In the End Is Our Beginning

A sermon for Advent 1, preached at St. Thomas' Episcopal, Monroe, La., 29 Nov. 2015.

In a cartoon circulating on the Internet, a man and a woman walk along a city street. The woman is speaking. “My desire to be well-informed,” she says, “is currently at odds with my desire to remain sane.”

If you cannot identify with that sentiment this morning, I would seriously have to wonder where you have been and how you have been spending your time.. such that you could be so out of touch with what is happening in the world today.

Another item making the rounds online last week was a short bit of poetry, author unknown. It went like this: 

The Physician’s hands gently touch the earth: Where does it hurt?

Everywhere
Everywhere
Everywhere 

That one puts a lump in my throat every time I see it. Indeed, our world hurts. Everywhere.

Today we stand poised once again in the doorway between an end and a beginning. Last Sunday, we ended the church year celebrating Christ the King. 

Jesus shall reign where’er the sun doth its successive journeys run;
his kingdom stretch from shore to shore, til moons shall wax and wane no more.  
(Watts; BCP, p. 544) 

And now here we are, just 7 short days later, standing on the brink of apocalypse. 

Jesus tells us through St. Luke (21:25-36, NRSV), that, indeed, not only the moon, but the sun and the stars will seem to have gone haywire. And it will be a terrifying sight. We will faint from fear.

I don’t know what the sun, moon and stars going haywire might look like. Perhaps that is Jesus’ way of saying, “the universe will feel topsy-turvy.”

But we do know what “distress among nations” looks like. It is our everyday reality—at least if we are paying any attention at all!

And it does feel as if the entire universe has lost it’s bearing. We have so little power in the face of humankind run amok. We cannot control the behavior of others, neither individuals nor nations.

Fear is a natural response to lack of control over forces that threaten our world and our worldview. Fear might cause us to faint. But fear also causes us to become indistinguishable from the forces that threaten us in the first place.

Thursday morning I drove to Baton Rouge to spend Thanksgiving with my son and his bride. And what a wonderful time it was! What could be more fun—and more holy—than being the honored guest as newlyweds initiate their first family holiday tradition!

 We prayed together, feasted together and played together. And the world seemed at peace. And it was easy to have faith in a bright future. I hope and pray your Thanksgiving was equally restorative.

But late in the evening, I went to my computer as usual to catch up with online friends and the news of the day. And there among the Thanksgiving greetings from friends all around the world, many of whom do not celebrate this very U.S. American holiday but know that I do…

There among the blessings was a news story that chilled my soul. In Irving, Texas, Muslim worshipers emerged from afternoon prayers to be greeted by protesters carrying rifles and shotguns.

This is what happens when humans assume they know the mind of God and seek to take the vengeance of the Lord into their own hands!

Today’s lessons offer us alternative responses to our fear and perceived threats to our existence. They ask us to take a longer view, and to give ourselves over to a power greater than ourselves.

They draw our attention to the fact that at this moment, even as we prepare to celebrate the coming of Jesus the Christ as a babe in a manger, we must look forward to his coming again in glory and power. And that in this in-between time, we are his light and his love in the world.

We interpret the prophet Jeremiah’s reference to a righteous Branch [springing] up for David (33:14-16, NRSV) to be about the very coming of God into the world in the form of the baby Jesus. But even as we read it that way, we also know that peace has not yet come to Jerusalem. That justice and righteousness do not yet rule the land.

Again through the words of Luke, Jesus the Righteous Branch instructs us in how to conduct ourselves in this time of waiting. Stand up and raise your head, he says. …Be alert at all times. 

What a far cry that is from ‘hunker down and cover your head.’ Know what is happening in the world around you, even if it threatens your sanity! But that does not mean be so distracted by it that we forget who we are—and whose we are—and react in kind.

In Fredericksburg, Virginia, three-quarters of the way across the country from Irving, Texas, an Islamic Center applied for a permit to build a new, larger mosque nearby. This faith community has occupied the same spot without incident for 15 years. Like its Christian neighbors, it supports the local homeless center, has potluck meals and conducts events for the neighborhood, like “farm fun day” featuring horse rides and a petting zoo.

But the public hearing to present their proposal turned ugly. Citizens with legitimate concerns about traffic were drowned out by raw, anti-Muslim rhetoric. The senior pastor of St. Mary’s Catholic Church attended the meeting intending to “speak toward peace,” but gave up. “It’s really wrong to paint with such a broad brush,” he said. But the crowd wasn’t ready to hear his message of peace.

The Way Is through Light and Shadow, by Bette J. Kauffman

How often the fear that leads to faintness of heart goes hand in hand with acts designed to induce terror in the hearts of those we perceive as the threat. How sad when fear turns us against our very neighbor, such that the sheriff must shut down a civic meeting to prevent violence. 

To you, O LORD, I lift up my soul; my God, I put my trust in you, prays the psalmist (25:1, NRSV), who then reminds us that God is our salvation. Not national power, not the guns we carry, not legal protection of our hate-filled behavior—but God alone is our salvation and worthy of our trust.

The psalmist also asks for teaching and guidance in the way of the Lord, then in verse 9 tells us what that means: All the paths of the LORD are love and faithfulness. 

In his first letter to the Thessalonians (3:9-13, NRSV), Paul gives thanks for that new community of faith and prays for them. Today, I make Paul’s prayer our prayer: That we may increase and abound in love for one another and for all as we look forward to the coming of Christ—both as babe in the manager, a beginning, and at the end of all time with all the saints.

AMEN.

Let My Ego Go

St. Luke's Episcopal Chapel, Grambling, La., 27 Sept. 2015

One day in heaven, St. Peter is standing at the pearly gates doing his usual thorough job of checking IDs and deciding who gets in and who doesn't. 

Along comes Jesus, who watches for a minute then says, “Hey, Peter, how’s it goin’, man?”
“Well,” says St. Peter, “I have a complaint. You know, Lord, I’m scrupulous about my job here.  I interview each soul arriving at the Gate of Heaven, and I check to see if his or her name is written in the Book of Life.  I turn away the people not worthy to enter heaven, but a little while later I turn around and I see those very people wandering around on the inside!  I don’t get it! What’s going on?”

Jesus chuckles and say, “Yeah, well, that’s my mother for you! Those people you turn away? She’s letting them in through the back door.” 

In today’s Gospel lesson (Mark 9:38-50, NRSV), Jesus’ disciples are ego-tripping. This is actually not an unusual occurrence. We get to see the Chosen Twelve ego-tripping with some regularity, like when they argue about who is the greatest while Jesus is trying to teach them about being servant of all.

Today’s ego-tripping has to do with insiders vs. outside. They—the Twelve—are, after all, the ultimate insiders. They travel with Jesus. They hang on his every word—even when they totally don’t get it—which is also with great regularity.

And so they are upset when they see someone else acting like an insider. They see someone casting out demons in Jesus’ name, and they try to stop him. He was not following us, St. John says, and you can hear the petulance in his voice.

And Jesus says, in no uncertain terms, ‘Get over it guys. Back off! The cause of Christ is what matters, and whoever does it, whoever gives a cup of water in my name, is on my side.’

Indeed, Jesus is sufficiently disturbed by their ego-tripping that he sets a tone of danger in what he says next. Do not be a stumbling block, he says.

Do not let your pride get in the way of anyone else’s soul journey, he says, or you really will wish you were dead. Sounds a lot like Proverbs 16:18, which we popularize as “Pride goeth before a fall.” Jesus cited the Hebrew Scriptures a lot!

This form of ego-tripping is epidemic in our hyper-partisan national politics today. It is exactly what leads to stalemate in government. It leads people in power and those who support them.. to reject ideas and refuse to negotiate on the basis of which party is behind those ideas at a given moment in time.

We are all too quick to turn political leanings, like “liberal” or “conservative” into missiles we fire at one another, without pausing to hear what each other has to say on real issues that concern everyone. We really don’t want to consider the possibility that both—or all—points of view are essential to finding the best path through thorny problems, like how to create an economic system that works for everyone.

Wherever matters of identity and points of view divide people from each other and become stumbling blocks to working together for the common good, ego-tripping is involved—even when it involves religious people like ourselves.

A couple of years ago, Bishop Jake appointed me to head the Diocese’s Dismantling Racism Commission. About a year ago, as part of that work, I began traveling to St. Joseph, Louisiana, about once a month to do some community organizing, using the methodology of the Industrial Areas Foundation, which I learned via my long-time involvement with Northern & Central Louisiana Interfaith.

St. Joseph, Louisiana, is a deeply divided community along several lines. Probably the greatest of these is race, but in that area, race is deeply intertwined with socio-economic status and geography. To put it quite simply, the town is made up primarily of poor and working class black folks, whereas nearby Lake Bruin is surrounded by middle to upper class white folks.

Ironically, one thing that motivates these very different groups of people to consider trying to come together is that the lovely, middle class white churches are all located in the poor, black town of St. Joseph. So… Sunday morning is the most integrated time in St. Joseph.

Of course, the black folks and the white folks aren’t INSIDE the same churches. But they are all in town… all sharing the same pot-holed streets, run-down and boarded up buildings, and derelict water system.

Let me assure you, this is exhilarating but exhausting and frustrating work! At this point, we have formed an organization we call Tensas Faith Community, and we have two white churches and two black churches involved.

At times, we are in perfect harmony. At others, we struggle with fear, distrust, and, yes, ego-tripping. People are always free to come and go, stay or leave as they choose, but…. it becomes really tempting to draw lines in the sand.

“What do we stand for?” someone wants to know. “We need to put it into writing, so I can decide if I’m in or out!” Or, “if we get involved with that, I’m outta here,” someone says, before we’ve even discussed and heard each others’ points of view about what getting involved with that means.

I believe that human ego is the biggest of the stumbling blocks to our own faith journey, and the biggest stumbling block we throw in the way of others’ faith journey. I believe Jesus is telling us in the story, “Let your ego go.”

I don’t know what divides the community of Grambling, Louisiana, but I’ll bet something does. And I’ll bet human ego is part and parcel of it. And whatever it is, Jesus wants us—St. Luke’s in Grambling—to be in the business of dismantling it.

Black and white South Africans hold hands at a rally celebrating Nelson Mandela's release in 1990.

We Episcopalians inherent a long tradition of being the establishment church. From the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. to St. Thomas’ in Philadelphia—the first ever black Episcopal Church in the U.S.—Episcopal Churches have been the spiritual home of the Middle Class and on up. We have produced presidents and politicians at every level, academics galore, and religious leaders who have left their mark on all of Christendom.

But we have not always been the best at what Pope Francis is demonstrating as we speak--namely standing in solidarity with "the little ones" and "the least of these."

We're good at charity. We are generous with our dollars. But I'm talking about something else. I'm talking about seeking to see the world from another's point of view, and suspending ego and judgment long enough to give relationship a change. I'm talking about being in relationship across the lines that divide. 

AMEN

   

True Religion

St. Luke's Episcopal Chapel, Grambling, La., 30 August 2015

“Get your cooties away from me!” Or, “Don’t touch me, you have cooties!”

It was ugly. It was mean. But when I was a kid, it was what kids said to other kids with whom they did not want to associate. “Cooties” was the imaginary scourge one group of kids projected onto those whom they looked down upon.

I was at times the target because my family was poor. But, I am sorry to say, I also spoke those words to or about kids I perceived as lower on the socio-economic totem pole than I.

I don’t know what label was used in your elementary school to establish hierarchies of social value, but I bet there was one. We humans seem to be pretty thoroughly afflicted with the desire to see ourselves as better than some other category of human.

Another example of this was accurately and heart-rendingly portrayed in the movie Mississippi Burning. It is a story difficult to tell because it uses language no longer used in polite company. So bear with me as I tell it anyway!

The teller of the story in the movie is the adult son of a poor white farmer, who scratched out a meager existence on a farm next to a poor black farmer. Then the poor black farmer managed to buy a mule, which gave him an edge: the possibility of renting more land.

This made the poor white farmer the butt of his friends’ jokes and teasing. How could it be that the poor black farmer was outdoing the poor white farmer?

So… next thing you know, the mule is dead. Poisoned.

And not long after that, the poor black farmer just disappears. Probably packed up and moved north, the adult son of the poor white farmer speculates. And it was at the moment of driving past the abandoned farmstead, that he as a boy had looked at his father and known exactly what had happened to that mule.

And, he says, his father knew that he knew. At that moment in the movie, he quotes his father saying, "If you ain't better than a nigger, son, who are you better than?"

The drive to see oneself as “better than” some other category of people causes untold damage in this world. It is at the heart of many wars—the U.S. American Civil War and World War II being chief among them.

By the way, I am well aware that some apologists claim the U.S. American Civil War was not about that, but the Articles of Secession and the Constitution of the Confederacy say otherwise.

And the central strategy for construing ones’ own human category as “better than” some other human category is to define and label those people as in some way a defective, contaminating presence.

All forms of religious violence—from the hate speech of Westboro Baptist to the murders of ISIS—are based on an obsession with destroying people defined as sinners and infidels. Tragically, this violence is done either to please or to appease God, even though we have plenty of evidence that is not how God thinks.

Those are extreme examples. We do this in less extreme but always hurtful ways. Our church recently decided at national convention that all baptized Christians are equally entitled to all of the sacraments of the church, including the sacrament of marriage and regardless of sexual orientation.

And some see that as a contamination of the church and have left. Indeed, the evolution of the Episcopal Church’s changing stance on human sexuality is a story of individual people, congregations and even entire dioceses fleeing the contaminating presence of those they believe to be morally inferior.

When we divide poor people into categories of “deserving” and “undeserving,” we are doing the same thing. And when we are fine with “doing charity” of some kind, but don’t really want poor people showing up in our churches, we are doing the same thing.

Charity is a really good way to keep poor people at arm’s length because it is almost always done at some other location: the homeless shelter, the food bank, and so forth.

In his book, “People of the Way,” Dwight Zscheile tells the rather elitist history of the Episcopal Church in the U.S. We once were the “establishment” church. This history lingers in a certain Episcopal snobbery, perfectly summed up by the man who said, “Everyone in this community who should be an Episcopalian is already an Episcopalian.”

That man was a member of a small and possibly dying Episcopal congregation in a small Louisiana community with plenty of unchurched folks who were poorer than he or of a different racial or ethnic identity than he.

Human efforts to keep our own particular brand of religion pure are always focused on others, on who to keep out, or at least who to not invite in. And that is not how God thinks.

It IS how the world thinks. It IS a rather natural human tendency. But it is not how God thinks.

In today’s lessons, both St. James (1:17-27, NRSV) and Jesus (Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23, NRSV) speak of the phenomenon of people who talk good religion but do not live good religion. I especially appreciate James’ mirror analogy: For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves, and, on going away, immediately forget what they are like.

I wonder if the problem is not more basic. I wonder if we ever see ourselves as we really are in the first place! If we in fact see ourselves honestly, then how is it we keep looking for defilement in other people?

Jesus makes it clear we are looking in the wrong place. Defilement cannot come from without, he says. It comes from within, from our own human heart.

Consider the ultimate consequence of what Jesus says here. If we see defilement or contamination in some person or situation, it is because we brought it to that person or that situation. It’s coming from us, not from them! 

Brothers and sisters, in today’s collect we ask God to graft in our hearts the love of your Name and increase in us true religion. My additional prayer is for us to understand that true religion can increase in us ONLY by the transformation of our hearts by the God who is Love. May we give up the false religion of trying to figure out who we are better than, for the true religion of seeing us all as equally limited, imperfect and beloved children of God.                                                                          AMEN
  

Come and See

Grace Episcopal Church, Monroe, La.

Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Come and see!

 

Nathaniel is the questioner; Philip is the answerer. Or so it was 2000+ years ago on a dusty road to Galilee!

 

Which are you at this moment in time and in this place? Nathaniel? Or Philip? I ask because I can see and hear myself in both of these guys.

 

I ask because, as I read the Gospels, over and over I see myself, and all of us, in the disciples—both when they are getting it, and when they are missing the point entirely.

 

This morning I would rather be Philip, the one pointing the way to the Good News of Jesus the Christ. Come and see!

 

Isn’t that our primary job as Christians?

 

But I am perfectly clear that sometimes I am Nathaniel, allowing my prejudices or my hurt feelings or my disapproval of… whatever, to blind me to the redeeming grace of God. Can anything good come of that?

We all have Nazareths in our lives. Our Nazareth might indeed be a place—a small, poor town that, like Nazareth in Jesus’ time, suffers from ill repute. It might be a part of a town. I have heard the south side of Monroe referred to in that very tone of voice.

In this era of polarized politics, it might be a political party or a specific candidate for public office, one with whom we radically disagree on important matters. If he or she is elected, we think, no good will come of that!

It might be a policy decision, or a personnel decision, or simply a new way of doing things that challenges our own sense of order, our own sense of rightness and wrongness, our resistance to change, our blindness to our own privilege. Any of those can cause us to think, Well, can any good come of that?

Sadly, we are often so devoted to our own way of seeing the world that our behavior slants toward trying to make sure good does NOT come out of… whatever it is we are upset about.

We’d rather be right than content, or perhaps surprised that something works out better than we thought it would!

My son got married a couple of weeks ago. Leading up to the wedding, various friends offered him advice—as humans have a tendency to do. One male friend said to him, Just remember, Will, you can be right, or you can be happy, but you cant be both! He was joking, of course!

Remember Jonah, the pouting prophet? God saves Ninevah in response to Jonah’s own preaching, and Jonah goes off to sit under a bush and pout.

My point is that God redeems things. God is in the redemption business. Whatever good comes of anything, it is because God redeems things.

Our human efforts, even our most well-intended, morally right and good efforts, are by definition limited, partial, imperfect, broken human efforts. 

But those human efforts produce good because God redeems them, and perfects them, and magnifies them.

When we have the courage and wherewithal to set aside our prejudices and hurt feelings and pride and desire to be right, and to say, Come and see… God can and does use that to produce good in the world.

Sometimes, to our chagrin, God produces good out of the very thing we were so certain could never produce good.

Recent decisions by our courts and our church to broaden the definition of marriage and to change the marriage rite have some folka celebrating, and other folks mourning.

And both groups came prayerfully and thoughtfully to their conviction of the rightness of their cause! That's what puzzles me. I find myself asking, Why would God lead people to exactly opposite convictions about the rightness or wrongness of a thing? What good could ever come of that?

Let me hasten to explain that, in fact, my first question is unanswerable and the wrong question. We humans are obsessed with “why.” WE want reasons. It is not at all clear to me that God gives a hoot about “reasons.”

I certainly do not share the notion we hear so often when something bad happens that “God has a reason” and if you’ll just have faith, and smile through the pain and tears, one day you will realize that God had a plan all along, and on and on...

Let me say again, I believe God is in the redemption business, not the reason business. Stuff happens, God redeems it.

And good has come of sharp, painful differences among us. If you look at the history of the church, we have been through some humdingers! Did you know that a few hundred years ago, blood was shed, people were killed, over how the church was to set the date for Easter?!

When sharp, painful disagreements arise among use, we must discuss and debate and argue and negotiate and compromise and contend with each other… and love each other and choose to stay together through the pain and disagreement.

And we become bigger, our hearts and minds expand, our love grows stronger, we let go of being right.. in favor of being together. And maybe that’s the shape of God’s redemption!

God’s redemption rarely looks like we think it should! Surely the scandal of Messiah on a cross is the most powerful lesson of all that God’s redemption never looks like we expect it to!

A few years ago, I was on my knees one night over in the chapel at St. Thomas’ praying fervently for something I wanted. I thought I would die if I didn’t get it. It just seemed so right, or ordained, that it should come to be.

Suddenly I experienced a “thought” I’m pretty sure was from God. Now I am not a person who gets messages direct from God! But at that moment a thought appeared in my head in a most powerful way. And the thought was, It’s up to you.

I rocked back on my heels. Holy smokes! What does that mean?

Suddenly, my prayer seemed totally selfish. Oh, my, if it really is up to me, if God really will give me whatever I ask for, is that really the thing I want most in the world?

And I realized I didn’t want the responsibility, if you will, of taking God up on an offer to give me what I wanted! It was a lesson in, Be careful what you pray for!

And so another understanding of that message from God came to me and has been with me ever since. It’s this: God is saying, My work in this world is up to you. I need you to be my body in the world, my mercy, my peace, my reconciling love. Come and see. Go and do. And I will redeem your feeble efforts!        AMEN

 

Dancing in the Eye of the Hurricane

St. James Episcopal Church, Alexandria

Late last week, I was listening to American Roots on public radio and heard a song called “The Eye” by Brandi Carlile. The key lyric in that song is, “You can dance in a hurricane, but only if you’re standing in the eye.”

Striking imagery. And my immediate response was, “The title of my memoir—when I get around to writing it—will be ‘Dancing in the Eye of the Hurricane.’”

Maybe 24 hours later I sat down at the computer to look at the propers for today. And that’s when I realized that today is the one day in the church year devoted to a point of theology—perhaps our most important but most challenging point of theology—the Trinity.

Brothers and sisters, I don’t know if that memoir will ever be written. But today’s Trinity Sunday sermon is entitled “Dancing in the Eye of The Hurricane.”

Because that’s how I experience the Triune God and God’s call and claim on my life.

Now, you are not about to hear some clever theological explanation of how the Trinity is like a hurricane. Rather, like every other sermon I have preached, this one comes from my life, from what happened this week, from how I encountered God in the world yesterday, this month, 10 years ago. 

God comes to us disguised as our life, writer Paula D’Arcy said. And that quote is now available as a poster, on a t-shirt, printed on.. whatever.

It resonates. God comes to us disguised as our life. 

And life is a lot like a hurricane. Sometimes we dance along happily and competently in the relative calm of the eye. And then we miss a step or the roiling turmoil around us lurches in an unexpected direction, and we are bouncing off the walls. It takes time to get back into that eye where we can dance again, and only in retrospect can we see that God was in it… and we in God... the whole time.

Many times getting bludgeoned by the winds of the hurricane is exactly how we encounter God’s call and claim on us in a way we cannot ignore.

For me, God’s call and claim on my life began long before I encountered the Episcopal Church, long before I knew of such a thing as being a deacon.

I was first called to teaching. And that call came by way of the really messy business of a marriage ending badly. After careening about for a time wondering where in heaven’s name that had come from, I was left with the task of reinventing myself.

I went back to school to get a Bachelor’s degree, got to be a teaching assistant while still an undergraduate, taught my first class the summer after I graduated, went straight to graduate school, began teaching full time in the fall of 1990… and have been at it ever since.

And it is a calling. Teaching matters. It changes things. Here’s a story: A number of years ago, my brother was living on the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean. He took tourists on sail boat snorkeling tours to the underwater national park near there.

One day a tourist on his boat noted his last name and said something like, Oh, I had a teacher at Penn State with that last name. To which my brother replied, Small world. My sister used to teach at Penn State. 

The tourist—a woman whose name to this day I do not know—then told my brother that my teaching had changed her life. She related a discussion I had conducted in class some 10+ years earlier to my brother.. in sufficient detail that I recognized the exact lesson she was talking about.

It had been a media criticism class and we had critiqued an example from an ad campaign that used controversial depictions of race and race relations to sell clothes. 

And that discussion, the woman on my brother’s boat told him, changed forever how I perceive and understand race in our society. 

And that story made it into this sermon today in part because I’m still at it. Still teaching—and learning—about race, that is. I came to Pineville yesterday for a meeting of the Diocesan Anti-Racism Commission that Bishop Jake asked me to head.

Much has happened from there to here. I left Penn State to come to ULM where I still teach. And I thought I had stepped into a time warp in terms of race relations. In my first few months in Monroe, I repeatedly was told racially repulsive jokes featuring the n-word—once on the patio of an Episcopal church—by people who clearly expected me to laugh.

That—and the death of a second spouse that also sent me careening into the walls of the hurricane—led me to get involved in Northern & Central Louisiana Interfaith, a coalition of mostly churches that purposefully cross boundaries of religion, social class, gender and race. The most radical thing we do is form relationships with each other across those historic divides so that we can then work together for the common good.

And it was Interfaith work that called me to the diaconate. Interfaith needed more white, ordained leaders. In other words, I don’t do Interfaith work because I’m a deacon, I am a deacon because I do Interfaith work.

A couple of years after ordination, Bishop Bruce appointed me to be ULM Canterbury chaplain. Two of the young people from my Canterbury group became the first members of the Episcopal Servant Leadership Corps, headquartered in St. Joseph, the poorest community with an Episcopal church in this Diocese.

One of them is currently still in St. Joseph, and is helping me organize for the common good using the Interfaith model to bridge a racial divide rooted in slavery and as deep and wide as it has ever been.

My friends, this is what dancing in the eye of the hurricane looks like for me. I don’t know what dancing in the eye of the hurricane looks like for you, only that you too are called.

 That does not mean you are called to ordained ministry, although you might be. It does not mean you are called to change jobs or careers or move to a new place or reinvent your entire life, although it might mean that.

It does mean that whatever you are doing with this one glorious and precious gift we call life, God is already at work loving and reconciling this world and you, me, all of us are called to be a part of it.

Please do not hear in any of this the tired notion that “God has a plan and if you just pray hard enough and are good enough, God will send signs to tell you whether to take this job or that one, move here or there, sell the farm or not, start that business or not, etc., etc.”

Consider the possibility that God does not care much about those specifics! 

Discernment is the process of prayerful attention to the Holy Spirit’s presence and movement. It’s looking at everything we do, and aren’t doing, and asking, Where is God in this? How does or would this enable me to participate in God’s reconciling love in the world? To serve others? To care for those who must be cared for, and to help those who are able care for themselves and their families, and also participate in God’s reconciling love in the world?

My friends, we come from God, we are in God through the Risen Christ, and God is in us through the power of the Holy Spirit. That's my theology of the Trinity. And when we relinquish our own feeble attempts to control life, when we accept that we cannot, when we forgive life for being exactly what it is and seek only to offer ourselves and our lives to being God’s reconciling presence in the world, ...then we dance in the eye of the hurricane.                                                                                 AMEN

      

And Everyone Else Too

Christ Church, St. Joseph, 4/26/15

Note: This sermon is adapted from a fragment of a story I saw online, but I don’t remember where.

Once upon a time long ago, God had a big, beautiful wall plaque hanging in the heavenly mansion. It was inscribed with words and it was known in heaven as “the Truth plaque” because God had made it clear to everyone that the inscription on the plaque was God’s Truth, with a capital T. 

The plaque hung there for many ages. Each time someone new arrived in heaven, the first stop on the get acquainted tour was God’s Truth plaque. 

Here, the tour angel would say, “Read this. It’s the only thing you need to know to have a wonderful eternity here in heaven. I know, it’s only a few words, but it’s the only rule. It’s God’s Truth.”

And people would nod and smile and say, Got it! 

Then one day a rather rambunctious angel who was still learning to fly and getting used to the size of his wings, got a little out of control, swerved too close and knocked God’s Truth plaque off the wall.

And it fell, and it fell and it fell, finally hitting a rocky outcropping on the top of the highest mountain on earth. It broke and the pieces flew… in opposite directions.

One big chunk of it, with half of the inscription on it, fell into the middle of a village of somewhat quarrelsome people. It landed with a thunk in the town square and everyone ran out of their houses to see what it was. They picked up this big chunk of plaque; it took two of them to do it. Someone else brushed off the stardust and the yet another read the inscription.

You are loved, it said.

Wow, the people said. Surely this is a message from God! How else could such a thing happen? God has sent us a message. God loves us. 

And they were so overjoyed to learn that God loved them that they began to be kind and loving toward each other. They took care of each other. Everyone was everyone else’s neighbor. No one in the village lacked for anything because everyone shared what they had.

 But over time, things began to change. You know how humans are! They tend to forget what are sometimes important details. In this case, they began to forget that what had fallen into the town square was, in fact, a piece of something bigger.

Indeed, it was so beautiful and wonderful in and of itself, it was quite easy to lose sight of the fact that it had once been part of something bigger. Even the jagged, broken edge began to look as if it was meant to be that way!

And so a piece of God’s Truth became ALL of God’s Truth to the people in the village. And the oddest things began to happen! People began to slip back into their quarrelsome ways. Jealousies broke out over whose house God’s Truth fell closest to and over who got to it first, who picked it up, who brushed it off, who interpreted it best, and so on.

So the most powerful people in the village decided they better take charge of it, and they built a huge altar—because they had money—they built a huge altar that reached up to the heavens and they put the fragment of God’s Truth, which had become for them ALL of God’s Truth, on the very top to keep it safe.

You have to wonder why—if they believed it really was God’s Truth—they thought they had to protect it, as if God couldn’t or wouldn’t, but… you know, human beings!

And so things changed in the village again, and in place of loving and caring for each other came arguing over who owned “the truth” and who in the village had earned God’s favor and who was most deserving to be blessed with plenty and who needed to fix their own life so as not to be a burden on the community, and on and on.

And sure enough, eventually other villages in other countries heard about this, and they want a piece of the pie--or plaque, as the case may be--too. Next thing you know, violence and wars are breaking out. The people of the village have come to see themselves as “special people” whom God had chosen to love and bless above all others. And so they were willing to kill in order to preserve their standing and possession of what they had come to think of as ALL of God’s Truth.

But in that village lived a little girl who did not like what was going on. She kept thinking, there’s something wrong with this picture. If we are loved, she thought, then how can we be so unloving? How can we be jealous of each other?

Why do we think we are so special when we are willing for some people to be poor when others have plenty? Who is “we” anyway? And how does being loved by God entitle us to judge others? We didn’t earn this. It fell into our laps!

And wasn’t this message from God a piece of something bigger? Didn’t it have broken edges?

And so she set out and searched far and wide. She traveled the earth looking for another piece of the puzzle. And sure enough, she finally found a chunk of a plaque sticking out of the top of a sand dune. And it looked to her like the same material and the words on it the same style as those on the piece in her home village.

So she picked it up, brushed off the sand, and headed home. And when she got there, she went straight to the high altar, climbed to the top, and put the piece she was carrying next to the piece that was already there.

And sure enough, the broken edges matched! The two fragments fit together perfectly.

And now the plaque reads, “You are loved. So is everyone else.” 

My friends, I probably should just sit down and shut up. I think the point is clear. But… you know we humans.

First, the story is not original with me. I read a fragment online, don’t remember where, and I made it my own with lots of cool details.

Second, it is the best allegory I can come up with at this time to convey the meaning of the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. As our lessons today convey, it’s all about love, unearned, completely gracious, boundless love.

So I leave you with this question: How would our lives, and therefore the world, change if we lived as if we really believe that God loves us, and everyone else too?

AMEN

Transformed by the Risen One?

St. Thomas' Episcopal Church, 4/12/15

Easter 2015, by Bette J. Kauffman

Each year Easter season brings us two lectionary treats. First, we set aside the Old Testament for a few weeks and read from the Acts of the Apostles.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Hebrew scriptures. The poetry of the psalms comforts me, no matter what is going on in my life. The challenging words of the prophets—speaking God’s truth and crying out for justice—compel me to action.

But our annual journey with the Apostles as they grappled with the past—that is, the life, ministry and death of this man, Jesus—and brought into being a new thing under the sun… this is an invaluable opportunity. We read Acts not only to get in touch with our roots as The Church, but also to assess our present.

How do we as The Church today compare with the earliest Christians? Yes, we certainly have a more fully developed institutional church. But are we in the world in the same transformative way?

And transformation is what the second of our Easter season lectionary treats is all about. For our Gospel lessons, we hear again the delightful but powerful stories of the encounters of the apostles and disciples with the resurrected Jesus.

I call these stories “delightful” because the apostles are so thoroughly and wonderfully human. We see ourselves in them and in their reactions.

We today do not know what the resurrected Jesus looked like. All we can know is that he did not look like Jesus the man of Nazareth the apostles and disciples had known so well, had followed, lived with, been taught by, prayed with.

Mary, the first to see the resurrected Jesus at the tomb, did not know him until he said her name. The disciples on the road to Emmaus walked with him all afternoon, but did not know him until he broke the bread over dinner that evening.

And in today’s story, when Jesus the Christ appears through locked doors (John 20:19-31, NRSV), his first words—as in so many of the appearance stories—are to reassure. Peace be with you, he says. They are frightened, as you and I would be if someone we thought was dead suddenly appeared among us.

And then Jesus the Christ goes to some length to prove to them that he is the one they know and love. Look at my hands and feet, he says. It’s me, it’s really me. And in today’s story, we with Thomas are invited to place our hand in the very wounded breast of Jesus the Christ.

Jesus reassures his followers that he is one and the same, Jesus the Son of Man whom they know and love, and who was crucified and laid in a tomb, even as he comes to them transformed—the Risen Christ—a being they scarcely recognize and react to in fear.

What a perfect set up for what comes next! Do you remember what that is? Does Jesus appear to his followers just to comfort them, and reassure them, and make them feel less bad for his suffering and death on the cross?

No. Of course not. He comes to commission them. He comes to them transformed, and he sends them out to transform the world.

As the Father has sent me, so I send you, Jesus says. And then, that wonderful and powerful moment, He breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Miraculously, the apostles and disciples experience the transformed Jesus, the Risen Christ. And by that experience, they are transformed.., and they do what he commissions them to do. They change the world.

But… a couple of caveats. Pentecost is still a way down the road and we know the Holy Spirit comes again with great power and might—so powerfully and mightily and visibly that we call that day the birthday of The Church.

But, importantly, the followers of Jesus are already in the business of transforming the world when that happens. They are already out there, preaching and teaching, healing and baptizing, and the Holy Spirit comes to anoint what they are already doing—having been transformed from frightened, scattered, grief-stricken followers into God's reconciling love in the world, transformed by their encounters with the Risen Christ.

The second caveat is this. Yes, they transformed the world. The world we live in would not exist, the vast expanse of Christianity would not be, had it not been for that band of transformed followers of Jesus the Risen One.

But the world we live in is yet far from the world reconciled to God. The work begun by the transformed ones of so long ago is unfinished. The Kingdom is at hand, but the world we live in remains broken, horribly broken in life-draining ways.

At this point in writing this sermon, my mind was flooded with dozens of ways to illustrate this final and most important point. I’ve chosen just one, a personal one, that brought it home to me—again—in a powerful way.

I have type O-Negative blood. That makes me a universal donor, meaning that virtually any other human who needs it can receive my blood—or plasma or platelets. As a consequence, and in thanksgiving to God for my own good health, I have been a regular donor all of my life.

I’m not looking for accolades here. Just stating some background facts. Since I came to live in Monroe, I have gone to Lifeshare about every two weeks and donated platelets. That is until about a year ago when I began to struggle with keeping my hemoglobin high enough to donate.

Nothing seems to be wrong. It’s age, and the fact that I choose seafood and veggies every time. So, this past Friday I was scheduled to donate platelets, and being concerned that my iron would be too low, I took myself out to Waterfront Grill for dinner Thursday night.. and had me a lovely medium rare filet and steamed broccoli—both foods high in iron.

And… voilá! I passed the hematocrit test and donated platelets for the first time in four weeks.

And then I went home, turned on the computer and… what do I see? All the news about laws now being proposed to make sure the poorer people among us, the ones who make our pizzas, flip our burgers, empty bed pans in our hospitals and nursing homes, scrub floors or serve us in nice restaurants, and do not make a living wage, must less enough to go out for a steak dinner… All the news about laws to make sure they also cannot buy steak—or seafood, which has its own merits in a healthy diet—with their food stamps, our stingy charity.

And, BTW, many of these same people live in what are called “food deserts,” where fresh broccoli is also a luxury. That’s an issue Interfaith and Together Louisiana are taking up in the upcoming legislative session, and you’ll be hearing more about it.

What a contrast to the Christian community described in our lesson from Acts of the Apostles today (4:32-35, NRSV)! It was a community in which everything was shared in common and no one was in need. In fact, judging from current political trends and battles, we as a society abhor the economic system described there.

We not only prefer our own system with its built in inequalities, but we also often resist attempts to bend our system toward a fairer, more equitable outcome. Worst of all, we acquiesce to demeaning and punishing people just for being poor with laws such as the “no steak, no seafood” law.

My friends, have we been transformed by our encounters with the Risen Christ? Or are we far too quick to think the resurrection is all about us and our personal salvation?

Like the apostles, we need reassurance. But if we understand Easter as primarily an evacuation plan for the next life, we have missed the point.

Jesus the Christ calls us to transform the world. Not the next world, this world. Not heaven, which needs no transformation. On earth. May your will be done on earth, Jesus taught us to pray.

My prayer this morning is that our encounters with the Risen One transform us into The Church that transforms the world with the reconciling love of God.

AMEN.