The Miracle

9 Pentecost, Christ Church, St. Joseph

In our Old Testament lesson two weeks ago, a passage a few chapters earlier in 2^nd Samuel, we were painted this delightful picture of King David leaping and dancing before the Lord.

 

The occasion was moving the Ark of the Covenant—the centerpiece of Hebrew worship of the One God—from the house of the Levite Abinidab, where King Saul had parked it to collect dust 20 years earlier.

 

Having replaced Saul as King, David gathers together the people of Israel and transports the Ark back to Jerusalem—with a celebration in the fine tradition of the New Orleans Second Line: shouting, dancing, tambourines, sounding trumpets, clashing cymbals.. and more! 

 

New Orleans Second Line, photo by Charles Lovell.

Of course, I’m historically putting the cart before the horse. It would be more accurate and appropriate to say that the New Orleans Second Line is in the fine tradition of King David’s procession returning the Glory of God to its home in Jerusalem!

 

Either way, my point is that David was not merely moving a piece of furniture. He was making a statement about what kind of king he would be. In contrast to his predecessor, he was saying, the One God and the worship of the One God will be at the center of my kingship.

 

Well, yes, David was, by and large, a righteous king. But we also know, as told in today’s passage just a few chapters later in 2^nd Samuel, that David was capable of great treachery. That David fell to temptation, then compounded his sin with an evil cover-up.

 

Oh, what humans will do to try to save face! And the more powerful the human, the more likely their face-saving cover-ups will lead to the death and destruction of innocent lives. We see evidence of that in our national and international politics all the time.

 

So as a model for kingship, David is definitely a mixed bag. Jesus is a different story altogether.

 

Here in the middle of our Gospel lesson, John states, When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

 

I don’t think we need rocket science to figure out that it is earthly kingship—precisely the kind of kingship that contributed to David’s fall from grace—that Jesus is rejecting and fleeing from.

 

Certainly John does a good job of portraying Jesus as a leader, and a strong one at that. One who knows what he is going to do but nevertheless gives his disciples an opportunity to suggest a solution to the problem at hand.

 

Here I think it important to note that John tells this story of the feeding of the 5,000 a bit differently from the other Gospels. For example, Matthew 14:15 & 16 says:

 

As evening approached, the disciples came to [Jesus] and said, “This is a remote place, and it’s already getting late. Send the crowds away, so they can go to the villages and buy themselves some food.” Jesus replied, “They do not need to go away. You give them something to eat.”

 

Luke and Mark are virtually identical to Matthew: The disciples—not Jesus—initiate the discussion. They want to send the crowd away. Jesus says no, you feed them.

 

But in John’s account, Jesus initiates the discussion, and he does it even though he knows already what he is going to do, and he does it as a test of them. It’s almost as if he’s saying, ‘Okay, guys, have you figured out yet what kind of king I am?’

 

Of course they haven’t, and so he shows them, again. And I’ll come back to that part of the story in a moment, but first an aside: I point out that John’s account of this miracle is different from the accounts of Matthew, Mark & Luke, NOT to start an argument about which account is “the right one.” I do not think those arguments are necessary, nor do they lead us to a deeper understanding of the Bible. I think they are distractions from what we can learn from the Bible.

 

Rather, I ask, “What can we learn from each telling of the story? What can we learn from THIS telling of the story, that we don’t learn from those other tellings?”

 

John’s Gospel presents Jesus as a strong, fearless leader, a man in charge, a shepherd leading with a firm but tender hand, a man in charge of his own destiny as well. In John, Jesus’ life is not taken from him; he gives it freely.

 

So.., back to the feeding of the 5,000. The disciples, who have themselves just returned from their first mission trip with stories of miraculous healings and exorcisms, still do not yet fully understand what kind of king Jesus is.

 

So Jesus shows them: I’m the kind of king who feeds people, physically and spiritually. Moreover, you are what you eat. The physical food you eat today satisfies your belly for a few hours. The spiritual food I offer transforms lives.

 

Just what, do you suppose, was the miracle that took place on that hill near the Sea of Galilee some 2,000 years ago? I’m sure God can create out of nothing at any time. I’m sure God can cause molecules of bread and fish to magically multiply.. at any time.

 

But that kind of miracle would be almost unremarkable. After separating light from dark and sea from dry land, after hanging the sun, moon and stars in the heavens, I’m guessing God could multiply bread and fish without breaking a sweat.

 

I’m guessing a greater miracle happened on that day so long ago. I’m guessing Jesus blessed the bread and fish.. and through his compassion and his act of love and thanksgiving and praise, God became known to the gathered throng in that breaking of the bread.

 

“You are what you eat.” Our Bishop loves to say that. When he offers consecrated bread and wine in the feast of Holy Eucharist, he says, “Become what you receive.” The physical food you eat today satisfies your belly for a few hours. The spiritual food offered in the breaking of bread transform lives.

 

Photo by World Food Programme

 

Because when God becomes known to humankind, our hearts are opened and miracles happen, miracles of giving and sharing even when we ourselves are in hard times, of welcoming strangers, of caring for the least among us. So much so that we have more blessing left over than what we started with.

 

You’ve heard it many times: “I went to the homeless shelter or the food bank or the mission field to give/help/do something for people who are less fortunate than me,” people say, “and I got more out of it than I gave.”

 

When God is revealed to us, when we recognize the Divine within and among us, when we see ourselves and our neighbors—all of them—as God’s beloved, human hearts are transformed.

 

Meister Eckhart, a German theologian and Franciscan monk of the 14^th Century, said it this way (from Edge of the Enclosure, 7/30/11):

 

For not only bread
but all things necessary
for sustenance in this life
  are given on loan to us
    with others
    and because of others
    and for others
    to others through us.

 

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. AMEN.

Blessedness

 Pentecost 7, St. Alban's Episcopal Church, Monroe, La.

Blessed be…God .., who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing, Paul writes to the Ephesians. And then he goes on to detail those blessings:

·      Adoption as God’s children through Jesus Christ our brother

·      Redemption and forgiveness of sins

·      And in the fullness of time, to be gathered up in him…

 

The riches of grace, indeed, lavished upon us by the God who IS Love, first, last and always.

 

To me, the most striking thing about today’s lessons is the stark contrast in emotions I experience in reading them. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is all joy and gratitude. It’s all reassurance of God’s love for humankind. It inspires confidence. It brings peace and trust that all will be well.

 

Not so much the other two. I will return to Paul’s description of blessedness, but first we need to look at these other two stories to see what is there for us.

 

In 2nd Samuel, we have King David leaping and dancing with abandon before the Lord, and all the people celebrating with him with music and dancing. This is, in fact, a delightful picture!

 

They are transporting the Ark of the Covenant from the home of the Levite Abinadab, where it had been deposited by King Saul after the defeat of the Philistines. It had sat there for 20 years, sort of out of sight and out of mind.

 

Now that he is king, David is not merely moving the Ark, but making a statement about who he is and how he will lead. He is saying, I want the Glory of the Lord near me in Jerusalem. With the Ark in a special tent put up for that purpose, he is declaring his intention that worshiping God would be at the center of his leadership—not just for him, but for the people as well.

 

 

 But here in the midst of this joyous image of dancing and leaping with joy before the Lord comes a statement.. shocking in its harshness. It’s like taking a bight into a beautiful apple and finding a worm—worse, a half a worm—and we are brought up short. David’s wife Michal is watching from a window and, we are told, she despised him in her heart.

 

What in the world could it be about the scene before her that causes such a hateful reaction? We do know earlier in the story of Michal and David, as told in several passages of Hebrew Scripture, that she loved him very much.

 

The writer of 2^nd Samuel does not explain her change of heart, so we are left to wonder. Was she perhaps jealous of David’s relationship with God? Perhaps fearful that her husband’s first and highest loyalty was to God, making her second in his affections at best? Or was she disdainful of his “let it all hang out” abandon, finding it unbecoming to his station in life to leap and dance for joy before God and the people?

 

I am ruefully reminded that I, myself, have been known to kind of look down my nose at people whose manner of worship includes everything from waving hands in the air to speaking in tongues to, indeed, dancing up and down the aisles of churches. Give me stately ritual over spiritual drama on Sunday, pleeeeeze!

 

Pick your answer or come up with another, but recognize that Michal is offered to us here as a mirror. Paul draws for us a picture of blessedness. God’s desire is to gather in—not just us but all things in heaven and on earth. It’s a picture of heaven on earth.

 

But our feet are so often stuck in the muck of earthly things. Our jealousies and our fears, our disdain for those who do not live up to our standards of worship, lifestyle, morality—whatever. Those very human responses get in the way of our inherited blessedness. Instead of joining the dance, we stand back in fear, in anger, or passing judgement.

 

King Herod and his wife Herodias mirror human treachery and its capacity for destruction even more clearly and starkly. In this scene, we get just a hint of potential blessedness. King Herod is drawn to the message of John the Baptizer. He can’t quite put his finger on why, but he wants to hear what he has to say.

 

He would probably be happy if John were to leave the neighborhood, but he doesn’t want to harm him. Indeed, Herod protects the prophet from his own wife, whom he loves dearly but who is clearly infuriated by John’s truth-telling about their marriage, which is unholy in the eyes of Jewish law.

 

In the end, Herod succumbs to his own lack of courage and character. His wife cynically manipulates him by exploiting her child’s budding sexuality. He yields to his own lasciviousness and swears a foolish oath. Then, having made a sweeping promise, he must save face and not disappoint his blood-thirsty base. Murder is the outcome.

 

 

 The earthly muck of pride, fear, the need to save face, self-righteousness, the pursuit of power and earthly wealth, sucks at our feet constantly. It prevents us from seeing and joyously embracing the blessedness that God desires for us and offers us as our inheritance.

 

Now, I need to say a few more words about the nature of blessedness. It has become commonplace today to attribute everything to being blessed. We get promoted at work, “I’m blessed,” we say. A bigger house? A newer car? Yes, yes, I’m blessed. A great vacation? Our freedom from political oppression? We don’t hesitate to call these things “blessings.”

 

But that’s not what Paul is talking about. The blessedness that comes from God that Paul is describing here is spiritual, not material. I do NOT mean to say that we should not be grateful and thankful for material things, or political things like freedom to worship as we choose. These are good things. We should be grateful for them.

 

But there’s two problems with calling them “blessings.” The first is the unfortunate implication that because we have these material “blessings,” God must therefore bless us more than God blesses those who are poor and those who live under political oppression. Not so. Indeed, the Bible—and the Hebrew Scripture and the Qu’ran, BTW—all tend toward the opposite.

 

“Blessed are the poor in spirit.” “The last shall be first and the first shall be last.” “Go and sell all that you have and give to the poor and you will have eternal life.” “Do it to the least of these and you do it to me.” Etc. The passages that convey a bias toward those who have little are many.

 

The second issue with calling material gifts “blessings” is that it tends to obscure some very important and serious realities, a primary one being that earthly economic structures are not designed to produce “blessings.” They are designed to produce economic rewards, and those by no means equally. Some labor is valued much more highly—and profitably—than other labor.

 

Moreover, the labor market does not reflect the values we profess. If it did, teachers might just be paid more than football players, and we all know that isn’t going to happen anytime soon! Of course, as a retired teacher, although I love to complain about football player salaries, I’m also painfully aware that my labor has been valued much more highly than the absolutely essential labor of many others. I think of food workers, retail workers, people who clean homes and businesses, and those who save countless lives by picking up our garbage and carrying it away.

 

My point is, simply, that calling the products of our economic and political structures “blessings” conceals both responsibility and privilege. I have become very, very careful about what I call a “blessing” because I do not want to lose sight of my own responsibility to work for just political and economic systems, or my privilege as one who does way better by existing structures than many, many others.

 

Now, I’m not trying to start an argument about whether the labor market—or any other market, the stock market, the commodity market, etc.—is fair or not. And I’m certainly not trying to say that markets are bad. Markets are good! They promote the circulation of beneficial earthly goods. We just need to make sure we manage them—for they are vehicles of our own creation—so we need to manage them to make sure they produce the outcomes we want.

 

What I AM trying to say is that earthly economic and political structures do not produce “blessings.” Blessings are from God, and as Paul explains and illustrates, God’s blessings are spiritual in nature. Moreover, they are equally offered to all creation: everything in heaven and on earth, as Paul says.

 

 

And if we can find it in our hearts to fully accept and live into God’s gracious blessedness, to set our eyes on spiritual things, to know and live as God’s beloved, as redeemed and forgiven, then we will pass it on. We will overcome and rise above the muck of human pride, greed, idolatry, jealousy, and hate. We will become channels instead for God’s love, forgiveness, mercy and generosity toward all people and all creation. We will see Jesus in every other person and we will work for justice and peace on earth as our baptismal covenant calls us to do.

 

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.

Dancing in the Eye of the Hurricane

 Trinity Sunday, Grace Episcopal Church, Monroe, La.

I received the Summer 2021 issue of The Anglican Digest in the mail about a week and a half ago. If you’re not a subscriber, it’s easy to become one. If you are, I want you to go home and look at two things.

The first is a photo of the beautiful Regina window in our chapel. It’s on p. 37 and I’m happy to say it’s a rather nice reproduction of one of my photographs.

The second is a diagram of the Trinity….

Anglican Digest, 2021 Summer Issue, p. 23.

 

Timely, right? Because today is Trinity Sunday—the one day in the church year devoted to a point of theology, rather than a person or an event.

 

When I first laid eyes on this diagram in the Anglican Digest, I thought, “Nice!” This works pretty well! Maybe we should have it translated into a lovely banner—royal blue background, gold circles and bands, black embroidered words on the gold—and then we could bring it out once a year, place it at the top of the chancel steps and all gaze at it for 20 minutes, thereby relieving the clergy of ever having to struggle with a Trinity Sunday sermon again!

 

But, of course, the longer I look at it, the less adequate it seems. Useful, yes. It does remind us that our One God is a perfect unity of three distinct persons. It also balances the inverted triangle on its point, the Holy Spirit. This makes me ask the question, Why isn’t the church as packed on Pentecost as it is on Easter and Christmas? Surely the gift of the Holy Spirit is on a par with the gift of the Son?

 

But however useful diagrams can be, ultimately God can’t be reduced to circles and lines and words, a bit of geometry and language—two very human maps for understanding and translating the universe. This diagram—no diagram of human making—can adequately express the experience of God in our lives. And that’s what I want to talk about this morning: The experience of God in our lives.

 

A few years ago, a pop artist named Brandi Carlile published a song called “The Eye.” The key lyric—the hook, the line repeated in every chorus—is, “You can dance in a hurricane 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.’”

 

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

 

God comes to us disguised as our life. Writer Paula D’Arcy said that in a wonderful book I recommend called Practicing Resurrection. And those words clearly resonate with lots of folks besides myself, because the quote is now available as a poster, on a t-shirt, printed on.. whatever.

 

Hear it again: 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. 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.

 

In my 30’s, 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, and began teaching full time in the fall of 1990.

 

And although I retired from ULM 3 years ago, I’m still teaching. And it is a calling. Teaching matters. It changes things.

 

Here’s a story: One of my brothers used to live on the island of St. Croix in the Caribbean. He took tourists on sailboat snorkeling tours of the underwater national park there.

 

One day a tourist on his boat noted his last name and said something like, 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 (my Penn State classes were 50 students each!)—then told my brother that my teaching had changed her life. She related to my brother a discussion I had conducted in class some 10+ years earlier.. 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 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.

 

That is the kind of outcome teachers live for! And I’m still teaching—and learning—about race, but that’s not what I’m going to talk about today. ….

 

God’s call and claim on our lives can change over time. Mine has. Yes, I still have a lot to say about race. But these days I am increasingly called to the fight to save our planet, to liberate God’s stupendous Creation from the neglect and abuse of its human caretakers.

 

How this call came about is a long and complex story. I don’t want to spend the last few minutes of this sermon telling it, so I’ll just mention a couple of things: Hurricane Katrina, a perfect storm that sent the entire state of Louisiana bouncing off the walls. My creative side that finds its expression in photography, a passion re-ignited by Katrina.

 

And even a phrase from our Book of Common Prayer… “these creatures of bread and wine.” That phrase changed my view of all of creation. Think about it! Or… in the pop lingo of today, “Let that sink in…” 

Passion flower (Passiflora incarnata), just one of the zillions of creatures at Camp Hardtner that can connect you with God.

So today, after our 10:15 service, I’ll jump in my car and head to Camp Hardtner, where I will spend a couple of hours teaching this summer’s camp counselors about the awesome biodiversity of that place and how they can not only enhance their own spiritual life by becoming caretakers of the earth, but also cultivate care for creation in their charges this summer.

 

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.

 

This multi-faceted One God is not some sort of benign, benevolent presence, sitting on a shelf waiting to receive our gratitude when things go right and hear our petitions when we need help. To be leaned on like a father and to pick us up and carry us when we’re tired like a brother.

 

However you imagine or understand the Triune God, whichever person of the Trinity you most gravitate towards, know this: The One God is already at work loving and reconciling this world. You, me, all of us are called to join in.

 

Whatever you are doing with your life, how are you making it an answer to God’s call and claim on you? That is the question we all must be able to answer.

 

This God, whose very Spirit we breathe, calls us and makes claims on our very life. And when we respond to that call, committing fully whatever gifts of time, talent and treasure we have... then we dance in the eye of the hurricane.

                                        

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. AMEN.

Hear It Again for the First Time

 Grace Episcopal Church, Monroe, La., Oct. 25, 2020

So…what you are about to hear is a “desperation sermon.” By that I mean, I wrote it Saturday afternoon beginning about 2:30 p.m. when desperation drove me to my computer and made me start typing.

And as is typically the case, starting out with the truth seemed the best bet.

 See, my usual way to write a sermon is to read the lessons the previous Sunday afternoon—several times—and again on Monday, and Tuesday. By Wednesday the sermon is taking shape in my mind and… usually no later than Friday, I’m ready to sit down and write out what is already pretty well formed in my head.

Not so this week. Indeed, when I sat down at the computer Saturday afternoon, I still didn’t know what I was going to write. I just knew, in desperation, I had to write something. Hence this odd beginning!

So.. what’s the problem? Truly difficult scripture to deal with? Jesus’ most challenging teachings? Like that bit about everybody getting paid the same no matter how little or how long they had worked?

Nope. Quite the contrary. “Love God and your neighbor as yourself.” We’ve heard it hundreds of times. We say it. Often! What teaching of Jesus could be more familiar, more accepted…. more definitive of who we say we are.. than “Love God and your neighbor as yourself.”

Indeed, I’ll bet if you did a search of my sermons, you’d learn that I go there in some fashion in most of them. So you would think that the opportunity to preach an entire sermon on this core and pillar of our faith would be met with a flood of ideas and words!

In fact, that’s what I thought last Sunday afternoon when I read the lessons for the first time. “Oh, good,” I said to myself, “I get to preach on ‘Love God and your neighbor as yourself.’ That’s a no-brainer.”

Except it’s not. Except my second thought was, “Wait a minute. Everybody knows that. Everybody believes that. Everybody knows that ‘neighbor’ means everyone: your rich neighbor, your poor neighbor, your Christian neighbor, your Muslim neighbor, your light skinned neighbor, your dark skinned neighbor… And on and on. A million sermons have been preached!”

And of course, therein lies the problem. What’s left to be said? How does one say something fresh and new about that which everyone already knows and believes?

 

Back in March when we were all asked to “shelter in place” in our own homes, I set out to “entertain” myself by tackling some, what I will generously call “messes” in my home. One of them was a storeroom. Sort of. Because it had long been impossible to actually store anything there because the room was piled high with…. stuff. Just stuff. Stuff waiting to be recycled. Stuff I didn’t want anymore but couldn’t bring myself to through into the trash. Stuff waiting to go to Christian Community Ministries. Stuff.

And so I cleaned it out. And there under all that stuff I found two boxes I had completely forgotten. One was a box of old books I’d picked up for a pittance at an auction. I had intended to sort through them, pick what I wanted, sell anything worth selling and give the remainder to the Symphony book sale.

The other was a box of brass objects from my brass collecting period: candlesticks, bowls, platters, etc. etc. All waiting to be polished and used or.. displayed, or.. what? I’m not sure.

So I dragged these two boxes into the kitchen and slid them partly under the little dining table where I would be sure to see them every time I sat down to eat a meal.

You know what I was thinking, right? I’ll put them right here where they will be a constant visual reminder to go through them, sort, use or dispose of, whatever.

But you also know where this story is going, don’t you? They’re still sitting there, untouched. They have become part of the furniture of that space. I vacuum around them. I don’t even see them anymore.

And that’s the problem with Love God and your neighbor as yourself. It has become the furniture of our faith.

And that’s the challenge of this sermon: How do I—or any preacher—help us all to rediscover, to trip over, to claim in a new way, this central tenet of our faith, this thing that everybody already knows and believes? Even as we often fail to do it!

How can we hear it again for the first time?

That’s it. That’s the tweet. Hear it again for the first time: Love God and your neighbor as yourself.

Now, all I can offer to help you hear it again for the first time are two quick points.

First, I think it behooves Christians to remember that love God and your neighbor as yourself doesn’t belong solely to us. I casually referred to it a few paragraphs back as a teaching of Jesus. And it is. But Jesus didn’t make it up. He was quoting his own Hebrew scripture. There it is in Leviticus. It belongs also to our Jewish brothers and sisters.

It is also claimed by Islam. Loving God is a thread that runs throughout the Qu’ran, and in the Sunnahs, which are Muslim writings held in esteem next to the Qu’ran, loving neighbors as oneself is presented as a natural outcome and extension of loving God.

Some scholars believe Islam borrowed from Christianity in developing that theology. I make this point because I believe, in this contentious age, looking for commonalities within difference—and while appreciating difference—is one of the most loving things we can do.

 

 

My second quick point is this: I have no idea how to teach us to “love God.” I know of no method, no process, no technique for learning to “love God.”

What I do know is that love is an unmerited gift from God. As God’s beloved, we love God back by loving what God loves—namely our neighbors as ourselves. ALL of our neighbors, and I would include our fellow non-human creatures.

Most human love is transactional. We love in order to get love—or something of value—in return. When our love is not reciprocated, we cut our losses and move on.

But we can’t love God to make God love us! Because God is the source of all love. God loves us first. We can take it or leave it, but we can’t earn it by loving God or by living a moral life or by all the piety in the world.

We can take it and love God and our neighbor as ourselves, or we can leave it… and be the unhappiest of humans, the most discontent, the angriest, the most hateful toward others. I truly believe that most human misery, prejudice, judgemental-ness, selfishness, fear, anger, hate... are consequences of people not knowing, or not accepting, or forgetting.. that they are God’s beloved.

We will never get it right all the time. All we can do, or, at least all I can do, is remind myself constantly as I am faced daily with neighbors I don’t understand, neighbors with whom I disagree vehemently, neighbors who frighten me with their anger and hostility… all I can do is remind myself again and again: I am God’s beloved and so is he or she. And that is enough. Loving is an end in itself. Love

The Sufi poets often give me words to express the ineffable. Here are the words of the Sufi saint Rabia al-Basra. She writes:

O my Lord,
if I worship you
from fear of hell, burn me in hell.

If I worship you
from hope of Paradise, bar me from its gates.

But if I worship you
for yourself alone, grant me then the beauty of your Face.

 

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.

 

Encountering the Holy

23 Feb. 2020, Grace Episcopal, Monroe, La. 

Who could not love Peter in this Gospel story? He is so very human, even child-like, in his offer to build dwellings on the mountain in order to hold on to a glorious moment.

We have all been there. We have all had a moment or two in our lives, moments so perfect and beautiful, that we have yearned to stop time in its tracks.

We call them “mountain-top moments” for good reason. They are typically moments bathed in holy love and holy light, like the one described by Mathew, and like Peter, we want to stay in that moment forever. 

Detail from The Transfiguration icon.

Artists throughout the ages have represented the transfiguration scene in a variety of ways, but my favorites show the disciples tumbling down the mountain in disarray, sandals flying off their feet. Moses would approve. They are all on holy ground.

Today is the last Sunday after the Epiphany, and we end this holy season of “showing forth” the way we began it…, with a theophany—a human encounter with God. We—and the world in the persons of the Magi—saw the star, followed it to the infant Jesus, and knelt in wonder before God Incarnate.

That was six weeks ago. Today we are with the disciples on the mountain top witnessing the glory of God Incarnate once again.

Soon, the vision will end—as all mountain-top experiences must. We must put our shoes back on, head down the mountain, and with Jesus, turn our faces toward Jerusalem. I don’t think the disciples had much of a clue about what was coming, but Jesus did. He has tried to tell them and will try again, but… we see little evidence in their words or actions that they understood.

Who can blame them? We understand—to the extent that we do—only with the help of the biblical record and two thousand years of hindsight.

“To the extent that we do.” I put that phrase in that sentence very purposefully.

We regular church goers are very familiar with the progression of the church year. We prepare for Christmas with advent, we celebrate the holy birth with gusto, and we give at least a nod to the showing forth on Epiphany. We mark the transition between Epiphany and Lent by gorging on pancakes and King Cake, and then get down to the serious business of ashes and fasting, perhaps a bit of extra alms giving…

So, yes, we get it. And we have organized our church life around these events in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. But I’m directing our attention to something deeper.

Jesus knew what was ahead in Jerusalem. I like to think that he gained strength and courage and resolve for the agony to come from his glorification and moment of complete unity with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit on the mountain top.

But as Jesus descends from the mountain, his face turned toward Jerusalem, something important and telling happens. Our lectionary reading for today stops just four verses short of this event, but I think it an important part of the story.

So.. Jesus and his disciples are descending from the mountain having a brief theological discussion about what has transpired. And then they encounter the crowd they had left behind to go up the mountain to pray.

Immediately, a man steps out of the crowd and presents himself to Jesus—and not just “a man,” but a distraught and desperate father. Lord, have mercy on my son, he says, for he is an epileptic and he suffers terribly; he often falls into the fire and often into the water. 

Now Jesus, in my mind, has every right to stay focused on the larger mission. He has bigger fish to fry. He must go to Jerusalem to fulfill all things, to become through his passion, the salvation of the world. Big, big orders, just confirmed again in his glorification on the mount.

But Jesus does what we have come to expect Jesus to do. He responds to the human need and pain in front of him. Go get your son, he says to the father, and the father does and Jesus heals him.

How do we encounter God in our own lives? What do we do with those encounters? Are they turning points in our relationships—with God, yes, but with the hurting world of which we are a part?

I’m going to tell you a story about something that happened in my own life just a few days ago—Thursday, to be specific. But I do so with trepidation, for two reasons. One, it seems a little self-serving, so please understand, I am not presenting myself as one who always “gets it” and responds accordingly. And, two, it involves the very controversial topic of immigration and asylum-seeking and how we respond to the thousands seeking to come to this country. 

Where immigrant assylum-seekers are detained in Louisiana.

I do not have answers to all of the questions immigration and asylum-seeking raise, but I have gotten a bit involved with a group of citizens seeking to make sure that immigrants detained in prisons and jails throughout Louisiana receive humane treatment. The humanitarian supports this group provides include primarily social visits to detainees, putting a few dollars into their commissary accounts so they can buy creature comforts that our for-profit prison system does not provide, sending cards and letters to alleviate their isolation and loneliness, and taking them reading material in their native language.

But the main way I have gotten involved is in helping those who are released. When a detainee is granted asylum or is bonded out by their families, the responsibility of ICE and the detention facility ends at the front door. And, actually, the challenge in helping begins earlier. It seems to be virtually impossible for the support network to get clear, definitive information about when someone is to be released.

So, last Thursday: Another volunteer and I took turns going to Richwood Detention Center to pick up a Cuban who was being released. The network had gotten word early in the morning that he was definitely to be released, probably mid-morning. Then the word was “noon,” then early afternoon, and so forth.

 I had to teach a class at Grace School, so the other volunteer was on call. By the time I emerged from class at 3:10 p.m., the Cuban had just been released and was sitting with the other volunteer in her car in a parking lot near the prison.

His family has been in the U.S. for some time. They live in Florida but a bus ticket to take him there would have cost $250. This network carries on with no official funding. But we had a plan. One of the key people in the network, a friend of mine, lives in Natchez, Mississippi, and she had been in touch with his family. If we could get him to Natchez, his brother and cousin would drive all night from Florida to meet him there.

The other volunteer could not take him to Natchez, but I could. It’s important to know that when an asylum-seeker is released from detention, whatever they brought to this country with them, they no longer have it. This man was wearing every item of clothing he owned, namely a torn pair of jeans that did not reach his ankles, loafers with no socks, and two thin shirts.

Do you remember the weather Thursday afternoon? Cold, wind, rain. I offered him a heavy corduroy shirt left behind by my late husband, but he declined. I offered him a meal at Taco Bell; he said he wasn’t hungry, although he was certainly thin and looked hungry. When they get out of detention—where they have typically been for 8 or 9 months or more—they have one thing on their minds: Contact with their family.

So we got into my car, I stopped to fill up with gas, and as we headed east on Winnsboro Road toward Hwy 15 south toward Natchez, I plugged in my phone and handed it to him. None of his family was among my contacts, so he used the instant messaging app to request connection. A few minutes later, his mother responded—cautiously, because she of course did not recognize my phone #. 

Hola, quien es? she typed. Who is it? My passenger grabbed the phone, hit the “face time” button, and all heaven broke loose in my car. I have never before witnessed a family reunion anything like it. 

Te amo! Te amo! Te amo! My conversational Spanish is not good. I can read the language very well, I can speak it pretty well, but when native speakers are conversing, I understand very little. But “Te amo!” is easy. “Te amo!” means “I love you.” And that is what the first few minutes of that conversation consisted of. Te amo! I love you.

About 5 minutes in, my passenger tapped my arm and turned the phone toward me. His mother wanted to see me. Thank you, thank you, she said in heavily accented English, thank you for helping my son. 

The reunion continued unabated for a full hour as we drove south. The father came into the call, and other family members. There was much laughter. At one point, my passenger sang a song to his mother. I gathered from the occasional word I understood that he was singing her the song he had used to sustain himself emotionally through long months of detention. She cried.

Then she asked to speak with me again. Did I mind if her younger son, my passenger’s brother, played and sang over my phone. Of course not. And so we were serenaded by a clearly talented younger brother. And on it went…

Immigration, by Spencer

It is past time for me to sit down and be quiet. So let me try to put into words what I hope you will take away from this… admittedly “stream of consciousness” kind of homily.

Jesus was there Thursday. It did not feel like a mountain-top experience at the time. But Jesus was there.

Jesus was in my car driving through the rain and in that family reunion. Jesus was in my friend in Natchez orchestrating the whole thing—although she would be the last person to say that! She then drove to Sicily Island to meet us so I didn’t have to drive all the way to Natchez. Jesus was in two volunteers bouncing between our ongoing lives and making sure the stranger among us didn’t walk out of that detention center and find no one there to greet and help him. Jesus was in the whole thing.

And I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. How it is supposed to transform my life. I just know, poised at this moment between Epiphany and Lent, Jesus walks among us. Our own encounter with God is waiting.

Are we open to it? Are we willing to find God, not only in our Lenten pieties, not only inside this beautiful worship space, but even more compellingly disguised in the very brokenness of our world? Are we willing to be transformed by our encounter with the Holy in the most unlikely places?

In the name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, AMEN.