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.

      

Knowing and Being Known

St. Andrew's Episcopal, Mer Rouge, La.

Today’s lessons are about knowing, not knowing.., and being known. We’ll begin with Samuel, if for no other reason than because it is one of my favorite call stories in the Bible. Samuel reminds me so much of us much of the time!

Samuel is, of course, Eli’s helper in the Temple. He goes to bed one night and hears a voice calling his name. He thinks it’s Eli. Eli says, Nope, not me, go back to bed.

And this happens three times. But in the midst of this repetitive and seemingly redundant story of God calling Samuel, and Samuel thinking it’s Eli, we finally get a statement of the obvious: "Samuel did not yet know the Lord..." 

And it takes Eli, the High Priest, being awakened in the night three times to figure out what is going on! One would think the High Priest would be a little more in tune with God and God’s ways of calling people.

How like we humans this is! We do not know God well enough to hear God’s call. Or, we doubt our senses and our sanity, or we second guess ourselves or we are skeptical.., and rightly so.

I have certainly heard people claim that God had called them to do something that I don’t believe for a moment God would ever call anyone to do. I once was trying to counsel a woman who kept getting fired from jobs for passing out religious tracts while on the job, and she insisted that God was calling her to do it.

Human knowing is always imperfect. However wonderfully we are made, however great our capacity to use science or intuition or whatever to understand humankind and our world, there’s always more to know.., and that’s in part because the universe is dynamic. It constantly changes.

But at our smartest and wisest and best, we cannot and will never fully know God! Indeed, the erroneous belief of some people of all faiths—Jews, Muslims, Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, Buddhists & Hindus—that they have God all figured out… has caused some of the greatest violence and grief and misery humankind has ever known.

I believe it was Fr. Richard Rohr, Franciscan and Roman Catholic priest, who said, “The moment you become certain you know the mind of God is the moment you’re no longer dealing with God.”

On the other hand, God does know us. And we get a glimpse of that in today’s Gospel story. Phillip brings Nathaniel to Jesus, and Jesus welcomes him with a most unusual greeting. Aw, he says, an Israelite in whom there is no deceit!

Nathaniel asks, Where did you get to know me? And Jesus answers, I saw you under the fig tree before Phillip called you. 

Here is where our understanding of scripture is limited by lack of knowledge of other faiths. In Judaism, being “under the fig tree” means “studying Torah."

Now remember that when Phillip first goes to Nathaniel, he is skeptical. Can anything good come out of Nazareth, he asks. But he comes anyway, and he meets in person the one who already knows him, and whom he is prepared to meet because he has spent time studying Torah. Studying Scripture should open your mind, not close it.

In other words, Jesus basically says, ‘We’ve already met. We met in Torah. I’m the one you’ve been reading about in Holy Scripture.’ And Nathaniel recognizes him and declares his faith: You are the Son of God! 

God knows us, and knows us well enough to find us, to call us in a way that we can hear—if not the first time, then the second or third. It’s okay to question. It’s fine to be skeptical. But trust that God knows us and will use Holy Scripture, other people, whatever.. to find us and call us.

So… I wonder how it feels to you, to each of us this morning, to contemplate being known by God. Can we wrap our minds around that? Can our soul bear it? Is it the best news ever? Or does it strike fear in our hearts?

I’m guessing some of all that. And isn’t “all that” what we heard in today’s Psalm? 

Lord, you have searched me out and known me,
   you know my sitting down and my rising up;
   you discern my thoughts from afar. 

The Psalmist acknowledges that God knows us. But by verse four, the response to seems a little stressed out! 

You press upon me behind and before
and lay your hand upon me. 

Another translation uses the phrase “hemmed in,” not at all a comfortable feeling. And I am immediately reminded of fights in bars and movies that begin with, “Get your hands off me!”

In other words, knowing that God knows us, deeply and truly, each one as we are, is not entirely comfortable.

On the one hand, humans long to be known and understood, not only by God but by other humans. On the other hand, being known too well strikes a bit of fear into our hearts.

We are deeply flawed creatures. We would love to be known for that which we are proud of, for those aspects of ourselves we find acceptable, lovable, attractive. We do not want others to know our flaws and shortcomings. We would hide them from each other, and perhaps even more so from God!

Moreover, who among us has not been deeply wounded by another human who used his or her knowledge of us to hurt us? Who among us has not been wounded by revealing ourselves, making ourselves vulnerable to another human, only to be betrayed by that trust?

But the Psalmist takes us in another direction. God’s knowing is deeply and perfectly loving. God is with us in heaven and in the grave, in air and sea. God’s hand leads us and holds us fast. 

And then the most loving imagery of all: 

For you yourself created my inmost parts;
     you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
Your eyes beheld my limbs, yet unfinished in the womb;
     all of them were written in your book. 

God’s beloved. That is who we are. That’s what it means to be known by God. And what can we do in response? Just two things: Love god back, and our neighbors—all of them—as ourselves. Everything else follows.                     

AMEN

Incarnation

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Mer Rouge, Dec. 28, 2014 

So... there we were, just 3 days ago, kneeling beside a manger gazing in wonder at a newborn babe. He cries from time to time, as newborns do, to signal that he is hungry and needs a diaper change.

He looks so very human, lying there tiny and helpless, wrapped in bands of cloth. Our hearts melt. The least maternal among us cannot resist offering a finger for a tiny hand to grasp. It takes a cold, hard-hearted human to resist a newborn baby.

But, how do we wrap our minds around what the angels and the shepherds told us—that God has come to dwell among us?

 I think for most of us, most of the time, our belief about who Jesus is and Jesus’ relationship to God, comes “from below.” In other words, we come at it from the human angle. We begin with the babe in a manger, his earthly parents standing protectively near. We understand that.

We understand that the child grows to be a man and takes on responsibility. Jesus the man ministers to poor people and sick people; he associates with tax collectors and sinners. He is tempted; he walks the dusty roads of Galilee and grows weary of the crowds. He is human. He has a special relationship with God, to be sure, but he’s human nevertheless, like us in every respect.

Then along comes the Gospel according to St. John. Every 1^st Sunday after Christmas, we read this poetic and compelling, yet mysterious, prologue to John’s account of Jesus the Christ.

Where, we might be tempted to ask, is the babe? Where is Mary, the blessed mother, Joseph, the faithful father? The shepherds? Indeed, not one human populates this account.. save John the Baptizer!

Here’s a Gospel trivia question for you: Where and how does Jesus the human first appear in the Gospel according to John? In verse 29 of Chapter 1, as a 30-year-old man, when he comes to the river Jordan to be baptized!

The Christmas story is not part of John’s account. John’s Gospel offers us a view of Jesus “from above.” That is, John’s account begins with God, and with the unity of “the Word” with God.

It echoes the creation story, and tells us again that God exists outside of time, and that even light and life itself are from God. And in so doing, it provides us with a healthy reminder of God’s difference from humankind.

In John’s interpretation of Christmas, the babe in the manger is “the Word” that not only was with God, but was God, “the Word” spoken in an act of self-communication. It reminds us that we can know God only as God comes to us in self-revelation. Nothing we can do—not our most noble aspirations or our most dedicated acts of service—can earn or precipitate such an event.

From the prologue to John’s Gospel, we learn first and foremost that in Jesus Christ we meet nothing less than the revelation of God. Christmas is, first of all, the celebration of a gracious decision on God’s part to become human in the baby of Bethlehem.

I myself have often wondered why the author of John chose to tell this story in quite such abstract words and concepts. Why didn’t he just come right out and say, in plain Greek, “Oh, and by the way, Jesus was God!”

I suspect it had to do with the fact that “plain Greek” is no better than “plain English” for talking about such things. How could any human language be up to the challenge of declaring and explaining something so utterly unbelievable, so preposterous, as God becoming human?

Indeed, another lesson we learn from John’s prologue is that God’s revelation in Jesus Christ is just not obvious. The Word came to a world that should have known him. After all, he created it.

In particular, he came to a people who perceived themselves to be chosen from all the peoples of the earth to be God’s own. And they expected a Messiah!

Yet, he was rejected. As John states, He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him.

Jesus was not universally recognized or acclaimed as the revelation of God. The remainder of John’s Gospel relates story after story of how prominent religious people not only did not recognize Jesus, but found him offensive, accused him of blasphemy, and charged him with being demon-possessed.

Jesus just wouldn’t obey the rules and hang out with the right kind of folks! Those who confidently thought they saw things rightly, in fact turned out to be blind.

But of course John the author addresses us as well, and he will not let us off the hook. He confronts us with a divine self-disclosure that does not document itself with foolproof evidence. We are not provided with irrefutable grounds for faith.

Instead, we are asked to believe that a baby in a feeding trough, born to a young woman who was not yet married, a Palestinian peasant who grew up to be an itinerate preacher living in a buffer zone in the Middle East, powerless before a Roman Governor, is the One in whom we meet the Creator of heaven and earth. The fact that the good church people of the day, who should have received him, in fact rejected him, leaves us all the more uneasy.

But rejection is not the whole story. Some did receive Jesus. They trusted and believed in him, and found themselves empowered to become children of God. They just aren’t the company we quite expect to find ourselves in: a couple of fishermen, a tax collector, a Samaritan woman with a checkered past, a beggar born blind, an unnamed Roman official, and ultimately, on Golgatha, a thief and a foot soldier.

What a motley crew! What an unlikely group to become the community called into being and nurtured by the revelation of God in Jesus. Certainly none of us needs to worry about whether we are pious enough or good enough or successful enough to be called into the community of the children of God.

But that in itself tells us much about the character of God and God’s intentions in Jesus. If we accept that God has seen fit to materialize in human flesh and form, then we live in a universe of possibility we can hardly imagine. If God can reconcile with humankind through a helpless babe born to an unwed mother in the lowliest of places, what might God be able to do through us?

Mary and Joseph “Yes” to God and the world was transformed. Each of us has a “Yes” we can say to God. It might seem small, insignificant. Not worth doing. But we’re all called. What is the Christ Child asking you to do to change the corner of the world you live in?  

Amen.

Hanging Out in the Holy Land of Advent

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Mer Rouge, La.                                      

It is easy to rush through Advent. Indeed, our lives at this time of year seem especially geared to push us relentlessly forward at an ever more frantic pace.

I am still finishing up a rather exhausting semester. My days this past week went from early morning to late night in a seemingly endless cycle of grading, meetings, and year-end demands and, yes, early holiday festivities.

It seems that our approach to that other penitential season—Lent—is so different. Easter seems far away as we gather Ash Wednesday to begin weeks of abstaining from something important to us, and commitment to fasting, reflection and alms-giving.

In contrast, the beginning of Advent is a mad dash into planning, shopping, decorating, office receptions and parties with their special foods and beverages, and more. It is a time of year when our society does everything in its power to entice us to over-indulge in every way possible, beginning with Thanksgiving and going all the way to Christmas.

For the past few years, many Christians have been quick to complain of a so-called “attack on Christmas.” I am far more likely to bemoan the attack on Advent! The first Christmas tree I saw this year appeared in Sam’s Club… before Halloween! I was stunned and dismayed.

Today’s lessons—Isaiah’s cry on behalf of the Israelites, John the Baptist’s rough-hewn lifestyle and in-your-face preaching—seem truly misplaced amongst the cheery holiday music, fresh greenery and glittering ornaments that have already filled our lives. Who wants to go into the wilderness when we can hang out here in Christmasland?!

But the wilderness has things to offer that we cannot necessarily find in the hustle and bustle and beauty of Christmasland. Holy things. And these passages give us some clues. This morning I invite you to hang out for a time in the Holy Land of Advent. 

 Let’s begin with the words of Isaiah (Isaiah 40:1-11, NRSV):

Comfort, O comfort my people,

says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

and cry to her

that she has served her term,

that her penalty is paid,

that she has received from the LORD's hand

double for all her sins.

Of course, Western Christians can hardly hear these words without hearing the soaring music of Handel’s Messiah. But the prophet does not allow us to simply rush straight to the triumph of the Allelujah chorus!

First, even as we are comforted, we are reminded that we need comfort due to the magnitude of our sins and the penalty we have paid. We have suffered as a result of our estrangement from God.

Please do not hear that as a theology of retribution. The bad things that happen in our lives are not God’s punishment for our sins. Rather, things go wrong in our lives and we lose sight of God. We try to comfort ourselves with all the wrong things—mood-altering substances like alcohol, extreme busy-ness, spending money, whatever—and the more we do that, the farther away God seems to be. And we suffer.

Second, Isaiah draws attention to the one thing that most reliably causes humankind to suffer, and that is our mortality. We are flowers, beautiful but fragile, for flowers do not last. The wind blows. We wither and die.

I cannot stand here this morning without being reminded that in the past two months (approximately), many of us have gathered here or at Redeemer in Oak Ridge four times to lay to rest members of this community of faith, whose departure left gaping holes, especially in the lives of the Barham and Brodie families, but also in all of our lives.

This world often seems devoid of the comforting presence of God! We often feel forsaken by God! Isaiah reassures us that God is there in the wilderness of our lives. That God patiently waits to speak tenderly to us, to feed us and to gather us and to gently lead us home.

Turning to today’s Gospel lesson (Mark 1:1-8, NRSV), I’m again struck by these opening words:

The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

As it is written in the prophet Isaiah,

"See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you,

who will prepare your way;

the voice of one crying out in the wilderness:

`Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight,'"

With this enigmatic opening, St. Mark connects his main character, Jesus the Christ, with the God of Hebrew Scripture, through his lead character, John the Baptizer.

John the Baptizer hung out in the wilderness, and people went in droves to hear him—in spite of the fact that he bore the bad news of sin and the need for repentance. Indeed, in Matthew’s account, John calls the religious elite of his day a brood of vipers!

So why did the people flock to him? As Mark says, he also bore the good news of another to come, one who would share with us the forgiving waters of baptism, but one who had more—much more—to offer.

The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me, John said. I have baptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

We go into the wilderness to repent, wait and prepare. In today’s epistle (1 Peter 3:8-15a, NRSV), St. Peter tells us how: Patiently, because God’s days are unlike ours and God has been more than patient with us. Keeping awake, for we do not know when God comes again. Living godly lives, doing the things God has called us to do to hasten the kingdom—which we know from Jesus’ teaching means loving God and our neighbor as ourselves.

Dear friends, let us hang out for awhile in the holy land of Advent. For here we find God’s comforting promise of mercy and grace bestowed in the coming of the one for whom we prepare—the one of power and glory who baptizes with the Holy Spirit.

AMEN

Keep Awake

Grace Episcopal Church, Monroe, La.

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down,
     so that the mountains would quake at your presence. (Isaiah 64:1, NRSV)

And so we begin Advent once again. With the prophet Isaiah, we cry out for God to come to our aid. The human longing for God to be with us is as old as the hills and as new as this moment.

And for good reason. Our world seems such a mixed bag.

On the one hand, we have just shared our annual feast of plenty with family and friends. My social media streams were filled with expressions of joy and gratitude, and photographs of gathered clans.

I was personally blessed and renewed by participating in prayers, song and Holy Communion at our first-ever joint Episcopal Thanksgiving Eve service here at Grace. The Kingdom of God was definitely at hand!

But I trust I am not the only one whose Thanksgiving was marred by reminders that the Kingdom of God is also not yet fully here.

Ferguson, Missouri, comes to mind. Much in this world remains in desperate need of God’s justice… and reconciling love. 

O that you would tear open the heavens and come down… 

But our call for and anticipation of Divine Presence is also a bit of a mixed bag. The words of today’s Gospel lesson (Mark 13:24-37, NRSV) are not entirely comforting.

At one and the same time, we long for the peace and unending joy we expect when all the world is finally and fully reconciled to God. Yet we quail at the thought of the suffering that precedes.. and the judgment that comes with.. the Son of Man on clouds at the end of time.

Advent is the ultimate in-between time for an in-between people. By in-between people, I mean those people of God who view the historic birth of a Palestinian babe laid in a manger some 2000 years ago, and a triumphant return of Jesus the Christ at some unknown point in the future.. as bookends of our faith.

In Advent, we prepare to celebrate once again that historic birth. But we do so in part by looking past the birth to the second coming of Christ, with its mixed bag of judgment and triumph.

Advent is a not merely a time of preparation for the joy of Christmas but a penitential season. Here we are in purple this morning!

Advent, the in-between time, should direct our attention to how we—individually and corporately—are spending our in-between time. And I say “should” because the society at large seems to do everything in its power to distract us from doing it!

For the past few years, many Christians have been quick to complain of a so-called “attack on Christmas.” I am far more likely to bemoan the attack on Advent! The first Christmas tree I saw this year appeared in Sam’s Club… before Halloween! I was stunned and dismayed.

My son and I and his fiancé will put up our tree Christmas Eve, between early and midnight masses!

But I am concerned today with far more than when you put up your Christmas Tree. I am concerned with how we spend our in-between time, individually and corporately. I am concerned with how we use Advent as a time of reflection and self-examination.

As many of you know, I teach at ULM. On the very first day of my advanced writing class, I give the students a choice of three topics and require them to sit down at a computer and write 300 words on the spot.

One of their choices is to write their “last speech.” That is, they are to imagine they have been given six months to live, and they are to write the farewell speech they would give to their family, friends and the world.

Quite a few choose this option, and I am usually charmed and even a bit amused at their earnest insistence, in their last speeches, that they have lived well and accomplished much, and that they depart this life with no regrets.

I cannot say the same. It’s not that I have not lived well, for I have. It's not that I fear dying; I don't. It's not that I regret anything more serious than that huge piece of leftover pecan pie I snacked on last night.

It is that every passing day teaches me more about both the breathtaking beauty.. and the utter woundedness.. of this world and everything in it. Every day shows me more that I can and want to do—out of my own imperfect, broken but beloved-of-God humanness—to share God’s love in a hurting world.

One day a few years ago, I went to Waterproof, La., to take pictures and interview for an article for ALIVE! about a ministry of this diocese in that community. It was a medical clinic run by a nurse practitioner with the help of a retired doctor and his wife. And in that community, where so many lack reliable transportation, it was the only medical care readily available to the many who suffer from the diseases of poverty—like diabetes.

Late afternoon, headed home, I passed one of many rundown dwellings on the edge of town. Out front, on the side of the narrow road, an old car had been jacked up and perched on various objects—a cross-section of tree trunk, a couple of cements blocks, and so forth.

 

iPhone Diary: 23 May 2012 (God Play) by Bette J. Kauffman

It looked not at all safe. I wouldn’t have lived in that house or crawled under that car for love nor money. But there was a man, lying on his back on the ground underneath the car, working on it.

I had barely passed that scene when the sky changed dramatically. It had been clouding over and threatening a storm for some time. Now, suddenly, the sun punched holes in the cloud cover and rays of light streamed through, in glorious contrast to the thundercloud backdrop.

Within moments, along a country road near Waterproof, La., I had gone from the heartbreak of human poverty to the glory of God at play. It stopped me dead in my tracks.

As I sat in my car on the side of the road gazing at the sky, one thought flooded my mind: So much to do. Oh, my God, we have so much to do.

My friends, I invite you to a watchful Advent, an Advent of looking for God in everyone and in all that happens, in the breathtaking beauty and the utter woundedness.. of all humankind and the world we live in.

[W]hat I say to you I say to all: Keep awake (Mark 13:37, NRSV). Be not surprised to find God already here.

AMEN

            

Doing Thanks

St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Mer Rouge, La.

I grew up in a distinctly protestant religious tradition—Mennonite, to be exact. And in that tradition, all things liturgical, especially things like crucifixes bearing the tortured body of Christ, were anathema. They emphasized Christ’s death over his resurrection at the least, and were akin to idols at worst.

I have long since laid aside many of those teachings and find great joy in our Episcopal liturgy and its adornments. Yet, I have a special fondness for Christ the King Sunday and its representation of Jesus as king, in kingly robes and crown, superimposed on the cross but clearly alive and triumphant over it.

Today we are combining celebrations of Christ the King and Thanksgiving, which turns out to be quite doable from a preaching standpoint. What better way to celebrate Christ the King than to give thanks!

The lessons we read this morning are for Christ the King Sunday. And reading them afresh with Thanksgiving in mind, I was totally struck by the relationship between the Ezekiel (34:11-16, NRSV) reading and the Matthew (25:31-46, NRSV) reading.             
 
Look again at Ezekiel. What does God promise God’s people in this passage? 

I myself will search for my sheep… I will rescue them… I will gather them and will feed them with good pasture, rich pasture! I myself will be the shepherd, I will seek the lost, bring back the strays, bind up the injured, and strengthen the weak. I, the Lord, have spoken. 

Wow! What more could a sheep of God ask for?! Of course, Ezekiel does put some judgment in the mouth of God, but I will take my chances with the loving and merciful God portrayed throughout Scripture… over the casual cruelty we humans are so capable of in judging each other.

Fast forward to the Gospel lesson. Here Jesus is speaking, and this is more explicitly a judgment scene. Christ the King is on his throne of glory, separating sheep from goats.

Again, to me, that’s good news. I’ll take Jesus, with his impeccable track record of justice, mercy and love, over human meanness, which is often, sadly, carried out in the name of Jesus.

A saying I’ve seen circulate on the Internet goes like this: “Most humans are capable of being mean from time to time under some conditions, but nobody is meaner than the ones being mean for Jesus!” I couldn’t agree more.

But today, in the context of Ezekiel, and glorious thanks giving by Paul for the faith and love of the Ephesians (1:15-23), I see the main point of this passage as Jesus teaching us how to give thanks.

Come you that are blessed, Jesus says, and inherit the kingdom.., for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was a prisoner and you visited me. 

As the passage continues, it becomes clear that the righteous who had done these things did not even realize what they had done. Clearly, they had not done them to earn or merit inheriting the kingdom.

People who do things for a reward would never be surprised to hear that they had earned the reward! Indeed, when we are working for pay, we are likely to keep very close track of what we have done and what we expect to receive in exchange for what we have done.

But the sheep Jesus invites into the kingdom must ask, When did we do these things? And Jesus explains, When you shared the love you have received from me with all of my people. You might not have recognized me, but I was there. That homeless person, that immigrant, that prisoner, that sick person…, that was me you loved, as I have loved you.

You see, the only possible response to accepting God’s loving care of us is to give it away. The only way to be a sheep of God’s rich pasture is to share it with the entire flock! The only way to be part of God’s family is to, well… be part of God’s… entire family…

And in both Ezekiel and Matthew it is eminently clear that we don’t define the boundaries of God’s family! That job belongs to Jesus, thanks be to God.

As a user of social media, I sometimes get roped into various fads that sweep the Internet. A few months ago, one such fad that made the rounds on Facebook was a call to post for seven days straight a list of what you were thankful for each day.

A well-intended exercise, and, indeed, I took my turn when I was tagged by a friend to do so. And doing it did make me think about—and sometimes really have to reflect on—what had happened that day that I could be thankful for.

But listing the things you are thankful for is not exactly what Jesus had in mind! I would even say, spoken prayers of thanksgiving—albeit lovely things and in themselves harmless—are not what Jesus had in mind.

What Jesus had in mind was action. No empty piety here! “Get to work,” is the message.

Notice the verbs Jesus uses throughout: you gave, you welcomed, you took care, you visited, you gave, you gave, you gave.

Not once does he mention what anyone believed! Not once does he mention whom anyone worshiped! Not once does he mention what anyone prayed!

The righteous are those who DO, without realizing what they are doing and without expecting a reward for it. To do anything else is unthinkable to those who understand themselves as God’s beloved and heir’s of God’s kingdom.

Friday afternoon I answered the doorbell to find two young women from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints standing in the carport. They introduced themselves as missionaries; I introduced myself as a deacon in the Episcopal Church.

My job as deacon, I hastened to explain, was to help people in the church find ministries and to aid and support them in being ministers in the world. Their faces brightened. Oh, the confident one said, you mean to be missionaries! 

Sort of, I replied. It depends on how you define missionary. I mean to feed the hungry, care for the sick, welcome the immigrant. 

Whether they understood the distinction or not, I can’t be certain. But you do. Of that I am certain. How will you do thanks, not just today but every day, for God’s love bestowed on you?                                                                                                                                               AMEN