water.  In this case, Jesus actually stands shoulder to shoulder with every sinner who wants to be washed clean.  Jesus does not shy away from the messy, literally dirty parts of these people.  Jesus bathes in them and seeks baptism himself.

Instead of washing himself from sins, in that dark water, maybe Jesus was taking on our sins.  Perhaps he was embodying what he would go on to do his whole life-living as a God completely committed to being human, in all of humanity’s strength and weakness.

We all know that when we experience our baptisms, we become one with Christ.  We change our identity.  We become “marked as Christ’s own forever”.  Perhaps when Jesus was baptized by John in the wilderness, he became marked as our own forever. 

And this is what God blesses.  For just as in all the other Gospel accounts of Jesus’ baptism, a dove from heaven descends, alights upon Jesus and the onlookers hear the words, “You are my Son, the Beloved.  With you I am well pleased.”

At this moment of utter humility-the moment when Jesus enters a body of water to be baptized for the remission of sins, this moment when Jesus is incredibly vulnerable and human-this is when God chooses to make a public declaration of Jesus’ identity as God’s Son. 

Frederick Buechner, the great Presbyterian novelist and autobiographical author knows this aspect of God’s closeness to us well.  The deep waters he waded through were his father’s suicide when he was a child and his daughter’s anorexia when he was an adult.  At the height of her illness, she became so sick she was hospitalized.  Though Buechner was terrified, He writes,

“I have never felt God’s presence more strongly than when my wife and I visited that distant hospital where our daughter was.  Walking down the corridor to the room that had her name taped to the door, I felt that presence surrounding me like air-God in his very stillness, holding his breath, loving her, loving us all, the only way he can without destroying us.  One night we went to compline in an Episcopal Cathedral, and in the coolness and near emptiness of that great vaulted place, in the remoteness of the choir’s voices chanting plainsong, in the grayness of the stone, I felt it again-the passionate restraint and hush of God.”

Buechner sensed Jesus standing shoulder to shoulder with him.  Buechner knew God was in the deep water with him and would not abandon him.

So, it turns out that the words to that praise song I sang as an adolescent are as true now as they were a decade ago.  God will be with us when we pass through deep water.  God will be with us when we walk through fire.  Our God really is Emmanuel-God with us.  Thanks be to God.