Mary

As a young girl, I played Mary over and over again in a small but simple opera that my mother wrote. We traveled from church to church performing this opera for congregations of all different denominations. The result of all this was that I really began to think about Mary and what must have been going on in her head. Here is my theory about that young girl and what she went through on that fateful day that changed the world forever, that day when the angel came to visit and announced the birth of a Savior who was to be her Son and God’s son.


When the angel came to Mary, the Scripture tells us that she went through a variety of emotions. The first word used to describe her feelings means to be startled or greatly agitated. Mary was upset by the angel, there is no way around that. This was not what she expected. It may not even have been what she wanted. The Scripture is very clear that she is UPSET by the angel telling her that God is with her. It is not so much the physical appearance of the angel that frightens her, it is what he is about to say. Mary seems to instinctively know that her life is going to change forever. And she is not sure what she wants.

Mary does not ask the angel who he is. It makes me wonder, had she seem him before? She does not seem frightened by his appearance (most people are blinded, frightened by angels). Rather she is troubled because she knows that something tremendous will be asked of her.

We always depict Mary as this placid Virgin, always calm and pretty. She is never disheveled, never nervous or unsure. Just passive and peaceful all the time. But that is not how it reads in the original greek of the New Testament. In fact, it is strange to me how almost all of the English translations play down her emotions, her responses. In the original language, Mary is not so passive.

I would like to suggest that our responses to God when God enters our lives, enters our hearts, are very similar to the responses of Mary. And, like Mary, when God comes to us, we don’t just feel one thing. We feel many emotions at once. But, most commonly, the first thing we feel is fear.

The second thing that Mary feels is confusion. When the angel explains that she is going to have a baby, she is confused. She cannot conceive of how this is possible, given that she is a virgin. This seems so far beyond anything that she can even contemplate. She is honest with her confusion and is not afraid to ask the angel how this will all work. I love her for that. She does not try to impress or pretend that she understands. She does not nod stupidly or turn glassy-eyed. She stops the angel and makes him explain.

“How can this work?” she asks. “How can this happen if I am a virgin?”

We often ask the same question of God. You mean that you want me to do what? How will that work? What do you mean?

The idea of having God’s child was definitely NOT in Mary’s life’s plan. She wanted to be a mother, yes, probably, since that was the highest goal of every woman in Jesus’ day. But I’m sure that she had never conceived of this.

When the angel explains that God will simply overshadow her, she accepts this without further explanation. And then she says that greatest words of all.

Here I am.

Throughout the Old Testament, these are the words of the most faithful people. Abraham spoke these words when God told him to leave his country and go to another land. Jacob spoke these words. Joseph, Moses, Samuel, Saul and even David spoke these words. The prophet Isaiah said these words to God, Here I am, Lord, send me.

The most faithful of God’s people in the Old Testament said these very words. They are the words of the soul who is ready to let God’s will be done. They are the words of all of us who realize that God’s plan may be better, larger, more comprehensive and more beautiful than anything we could possibly imagine. These are the words that we all strive to say to God. Here I am.

And so the soul moves from fear to confusion to eventual trust, just as Mary did.

This morning we will hold the Christmas pageant as the liturgy of the Word at both the 9 and 10:30 services. A young woman will play the part of Mary. Her name is Amelia and she is very special. Amelia was born with a rare condition. She has no cholesterol. She is home schooled by her devoted mother. She is loved by our youth group. Cases like hers are very rare in the world right now and she is doing beautifully. When I look at Amelia, I see another human being who does not really know what the future will hold but who nevertheless says, Here I am Lord, do with me as you will.

It is scary to think of God being in charge of your life, scary to think of what might happen if we were to let go of our ambitions and expectations and allow God to enter us and act through us. It makes me scared just to think of it. But Christ is born when we step out of the way and allow God to do something radical and new with our lives. This kind of discipleship is very rare for we must listen deeply in order to hear God’s will for our lives. And many of us don’t have the patience to listen.

There are just seven days to Christmas. Each day, let’s say these words to God

Here I am Lord, let me be with me according to your word.

Amen.

Advent

I was nine years old when they first asked me to babysit. Nine. The couple who lived right down Willow Street had a toddler girl. She must have been close to two years old. I came over at 6 and her parents were so happy to go on a date. I fed her supper, we played. I put her to bed. And then I was alone in a strange house. I remember it vividly.


First I watched the Wizard of Oz, but when that was over, I had nothing to do. I sat on the sofa in the living room. Everything smelled funny. The grandfather clock made so much noise. The minutes seemed to last an eternity. I kept waiting for the sounds of their footsteps on the front porch. What if a robber came? Where was the telephone?

The sounds grew louder and I became more watchful. Ten o’clock came and went. It was well past my bedtime. What if they had been in an accident? What if they never came home? What was that sound? Why did the shadows look so large?

At 11, I called my dad. I asked him to come over and wait with me. He was a good dad. He got out of bed and walked down the street and sat with me. It was not so hard to wait with him. Nothing seemed scary when he was with me. Just the fact that I was not alone seemed to help so much.

They came home some time later. Now that I look back, it must have seemed strange to these young parents that their babysitter had her dad there. But what were they thinking? I was only nine!

Jesus is coming again but we don’t know when. We have no idea when, it could be hours, days, years, millennia. We just don’t know. But we know that he is coming and his arrival will be something else. In the gospel for today, the first Sunday of the Christian year, we hear about how he will come. It sounds scary to me, with him riding on clouds, swooping into our mundane world to turn everything upside down. The sun will darken like an eclipse. The moon will give off light and the stars will fall from the sky. There will be cosmic signs such that we have never seen before. Christ will come in the clouds and he will send his angels to come and gather us up. It sounds like an earthquake with shooting starts or some kind of nuclear event. The heavens will be shaken, Mark writes. The heavens will be shaken.

You would have to be blind, deaf and dumb to miss such an event. So why then does Jesus say, in just the next breath, that we are to stay awake? He says that we are like slaves in charge of a house that does not belong to us. Like house-sitters or baby-sitters, we are to sit up and watch for the coming of the Master. The only problem is that we have no idea when he will come.

Why do we need to stay awake? Doesn’t this kind of cosmic arrival mean that everybody will be shaken, that everybody will wake up and see the Second Coming? How could you possibly sleep through that king of event? Why does it matter if we sleep before hand?

And what is so wrong with going to sleep? Why is that a bad thing? If I had not been so young and so scared, I might have gone to sleep at my first baby-sitting job. Would that have been so bad? The parents would have come home to find me asleep but in one piece and still on call for their baby-girl. They would not have been mad. It does not mean that I was not there or did not care. Sleeping is just something that we humans need to do from time to time. Why does God need for us to be awake?

The state that Mark describes is watchfulness. I don’t think that it has to do with how many hours a night that you sleep. It is about awareness. It is about how you live, not how much you sleep. How you live your life, about whether or not you are fully alive. What Mark is talking about is a state of mindfulness. It is about being fully alive. Our relationship with God and the eventual state of our souls has something to do with our mindfulness. It has to do with how alive we really are.

There are many things in life that lull us to sleep. A routine schedule, the daily work grind. A relationship that is long-standing and so comfortable that we are inclined to take it for granted. Many marriages fail and when you ask them what happened, they just say, “Oh, we drifted apart.” It is as if they got so comfortable together that they stopped working on being married. They expected it to come easily and soon it didn’t come at all. Studies show that couples that fight, not physically, but argue and disagree, tend to stay together. Because they are awake and paying attention to their relationship.

When you think about it, we humans try to be as comfortable as we can. We design our lives to take the sting out. We structure things so as to remove spontaneity. Most of us prefer to eat at similar times, exercise at similar times. Babies are happier when they have a routine and grownups are the same. We just like things to remain the same.

My father has been doing the stair-master every morning for ten years. Even though doctors and trainers all tell him that he needs to use different muscles each day, that he needs to mix it up a bit, he does not want to. He likes the routine. So he has very in-shape calves and a nice beer belly. But he is comfortable with his routine. Change, mixing it up, now that is just scary.

We lock our schedules in so that it seems that our life is repeating itself, like a broken record. Then we are shocked when our child grows or we see signs of ourselves aging. We structure our lives to make it look like all was comfortable, but it is not. God just keeps mixing things up and waking us up, startling us out of our comfort zones.

Illness wakes us up. Joblessness wakes us up. Depression, suffering, death-they all serve to shake us up. People tend to come to church for the first time when something happens to shake things up in their lives. They realize that they are no longer comfortable and that they need God.

The enemy of God is not fear, it is comfort. The enemy of God is the lulling sense that you don’t need God and the way that we forget that we are fragile beings hurtling through space. The sleepiness that Jesus speaks of is not physical sleep but spiritual malaise. It is when you stop being fully alive.

There is one thing that lulls us to sleep more than anything else: our busyness.

When you are racing from here to there, consumed with the minutia of urgent daily business, where is your mind? It is focused on the minutia and not aware of the big picture. As I drove my two boys hither and yon in search of a certain kind of sneaker, I could think of nothing but the traffic, my bad mood, the fact that the car was getting dirtier by the minute, my boys were fighting and if I was going to get them to their guitar lesson on time. I was moving fast, racing at 50 miles an hour down the highway to be exact, but I was lulled into nothingness. And I guarantee that everything that consumed and worried me at that moment on a Saturday afternoon will mean nothing to me in just a few days. And in a year, I will remember none of it.

At this season, the world will tell you to get busier. Buy lots of stuff! Wake up at midnight and shop til you drop! Christmas is about buying things and racing around to parties. Do and do and do and you will successfully never think about what this all means or why we wait for Christ to come at all. If we stay busy, years of our lives will go by, getting the box of ornaments out and packing it back in year after year. Soon we will realize that we have lived for decades and we do not know God any better. And we will wonder where the time has gone.

What are the signs of your times? What are people hungry for? Are you spending your time worrying about mundane things or are you actively asking God to guide you? If you are not asking God for guidance, if you think that you know what you need and you spend most of your time asking God for things, then you are still asleep. Mindfulness, watchfulness is marked by listening to God and to your fellow human beings. That is what it means to be humble, to leave room for the other.

I think that one of the reasons why we run around so much like chickens with our heads cut off is that we are afraid of standing still. When we stand still and begin to listen, we realize that we are empty and that realization is so scary that it keeps us on the move. But God cannot fill you if you do not acknowledge your own emptiness. And once God begins to fill you, well, then you really wake up.

When I look back on the churches that I have served, there is much that I cannot remember. Days went by with business and I can’t remember so much. But I do remember one place in each church with vivid recollection. I remember the chapel, the place where I prayed. I remember every detail of that room, the way the furniture felt, the icon or cross, the sound outside, just like I remember the living room of that house where I babysat for the first time. I remember because I was awake .

Ironically, when we sit still for a moment, we are more fully alive. The more we rush, the more we go to sleep inside. Stop the car. Breathe. Don’t let the precious moment pass you by. Jesus was just asking us to be alive. Don’t let yourself die inside. Wake up! Wake up!

The Saints

When I was in third grade, I had to take a test to see if I was gifted and talented. We were all told what the test was about. I remember it so well. I wanted desperately to be gifted and talented and the test was going to tell me I was. I sat at my desk with my super sharp pencil.

The directions said to draw a house. I thought to myself, “What would the examiners want my house to look like?” So I drew a house just like the pictures I had seen in books: a box, two windows a front door, a roof. I made my lines very straight and my corners sharp. That must be what they want me to do! I thought with a smile. And I handed in my paper.

The results came back. I was not invited into the gifted and talented group. My friend Jacob was invited. I asked him how he drew his house. “I went wild!” he said. “I drew three chimneys, a round roof, and I put candy canes on the front door.” Oh, no! I thought. They didn’t want me to make my house straight and clear and like everybody else’s. They wanted originality! I wanted so bad to take the test again, but it was over. And I was not gifted and talented.

I didn’t know that they were looking for creativity. I thought that they were looking for conformity. So every Tuesday afternoon, Jacob went to the gifted and talented program and I had to go home. Even though we had spent every afternoon of kindergarden making up candyland games, I had to go home and he got to stay. I still feel bad about it.

 As the days grow darker and the light dims, the church remembers those who have died. And we particularly celebrate our saints.

Most of us think of sainthood as some kind of an elite Christian club. Only people like St. Francis get in, people who perform miracles, give everything they own away and start monasteries. Most of us think that we could never be good enough, holy enough, pray enough to get in. Like my third-grade self, we keep thinking about what God would want us to do, how God would want us to act, rather than who we really are. We try to guess the criteria for sainthood and then we often fail to meet the criteria that we have made. We draw simple houses when God is really asking us to be creative and think outside the box. One thing is for sure. No two saints are alike. In fact, maybe sainthood is not a club at all. Maybe it is something much different.

I think that we have all been accepted or rejected to so many groups that we cannot conceive of sainthood as anything other than an elite Christian club. So we go to extremes. On the one hand, we have the Roman Catholic Church, where the requirements for sainthood are so intricate and detailed that Mother Theresa is still not in. Or we have some of the more liberal Protestant denominations who simply don’t have saints or denominations that say that every Christian is a saint. But that is like having a gifted and talented program where every child gets in. Though nobody’s feelings are hurt, the meaning of having the club in the first place is lost. There is no group if everybody is in automatically. It is no longer special, it no longer means anything. If grouchy Mr. Nelson who told me to shush every Sunday as a child is as holy as Mary the mother of God, then what does that mean? What incentive do I have to strive for goodness?

Neither tough requirements nor universal acceptance into the club seems right to me. Sainthood must be something more.

The Anglican Church wisely does not nail down all the requirements for sainthood, but it does proclaim that there are requirements and there are standards. However, those standards and requirements are known to God alone. It is God who determines sainthood. We do not have all the criteria because we are not the judges. Sainthood is a gift from God and God alone. It is not the church’s reward for good behavior.

And this is very important…

All baptized Christians are invited to become one with the communion of saints. But not all baptized Christians will accept that invitation.

When we baptize Christians, they are marked as Christ’s own forever. God declares them invited to the great banquet. A place is reserved for them in heaven. They are given a key to the greatest gifted and talented program of all time. And their lives will be spent answering that invitation.

A baby who is baptized will grow to about age five or so, and somewhere along the way, they will realize that a friend stole their toy or some other disturbing thing happened. The child will run up against the fallen, broken nature of our world. And, as their innocence begins to fade, that child will hear two voices: one voice of anger, resentment and frustration will tell them never to be friends with that person again, that this has ruined a friendship. The other, sometimes quieter voice, will be the invitation that occurred at their baptism. God will be quietly saying, “Come to me. You are mine. Behave as you are, made in my image. Forgive and live as I lived.”

For their entire lives, they will be given the choice between the voices of this world and the voice of the Risen One, who calls them to be holy.

I had the honor of doing an All Saints Service at Harbor House. Harbor House is a community of developmentally disabled people right off the Arlington Expressway. They live in Christian community. They believe that God particularly loves and blesses the poor, especially those who are handicapped.

I had had a very busy day. I had been to so many meetings that I felt drained. My stomach hurt and all I wanted to do was lie down and have someone bring me soup. I had that over exhausted feeling that causes you to feel like an overgrown child. My husband drove the boys and me to Harbor House, and I slept in the car, but it didn’t help.

I put on my robes and went to the common room to wait for the service to begin, going over the points of my sermon in my head, when a man walked up to me. He had Down Syndrome. He was just five feet tall, his face was wrinkled and red. He was probably about fifty or sixty years old. Old age for a person with Down Syndrome.

He came right up to me and held out his arms. He didn’t speak but just gestured. He was telling me to come into his arms. I walked up to him without really thinking and he held me and kissed me on the cheek. Then he took my face in his hands and looked at me. He looked deep into my soul with his bright blue eyes. And he smiled. I felt his love pour over me. We just stood there with him looking into my soul and me looking into his. He gave me something that I cannot articulate that night, a sense of peace, of understanding. He loved me for no reason at all.

I later found out that his name was Robert and that he cannot speak. But he sure spoke to me.

Sainthood is not a club. There is another word that Scripture uses.  It is called a COMMUNION. It is the Communion of saints. It is not about Christian perfection. It is about Christian connection. When Robert looked into my eyes that Thursday night, I knew that I was looking into the eyes of a saint. I knew this because he loved me. And his face will be there in heaven, as a part of God’s kingdom. Now that I have seen his face, I cannot imagine heaven without it. For a brief moment, his face was part of Jesus’ face.

Before he died, my father-in-law gave me a picture of Jesus. It hangs in my office. From a distance, it just looks like any other beautiful painting. But if you move closer, you can see that Jesus’ face is made up of many faces: some are faces that we would know: Martin Luther King and St. Francis, Pope John Paul II and Mother Theresa. Then there are unknown faces: little children and old woman, a housewife and a Chinese man. Together, this multitude makes up his face.

The communion of saints is not about criteria at all. It is about connection. If you want to be a saint, don’t try to be someone you are not. Be yourself, but connect. Love one another fiercely and not just with words. Act out your love and your commitment to God and to the human race, in your own unique way. If you strive to do this, I trust that you will see the faces of those who you truly love, those who have made you who you are. You will see the faces of those whose love has shaped and formed you. The house of heaven is made up of their faces and it is completely unique to you. Their faces make up the face of Christ.

Who will be there waiting for you in heaven? Who has consistently called for you to be a better person, to be true to yourself? Who has loved you wholly and unconditionally? Those people are your communion of saints. They emanate God’s love to you.

Do not spend your life trying to be someone who you are not. When you draw the house of your life, use bold colors and new ideas. Do not try to conform to some kind of a standard that you believe God has for you. Instead, try to connect with those you love. Try to call others to greater, more fulfilled lives. And most of all, try to love God as fully and as deeply as you can. God wants you to be yourself. God already has sainthood in mind for you. Your invitation was made at your baptism. It is an invitation which stands true for all eternity. All that you have to do is live into the invitation. All you have to do is say yes with every part of your being.



And now, before we baptize these children, we will prepare for an ancient liturgical custom. It is called the Necrology. Please get out the paper that can be found on the inside of your bulletin. Pencils can be found in your pews. I want you to write down the names of those people who you love who have died. Try to write legibly. These are the names of your saints. At the peace, there will be a basket passed around. Please put their names in the basket. As we distribute communion, we will read their names aloud. Thus, we are surrounded by the communion of saints as we share in the love of God, the body and blood of Christ.

Speak their names out loud, not just today but all the days of your life. Let their names be heard for all eternity. These are your saints.

The Saints and Self-Esteem

This sermon was preached at Episcopal High School in Jacksonville, Florida.


I was new in 10th grade. My father sent me to a private school, much like this one, but not so cool. It was not a Christian school, just a secular, private school. I had grown up in the inner-city and I did not know how to fit in. I had no idea what to wear and since no one wore uniforms, dressing each day was an ordeal. I would try on one thing after another and nothing looked right.


But worse than dressing was talking. I was incredibly shy. Incredibly. I was so shy I that could not recognize the sound of my own voice. It sounded weird to me when I spoke at school. I guess that was because I hardly spoke.

At home, I was a completely different person. I fought like crazy with my little brother. I argued and talked to my mother about everything. And I constantly worried about my dad. He suffered from depression and would just stop working and go to bed. One time he went to bed for three months. We did not know what to do or how he could hold his job at the law firm. I was always worried but, at home, at least I could speak.

I loved theater. When I got to play a part on stage, it was like I was being given permission to speak. I could become someone else, someone who was not always scared about her dad. I could become carefree and happy. So I tried out for everything. And the spring of my sophomore year, they gave me the romantic lead in the Spring Musical.

It was Anything Goes. Set in the 20’s on a boat, I got to fall in love with a handsome guy and sing about it. We even kissed on stage. I was curious to meet the guy who would play the other lead. When I met him, I was not disappointed. His name was Mark Volpe.

Mark was handsome. He was a senior. He had a lot of friends. He was amazing. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. I lived for rehearsals. He would talk and laugh with me. I would forget about my dad and just think about Mark. It was amazing.

The performance was everything that I could have dreamed of. And to top it all off, Mark gave me a letter and asked me to the prom. I went home elated. But when I got home, I got scared.

“I don’t think that your dad can handle you going to the prom with a senior,” my mom said. “It would just kill him with worry.”

So I wrote back. I’m so sorry, but I have to say No, I said. Mark did not wait long to ask out another girl, a senior. He seemed fine with it, but I was heartbroken. Later that year, I wrote him again, explaining that I had always really liked him but was too scared to go to the prom. He wrote back and told me that I reminded him of a clown.

It’s been over 20 years and I can still feel the pain. I have daydreams of going back to high school now, when I am confident and clear about who I am, when I am not afraid. I would go back and not worry so much. I would go back and not be afraid. I would go back and say yes to the prom and enjoy myself. But I cannot go back.

So I say this to you.

I know that many of you live your lives as two different people. You are one person at school, with your friends, and you are someone else at home, someone entirely different. Please raise your hand if you feel that this is true for you.

And we have this image of ourselves, or of the person we want to be. We think about how we look, who likes us or doesn’t like us, how we can fit in or stand out. We think about ourselves almost all the time. And the more we think about ourselves, the more we cannot quite fit in.

Every person, deep down inside, feels that they don’t belong. Even when things are going great and we have friends and we are dating our dream person, we still wonder, deep down inside, when all of this is going to end and we will be discovered for who we are, someone alone and left out.

The only thing that really brings us out of our self-absorption is falling in love. When I was really into Mark, when I couldn’t wait for the next rehearsal, I was happy because, for the first time, I was thinking about someone else more than I was thinking about myself. I got over myself for while and it was good.

But falling in love with people leads to disappointment. You go on a date and they say something really stupid and you just want to get out of there. Or they decide that they like someone else more and you live with that hurt. Or you chicken out and live with your own disappointment in yourself.

There is only one person who really can respond and love you back in the way that you need. God. Falling in love with God is what its all about. It is the best kind of romance. The only one that doesn’t leave you out in the cold or disappointed in some way.

The saints fell in love with God. They acted totally bizarre. They listened to Jesus’ words about how they should be humble and not show off, so they did things like this…

St Francis wanted to give everything to God, so he went to the bishop and, in front of the whole crowd, he stripped naked.

St. Philip Neri was so loved by people that they followed him around. He became nervous that they had fallen in love with him and not with God so he shaved off half of his beard and walked around looking like a fool.

Peter, when he found out that he would be crucified like Jesus, did not want to be killed like his master. That was too good for him. He loved Jesus too much to be crucified like him. So he insisted on being crucified upside down. Upside down!

They looked like fools, these saints. And they didn’t care because they were no longer thinking about themselves. They were too in love with God to worry about themselves.

The reason that we want to fall in love with God is that God knows who we truly are. Trying to be something that you are not will only get you so far. God knows you for the powerful, incredible person that you are and God wants you to become all that.

There is a story about a baby tiger who gets lost from his mother and ends up being raised by goats. He learns to bleet like them and to nibble grass. He grows into a large tiger but is simply behaving like a goat, bleeting and eating, nibbling and wandering. One day, the King Tiger comes to the forest.

He watches the young tiger bleet and nibble on the grass with the other goats. And he says to the Tiger, Come with Me.

He takes the young tiger to the river. Together, they look into the water. For the first time, the young tiger sees a reflection of himself. “You are not a goat,” says the King. “You are a tiger, like me. You do not nibble on grass.  You were made in my image.  You eat raw meat, like me.” And the King throws him the carcass of a dead animal.

“And you do not bleet nervously. You can roar, like me.” And the King let out a ROAR that shook the whole forest. And with that roar, the young tiger woke up to who he really was.

You are not two separate people, one at home and one in school. If you find yourself divided, unsure, nervously trying to find out who you are, then you have not really fallen in love with God. God will show you who you are.  God will teach you not just how to speak, but how to roar.
Saints are simply people who fell in love with the true one. That’s all. They just fell in love.

Idolatry

Last week, a hen came to church. It was St Francis day and her owner brought her at 10:30 inside instead of at 9 outside, where most of our animals were blessed. But this hen did a wonderful thing. She laid an egg in the back of the church. And the ushers sat there deliberating about whether or not they should put the egg in the offering plate. After all, this was her gift to us.


Every Sunday, we make this big procession and we put stuff on the altar.  Why?  Why do we bring up beautiful silver vessels and money? Sometimes the kids will draw pictures or pick a flower that is placed in their offering basket. Why do we do all this? What is the point?

In 2005, Steve Jobs was diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer. His cancer was a was a more treatable form. Most pancreatic cancer victims die within 6 to 8 months. Steve would live for six years, undergoing surgeries and inventing some of his most innovative technological tools. At a lecture at Stanford, Steve said this about his diagnosis...

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,"

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

One day, this man may be regarded as another Einstein, as the world’s greatest innovator. His name is already spoken in many households. China mourns him. All over the world, people are grieving a man who knew how to be truly creative.

Steve's life was not easy.  Steve was an orphan. Born of a mother who was too young and could not raise him, he was adopted by Mr and Mrs Jobs. He only went through six months of college. At what should have been the height of his career, he was fired from one of his greatest jobs. At 50, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and instead of seeing all this as bad luck, or an occasion to feel sorry for himself, he saw every setback and every failure as a great opportunity. Steve seized life as a gift and he milked it for all its worth. He brought his best game to life, every day. And he changed the world.

Did you know that you won the lottery? Even if nothing good happens to you for the rest of your life and you die young and miserable, you still won the lottery. Because you were born. Stop for one minute and consider all the possible genes and chromosomes that could have been combined to create a person. The chance that you would be YOU is one in a million, literally. It is a miracle that you were born.

The first and greatest sin that is talked about over and over again in the Old Testament is the sin of idolatry.  Remember the first of the ten commandments?

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage.  You shall have no other gods but me.

 Most of us have no idea what idolatry really means. We hear the story of how the Hebrew people got worried and anxious when Moses was talking with God in the mountain and they made a golden calf out of all their jewelry. And then they worshipped the god that they had made. We hear this story and we think, “OK, I don’t have to worry about that one. There is no way that I am going to be caught dead bowing before a golden calf! So I don’t have to worry about idolatry.” WRONG.

Let the calf go. We don’t do calves anymore. But we do idols. Believe me, we do worship idols.

What is an idol?  It is anything that takes the place of God in your life. Anything that becomes more important than God to you becomes your idol.

Idolatry begins with the myth that you must be happy all the time.  The myth continues when you start searching for something or someone to make you happy. Whatever that something is that will make you complete, that becomes your idol. Your family. Your money. Success. Your body. Your parenting. Your job. You tell me what it is, but there is something or somethingS in your life that rival God for your top priority. And whatever they are- these are your idols. They distract you from living life as a gift. You waste your time searching for them, serving them, and you are not fully alive.

Here are the voices of some of the idols.  Maybe you will recognize them.

“If only I were thin, I’d be happy.”

“I have to raise the PERFECT kids.”

“If I had more money, I would be happy.”

“I need to succeed to be respected. I must be respected!”

Idols tell you that there is something in your life more important that your relationship with God. And nothing makes God angrier than when you listen to them.

This miracle that is called your life, this is a gift to you from the Creator of the Universe. It is a gift, a party, a banquet. You were created not to fix the world or to keep God company but just for the sheer joy of it. God was dancing when God made you! God was playing. And God wants you to celebrate and relish this life, all of it, the good, the bad and the ugly. All of it is a gift.

In the parable that Jesus tells us today, a King throws a wedding feast. In Jesus’ day, there was nothing more special, nothing more fun that the celebration of a wedding. It was a feast that would last for days. People would sleep and eat and sleep again. The guests were treated lavishly. It was the best thing going.

This King invites guests, but the guests refuse to come, so he goes out on the street and invites anyone who wants to come, rich and poor alike. All are invited. But one man comes without a wedding garment.

It was customary to wear a white wedding robe. It was a sign of appreciation, a sign of gratitude, of respect. But this man did not wear one. And when the King asks him why, he says nothing. He is a free-loader, come to take part in the banquet but not to thank or respect, not to show his gratitude. So he is thrown out, into the outer darkness. Jesus describes this scary place as a place where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. Have you ever listened to fingernails on a chalkboard? (My first grade teacher sometime would do that by accident. She had long nails. It would send chills up my spine.  Think of that for all eternity.  It is not pleasant.)

Life is a feast of tastes and sounds and sights.  Life is a gift. Every day, when you open your eyes, you have been given a gift.  You think that any of this really belongs to you, your clothes, your body even? It is all a gift from God. All of it. And God wants you to say thank you and most importantly, to enjoy it.

Steve Jobs had a choice about his life. He could have been grateful or he could have been bitter.  He chose to wear the wedding garment, even when he was dying. He chose to relish every moment of his life, to make the most of it.
Many people are horrified by the notion that the King might throw a guest out. But God does get mad, there is no avoiding that fact. It is there in Scripture, in both the Old and New Testaments. God gets really mad.  There is no sin greater and nothing that makes God angrier than when we waste our lives chasing after idols, running around like chickens with our heads cut off, going nowhere.

As Celie once put it in the book The Color Purple, “I think that it makes God mad when you pass by the color purple in a field and do not notice it...”

Why do we bring plates up to the altar every Sunday?  We are showing you how to live.  We are reminding you of the most important, first action that all of us should take, with each breath, each moment, each day.  We are saying Thank you.

Remembering September 11th

When I was a child, my parents built a bomb shelter in the basement. It was the height of the Cold War. We lived in New Haven Connecticut where the Yale intellectuals were telling us that nuclear war was simply a matter of time. We watched the movie The Day After in which we saw the effects of nuclear war. Most likely the Soviets would strike New York City, so New Haven would receive residual effects. Our hair would all fall out, our bodies slowly disintegrate. Only cockroaches would survive.


Sometimes, when my parents were fighting, I would go down into the basement. It was usually at night. I would run my hands over the thick walls filled with sand until I found the light switch. Then I would sit alone in that tiny room. We had some cans in the corner, bottles of water. I felt safe in there but I also felt sad, lonely, even depressed. I remember thinking, “If we are ever attacked, why would we even come down here? What kind of life is this?”

When the Hebrew people were fleeing from slavery, God rescued them. In this dramatic scene, full of violence and hope, God parts the sea with a huge wind, leaving dry ground in the middle. The Hebrew people travel safely with God as their protection. And then the enemies come, and God destroys them. God is so active, so protective, so brilliant. It is a wonderful moment, a moment remembered for thousands of years. God fought for us!

I want to know why. Why didn’t God blow a great east wind when the first plane came towards the World Trade Center? Why didn’t God push that plane off course, make it land somehow?

We never thought that an airplane could become a weapon until that day. When the first plane hit, I thought it was a terrible accident. The pilot lost control. I could not fathom a person deliberately flying a vehicle full of people into a building. How could someone think like that? How could they even consider it? And later, we would hear about how they were crying out Allah Akbar! They were calling to God…Calling to God while performing an act of unspeakable evil.

When a tragedy of this magnitude happens in the life of a human being, we cannot make sense of it, so we retreat. How could this happen? How could God let it happen? We go inside of ourselves. We don’t know how to explain it and it hurts so much, so we run away, deep inside ourselves. When a young woman is raped and beaten almost to death, she changes dramatically. She hides within herself. When a child is molested or wounded, when a loved one dies in a tragic accident, we go into the bomb shelters of our hearts and we hide there. There is very little light in the place where we go, but it is safe. And we need safety. We need safety because we are afraid.

Some of you may think that we are making too much of this day, this tenth anniversary of 9/11. You may think that this country has gotten over it, but I think that most Americans have not gotten over it. Some have buried it deep inside. Others have just tried to forget it. On that day, and for a few days afterwards, we were united as a country. We cared for one another and valued one another. And then, when the chaos died down and the immensity of the event began to sink in, we hid from the pain and went back to bickering amongst ourselves.

In the Episcopal Church, like the Roman Catholic and Orthodox Churches, we have Scripture assigned to us each Sunday so that we read the entire Bible within the space of about three years. Today’s gospel is assigned for today. I did not select it myself. And in this gospel, Jesus talks to Peter about forgiveness.

“How many times must I forgive my neighbor?” Peter asks. “Seven times?”

“Not seven times, but seventy-seven times,” Jesus replies. Over and over and over again. You must forgive over and over and over again.

Does this mean that God is telling us to forgive the terrorists – those 19 hijackers and their leaders who slaughtered innocent people on that beautiful September morning? And how in the world can we do that? I myself do not know how. How can you forgive an act of unspeakable violence, an evil act which ends in the death of thousands of men and women, an act that left hundreds of children motherless and fatherless? How is that possible? And is it even the right thing to do?

The ancient word for forgiveness is afiemee. Let me first tell you, very clearly, what it does NOT mean. It does not mean to forget. It does not mean to say that everything is OK. It does not mean to like the one who hurt you. It does not mean to go back to life the way that it was before you were hurt. And it does not mean that you will ever be the same.

Afiemee means just one thing: Release from bondage. Release from imprisonment. It means that one day, when you are ready, you leave the bomb shelter deep in the basement of your heart and you learn to live again. It means that, one day, you will no longer be afraid.

We need to understand that God did not leave us to die alone that morning. God was there, in the towers. God ran into the buildings with the firefighters. God held hands with the chaplains and prayed. God stood by the windows as people got ready to jump. And God was there in the rubble and the dust, crying.

That’s what Jesus came to tell us, that God stays with us in the midst of tragedy and violence. God never leaves us.

9-11 is our cross. It is an event which has marked us as a nation and we have been changed forever. We will never be the same. But we have not yet experienced the full forgiveness of God, of our enemies, or of ourselves. We have not yet experienced true resurrection. We have imprisoned ourselves since that day. Never has this country been more divided than it has since that day ten years ago. We are fighting amongst ourselves in ways that go beyond the normal differences of political parties. And this must end.

In my first year out of college, I worked in an emergency room at Yale New Haven Hospital. One day, I was called to the burn unit to translate. A Russian man had been brought over to this country for treatment. I went to his room.

The curtains were drawn and the room was quite dark. “Come closer,” he said. “The light hurts my eyes.” I found out that he had been just 18 years old when he was asked by his government to fly over a town called Chernobyl and drop cement onto the site of an accident there. He wore a protective suit but his hands and his face were burned. The cancer had spread all over his skin and into his bloodstream. He was swollen and red, his hair was singed off. “I am here so that they can study my illness he said. I know that I am going to die. All my life I have wanted to see America. But the light hurts my skin and my eyes so much that I cannot go outside.”

After a few days and much paperwork and discussion, some of the nurses and I managed to get permission to take the Russian soldier outside. We covered him with strips of cloth, even over his face and hands. He wore dark sunglasses. We took him to my old station wagon. And we drove him around America. I will always remember his words, ‘I see it, Kate!” he said, “I see it!” He died three days later.

My Russian friend had the courage to leave his little room even when he knew that he was going to die, to see the light even though it hurt his eyes. We need to have the same courage, the courage to forgive, to be released from bondage.

Our country has always had this remarkable spirit, this remarkable gift of freedom and creativity, the ability to make something new and inventive in the midst of chaos and uncertainty. Jesus tells us to lift up our cross and follow him. That means that we are not to forget 9-11 but to let it become part of who we are. We are to define ourselves not by our hatred but by our ability to step out in the future. To lift it up and remember it as a day on which everything changed for us.

This is a day of remembrance. We will toll bells for those who died. It is also a day of hope, for there will come a time when we will stop bickering with each other and remember who we really are. There will come a day when we are ready to join hands again and step out into the light.

I don’t know when or how forgiveness happens. It is a gift from God. You know when you have forgiven, it just happens to you, from within. Suddenly, you are no longer afraid. I pray for that day, for all of us, when we can join hands once again and together step into the

I See You

She came and knelt before him and said, "Lord, help me."  He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs."  She said, "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table."  Then Jesus answered her, "Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish." And her daughter was healed instantly.

Matthew 15:26-28


Mothers can be powerful when they are desperate for their children.

My own mother stands at about 5 feet and 4 inches. One morning, when I was a teenager, I fainted in the shower. When my mother heard my body hit the ground, she pulled the entire bathroom door off its hinges. The bathroom door was locked. We had to get a repairman to come and put the door back on.


In the gospel, we hear about a mother. This woman had a little baby girl. She loved her child, that much is very obvious from the gospel. She loved her little daughter with all her being. But one day, that little girl began to have fits. We don’t exactly know what those fits looked like, but the mother claimed that her daughter had been seized by a demon

I have always imagined that her little one became epileptic and that those seizures were violent and terrifying. Her little girl one day must have begun to writhe and jerk, to foam at the mouth and then go limp. Her child just would suddenly have been lost to her, present one moment with smiles and then she became a frightening mass of flesh. She would wet her pants and bite her tongue. And her mother was desperate, absolutely desperate.

In the days of Jesus, women amounted to nothing. And Canaanites were considered not even human, not worthy of being taught about God. They worshipped idols. They were lost to God and were not to be saved. This is what Jesus had been taught.

When Jesus passes by, this mother races up to him and begs for him to help her daughter. And Jesus does not even answer her. All of his life, he had been taught not to speak to Canaanites. They were dogs, not worthy of attention. But the woman will not give up. Her desperation for her daughter drives her to assert herself in ways that were unfathomable back then. She yells and screams at Jesus.

“Send her away,” the disciples say. And Jesus tells her that he cannot take the food that is meant for the Jews and feed it to the dogs. I have always been bothered by these words, for they seem so unfair, but they were what Jesus had been taught. He was simply parroting what he had heard all of his life.

“Yes, Lord,” she says, “But even the dogs eat the crumbs from under their master’s table.”

And with her powerful words, Jesus looks at the woman. He looks at her and he really sees her. He sees beyond all that he has been taught. He sees a human being with tremendous faith. He sees a mother who adores her daughter. He sees as broken woman who would who do anything, anything to make her child well. And Jesus realizes that everything he has been taught is wrong. “Woman,” he says, “great is your faith.” And when he recognizes her, her prayers are answered.

When Joseph was ruling Egypt, he was busy distributing food to all the hungry people, when his brothers came to him. His brothers, who in their jealousy and envy, had sold him as a slave when he was just a child, come to ask for food. And at first Joseph does not let them know who he really is. He impresses them with his wealth and his power, scaring them by making it look like one of them had stolen something from him, keeping one of them hostage in his prison. But eventually he gets tired of playing games, and when they tell him that their father cannot bear to lose another son, Joseph sends all the servants out of the room. Then he breaks down and cries. He wails so loudly that people can hear throughout the palace. It is as if the truth is just bursting out of him. “I am Joseph, whom you sold as a slave,” he says.

The Scripture says that, at that moment, the brothers of Joseph open their eyes and they see him. They see who he truly is: a powerful man, the man who will save their family from famine, but also their little brother, who was mistreated by them, that little boy that they threw into a pit and sold as a slave. For the first time in their entire lives, they see him for who he really is. When they were children, they did not really see him. All that they saw was this annoying little brother, a brat, a braggart. His words made them angry, they despised him. But when Joseph the ruler reveals himself to them, and their eyes are open, they see him as he truly is, as their brother and also as a great man. And they are able to love him, no longer to be jealous or violent, but simply to love him for who he is.

If only we could see one another as Joseph’s brothers saw him, as Jesus saw the Canaanite woman. If only we would look at the person in the next pew and really see them, struggling to do the best they can, a person of great beauty and enormous depth. But instead we waste our lives living under an illusion, that everyone else is happy, and that we alone are broken and in need of God’s grace.

There was a young woman who went to college with me. We sang in the choir together. I knew her name. One night, we were sitting together on a couch in the choir lounge and she asked me if she could come and hang out with me and my friends. She explained that she didn’t really have any good friends. I said sure, but I got busy and never really thought about it.

Three weeks later, she hung herself by an extension chord in her dorm room.

At her funeral, I had terrible feelings of guilt. And I kept talking to her inside my mind. I would ask her over and over again, “Why? Why could you not have shown me who you really were? I had no idea that you were in so much pain! Why didn’t you tell me?”

She had given me a glimpse of her loneliness but she had glossed over it, making it sound like something that she wanted to work on, not something that was tearing her apart inside. I did not really know who she was. Had I known who she was, I would have rushed over to her dorm room and introduced her to everyone I knew. I would have tried to help her. If only I had known. But I never really saw her.

We go through our lives hardly seeing one another. You can come to church and sit next in the same pew with someone for months and never know that the person is getting a divorce or that their father is dying of cancer. We say hello to one another. We say, “How are you?” and the expected answer is “Fine.” That’s all most of us want to hear, “Fine.” There is this social expectation that we will not really tell the truth, not really tell each other about our pain or our struggles. So we say fine.

It’s only places like Alcoholics Anonymous where people are forced to be brutally honest. Their addictions force them to the tell truth up front about who they are. They are told to say, “Hello, My name is Frank. I am an alcoholic.” But in the rest of the world we don’t do that, we don’t say, “Hello, My name is Jennifer. I am estranged from my sister.” Or “Hello, my name is Dan. I suffer from chronic depression.” Or “Hello, my name is Sally. I am lonely.” Instead, we just say, “I’m fine.” And we tell each other where we live and what we do for a living. And we do not know one another at all.

Look at the person next to you. See them. That person is unfathomable, deep and full of mystery. That person has experienced pain and suffering. That person is beloved of God.

I have started taking yoga. At the end of the class the teacher puts her hands together like this, and she says a Hindu word, Namaste. I have been saying it for months. But only a few days ago did someone tell me what it means. It means, I See You.

Esau's Blunder

And so, Esau despized his birthright.
                                                      Genesis 25:34

"I am going to another church."

"But why?" I asked. "Why are you leaving?"

"I just went to a Bible study and felt that God wanted me to go…"

And so the conversation goes. I find it so hard when someone decides to go somewhere else to church, but our back door must be open as our front door is open. This is not a cult and I cannot force people to stay. But it does break my heart.

It is not uncommon for the new member, feeling so moved and inspired at first, will one day come to church and find it so so, and it is at that point that they begin to look for another church home, a place where they can find that emotional high again. And they will move from church to church, seeking that feeling of being inspired. They will leave whenever someone disappoints them, when they have a disagreement, when they get bored.

The divorce rate is at an all-time high in this country. More and more people are falling out of love just as easily as they fell in love. They will come and tell me that they no longer love each other, but what they really mean is that they don’t have the in-love feeling anymore. And without that exciting feeling, they just don’t want to stick it out. From this new perspective, marriage is much less romantic and much more like hard work.

Jacob and Esau were brothers, twin brothers. They fought all the time. They even fought in their mother’s womb (Esau won that battle and came out first). And they were so different. Esau was read and hairy. Jacob was bare and pale.

Their parents made this competition worse by playing obvious favorites. Their father loved Esau best, their mother loved Jacob. Esau was a practical man, an impatient man. He was a hunter, used to being on the move. His brother was quieter, more thoughtful. It was Esau’s impatience that was his downfall.

One day, Esau came back from hunting and he was famished. And I don’t mean normal hunger, I mean the hunger of a growing young man who had just finished at least one full day of strenuous exercise. Esau could think of nothing but food.

I can just imagine the tent. The smell of sweaty exhausted Esau must have competed with the smell of the cooking. Esau would drop down on the floor of the tent in pure exhaustion. All he would want is some food. His mind would be totally focused on that one thing, food.

And Jacob had soup. Not just soup, stew, the red lentil stew. The kind whose scent can fill an entire house while it is cooking, making your mouth water and your stomach ache. Jacob had the stew. There was not enough for both of them.

“Give me some of that red stuff,” Esau says. He was a man of few words, and he meant what he said.

Jacob asks for Esau’s birthright in exchange for a bowl of stew and Esau, thinking only of the surface of life, agrees. He gives up the line of the patriarchs, the favor of God, for broth and vegetables.

In American culture, we believe that the faster something is accomplished the better. But fast is not always best. And those who seek results quickly may give up their birth-right for stuff.

Think of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Satan said, “Just take it. Don’t think about it. I know God said not to, but don’t think about that too much. Just take, just do it!”

How often the greatest mistakes in our lives are made because we did not give ourselves time to spend with God, time to wrestle with God, time to absorb and grow. The spiritual life is not like McDonalds. You don’t pull up to church in your car for McEucharist. We ask you to come week after week, month after month, to pray and to give regularly. This is a way of life that takes time to foster and grow. It is not instant gratification. It is called discipleship.

When Jesus speaks to us about the spiritual life, he speaks to us in terms that come from nature. He knew that the people of the Galilee would know about rain and harvest, plants and vines. He knew that this was their language and when he used these images, they would relax, open their hearts, and listen.

In today’s gospel, Jesus uses images of seeds falling on the ground. The seeds are made by God and they are good stuff. The seeds are the presence and love of God, which God showers upon you like rain, upon the good and the evil, the children and the elderly, the strong and the weak. God showers love and grace upon us all in equal amounts. The question is not whether or not God loves us, it is what we will do with that love and grace.

We are the soil. We are the ones who receive his grace, his love, his patience and kindness. But our soil varies a great deal depending on the kind of life that we have led. And good soil takes time to become rich and fertile.

Do any of you have compost piles? If so you know the process. God takes the experiences of our lives, our mistakes and our failures, and God lets them distill down within us, decomposing down into rich, fertile soil. The process takes time. Christians are baptized once and for all, but disciples take years to be formed.

I want to encourage all of you not to sell your birthright. You are a child of God, baptized and beloved. This world will ask you over and over again if you would like to trade in that birthright for a successful career, for romance, for respect. Just tell a lie, the snake will say. Just make fun of that person, don’t think about it, just do it. Just take that drug, that drink. Just gossip, cut someone down, hurt. It’s not that serious. Don’t think too much about it. Everybody else is doing it.

And before you know it, you have traded God in for popularity, for some money, for a good time. And you are left with nothing.

Seeds cannot live for long in shallow ground. They may spring up, but they will wither and die if they are not deeply rooted in the soil of life. Life with God takes time and it takes commitment. It takes years of love and generosity, prayer and community. It takes time.

God causes us to grow, not just in the inspired moments, but in the humdrum, the day in and day out faithfulness of life. Don’t chase the high, even if you are hungry for excitement or think that you must have something now. Be patient.

You have been given the most precious gift in the world. Don’t hand it off for ANYTHING.

This fall, we are not going to do a pledge drive. Instead we are going to ask you to make a life pledge. I am going to get you to think of your life as a gift to God, a long-term gift. How will you pray? What will you do to form a small group that meets weekly? What will you give? How will you devote time to your loved ones? How will you care for your body?

And you will say, why. Why are we being asked to pledge all these parts of our lives? Because true discipleship takes a long time. It takes consistency and devotion. It takes a lifetime of prayer and a true community of people who know you intimately and meet with you regularly. It takes commitment.

And so, Jacob became the father of nations while Esau gave all that up for STEW.

God bless poor Esau. Let us not make the same mistake.

Freedom

One hundred and forty-eight years ago today, soldiers from this country fought against one another at the Battle of Gettysburg. On July 3rd of that year, the Confederate army charged the Union army on Cemetery Ridge in what would become known as Pickett’s Charge. The Union army fought off the Confederate soldiers with artillery fire. Young men died in droves. In the three day battle, 50,000 men died. Never has the United States lost more lives than we did in the war that we waged against ourselves.

I am from the North, a Yankee by ancestry. My husband is a Southerner, his family fought on the Confederate side. Sometimes I think about that Battle, how brother fought against brother and died. Blood soaked that field on that day. Men who could have loved one another were driven to kill one another.

Abraham Lincoln would later say that it happened so that the liberty of all people could be restored. And that is what we give thanks for today, for our freedom. We give thanks to God today for this country and for the freedom that we all enjoy, the freedom to argue and disagree, the freedom to make decisions move and live where we wish. The freedom to be able to gather here in church and worship God without fear. Unless you have visited countries where there is no freedom, you cannot even begin to understand what we have here. It is part of the air we breathe, the fact that we are free. We take it for granted.

God wants you to be free. God wants us all to be free, but there are many kinds of bondage. And the bondage that is worst of all occurs when we are unable to forgive.

In the gospel, Jesus tells us that we are to pray for our enemies, that we are to love them. “Be perfect,” Jesus says, “Just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”

It is the highest form of love, the love of your enemies. I cannot say that I am very good at it. It is the stuff that makes the gospel unique in every way. It is at the heart of the message of Jesus. We are to pray for those people who hate us and persecute us. Pray for them and love them.

This means that, as a country, we must pray for Al-Quaida. This means that, as an individual, you must pray for the woman who hates your guts and tells everyone how awful you are. And you can’t just pray for her to fall into a deep pit. You must pray for her wellbeing.

Why must we pray for our enemies? Because if we do not forgive them, our hatred and resentment will drive us to pieces.

In the movie True Grit, a 14-year-old girl named Maddie goes on a hunt for revenge. Her father was killed by a man named Tom Cheney. She considers it her duty to hire killers and avenge her father’s death. This act of revenge will set her free from the hatred and grief that consumes her. So she makes her way through the dust and violence of late 1800’s West to find a man who will act out her aggression. And once she has found him, a man with what she calls True Grit, she rides with him out into the wild to catch and murder this Tom Cheney.

It is a story of despair. The man she has hired is a drunk who has shot more men than he can count. They are accompanied by a Texas Ranger who is also on a mad hunt for the same man. When they finally come across this enemy, Maddie succeeds in shooting him, but the kickback from her gun sends her flying backwards into a pit where her arm is broken and she is bitten by a rattler.

Maddie’s life is spared but her arm is amputated. She never marries and spends her life remembering her trip of revenge. But she is not free. She is never free.

Not forgiving someone, it’s like drinking poison and hoping that the enemy will die. Maddie sought revenge and she consumed her life with it.

Be perfect, Jesus said. As your heavenly Father is perfect. The word in the ancient Greek is complete. Be complete, be whole. Do not drive yourself into pieces over the wrongs of another person. Forgive them, love them, and gain your life, gain your freedom.


Who is it that makes you really angry? Who is it that treats you unfairly or makes you feel unworthy? Everyone has someone who rubs them the wrong way. And many of the people who treat us poorly are very close to us.

Whoever it is that really makes you angry, whoever it is that really gets your goat, it is that person that you must study and come to understand, because they will teach you something valuable about yourself. If you are to declare your independence from them, then you must know them and even love them.

Think back to the Revolutionary war and the Declaration of Independence. This country was defined by its enemy. We wanted freedom from the tyranny of Britain. We wanted to be a people who were free to elect our own rulers, free to make our own decisions, pay our own taxes. It was Britain’s rule of us, Britain’s taxation without representation that brought us to know ourselves. You could say that our enemy was our best teacher. Because of our vehement need to define ourselves as free, we created a democratic nation. Our greatness was influenced most by our enemy. If we hadn’t wanted so badly to be independent, if we hadn’t wanted so badly to be free, we might not have become who we are today.

Do you want to be truly free? If you do then you must declare your independence from the ones who treat you worst by praying for them and yes, by loving them. By love, I don’t mean feeling all warm and fuzzy towards them and I don’t even mean that you should not defend yourself. I mean that you should understand them and want what’s best for them. I mean that you should trust God enough to place them in God’s hands.

We are defined more by our enemies than by our friends. So we’d better get to know them well.

At our wedding, some of JD’s relatives flew up North. These folks had never been to the North. JD’s tone-deaf Uncle Homer from Tennessee danced at the reception and sang out loud. JD hired a Memphis funk band and the southern blues rocked the house in Connecticut. North married South and it was a blast.

My brother and father decorated our Jeep with all the normal just married stuff. We were to drive down to Kennedy airport just outside of New York City the next morning. As we got into the city, something incredible happened.

Normally nothing makes me more frustrated than driving in New York City. It is like being trampled. Everyone is honking, there are no lanes, people lean out their windows just to swear at you. Everyone hates everyone, it is just part of the deal.

We landed in a traffic jam at a toll booth outside of the city. “Oh, no,” JD said. “This is going to last forever.”

Then something amazing happened. A souped up BMW, blasting rap music, beside us, honked his horn.

“JUST MARRIED! COME ON!!YEAH!!”

He let us in. Then another old junky car, with Mexican guys all crowded inside started cheering. The cars began to move. Audis and Vans, trucks and beetles. Everyone understood what had happened to us, everyone was honking and cheering. The lines just seemed to part. Everyone was smiling and waving. It was like the Kingdom of heaven.

I had never seen anything like it. I had never felt more free than that day, in the middle of a traffic jam.


If you truly want to be free, then you must love your enemies. Love them and forgive them.

Trinity

In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was without form and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the Spirit of God moved over the waters.

This is the very first sentence of the Bible. And already we are talking about God in two forms, the One who creates and the Spirit who moves or the Hebrew means broodes or sweeps, wanders or dances. And the darkness, it covers the face of the deep, but the deep in Hebrew also means the chaos. And the Spirit moves over the face of the waters while God makes everything.

And when God speaks, God says, Let US make man in OUR image…”

Why Us? Why the royal We? For thousands of years, we did not understand why, but, then again, there was much about God that we did not understand.

Then Jesus came, and he told us that he was the Son of God, that he was one with the Father in Heaven. And we were more confused still. And just before Jesus left us, he instructed his followers to baptize and to do so In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Why did he say it this way?

It was not until the third century that theologians came up with the word TRINITY. The Three-in-One concept, a way of pointing to God. It is theology at its best. It is poetry. It tells us a deep truth about God.

God is One and yet God is three. And this makes no sense. Which is exactly the point. We cannot understand God and the Trinity, fundamentally, cannot be understood. Each time someone has tried to explain the Trinity rationally, their theory becomes a heresy. The Trinity is Mystery. Nothing can be one and three at the same time, it defies all rational explanation. But isn’t that just perfect for God?

The Trinity teaches us much about the nature of God. Not only can God not be understood, but God is not alone. God was never alone. We were not created because God was lonely. God has all community and all love within the Divine self. God is complete in a way that you are I are not.

And God is ever-changing, ever-moving. The number three is unbalanced, it is dynamic, it moves and changes. God is always doing a new thing. God is full of surprises.

A week and a half ago, Tim Tuller came to the organ to practice and found that he had company. There was a possum who seemed to have taken up residence in the choir stalls. So Tim consulted Robert Hyde, our properties manager, and they decided to set a trap for Mr. Possum. After all, it was essential to catch the beast. Having a possum join the choir on Sunday might not go over too well. So they put some meat in the cage and set the trap.

But there was just one problem, the possum did not take the bait. No one seemed to be able to catch the little beast. Until finally, on Sunday morning, one of the Vergers came to the rescue and caught the possum with a bucket. Don’t ask me how this was done, the Vergers are a group with many mysterious skills. But God did a new thing at this Cathedral, and we decided to feature a color picture of the possum in the E Eagle for posterity.

God is ever-moving, ever full of surprises. God is Trinity and the Trinity is not only mysterious, it is surprising. God as Trinity plays with us, dances with us. God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are always wanting to show us a new thing. I think God brought us a possum to make us smile.

How could God be ever-changing and yet eternally the same? Again, it is beyond all human comprehension. Don’t even try to understand!

A few years ago, I was celebrating the Eucharist in Kansas. We were midway through the service. I had just made the announcements and was about to go up to prepare the altar when something happened. A voice came over the sound system…

THIS IS GOD.

I just stood there. Was there a drunk man who had gotten hold of a microphone? What was going on? Was it really God? There was nothing about this in the Prayer book…I just stood there for a moment and then I said, “Well, I’m glad that you’re here.”

I worried that God might speak again at the service and if so, I did not know what else to say. But God was silent. It was not until after the service that I discovered what happened. One of the older youth, whose voice had changed and had a deep baritone, was testing the microphone in the fellowship hall. For some unknown reason, it sounded in the sanctuary.

Open your eyes. God does new things with us every day. God comes up with new ideas and new plans. God plays with you and loves to show you a new thing. As Alice Walker wrote in her book, The Color Purple, “I think it makes God mad when you pass by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it…” God loves you and is ever changing, ever dancing with you.

I painted an icon this week. All my adult life, I have wanted to paint an icon. For well over 20 years, I have gazed at the face of Christ to say my prayers , looking at his face before I fell asleep each night and as I woke in the morning. I knew that I wanted to paint his face, but I also knew that I was not a painter.

I am the kind of person who buys paints and paper and with a lot of excitement, starts to paint. Then what gets put on the paper shocks me because it is terrible! I do not understand how to paint perspective, I don’t have a clue about color and I generally make a mess. So I had settled on coloring books with Max until this icon workshop came around.

We painted for 5 days from 8:30 to 4. We prayed and generally kept silence while we painted.

It was like loving Jesus every minute. I got to think about what his hands might have looked like, his face, his hair. And every day was full of surprises. I was shocked to see how much he looks like everyone I love, how much my own he is. The painting itself was full of surprises, new discoveries every day.

I want you to think of God not as something stagnant and boring, like some adult figure who sits stagnantly in heaven, observing your every move. Think of God instead as three-in-one, completely beyond your comprehension, yet always moving and dancing and loving. Like the ocean, think of God as always looking different to you, always revealing something new, something beautiful. Think of God as speaking to you in new and changing ways every day, through color and sight and sound. Wake up to the presence of the Holy Trinity that surrounds you and embraces your life. The more you look, the more you will see Him: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Are We There Yet?

It took one hour to get from my childhood home in New Haven , Connecticut to Salem, where we got to see my cousins. One hour. And yet, it seemed like a lifetime. I remember vividly sitting in the backseat, fighting with my little brother and asking the same question over and over again, “Are we there yet?”


Sure enough, I hear echoes of my childhood self when we take road trips today. TV and games help, but there is still the same longing question that often comes from the backseat. “Are we there yet?” One time Max asked this question just twenty minutes into a trip from Kansas to Colorado. I did not have the heart to tell him how much we were not there yet. After all, his mind could not have grasped the ten hour trip at the tender age of two.

As we move further and further into the Easter celebration, we move deeper into the story of Christ’s resurrection. Today we remember how, after appearing to the disciples many times in the resurrected form, Jesus ascended into heaven. He left bodily, physically. And he would never come back in that way again.

But before Jesus left, the disciples asked him the same question that I asked my parents so long ago, the same question that Max asked me. Are we there yet?

The disciples wanted to know if this was it. Was this the end of the world, the time when Christ would come in all his glory and defeat all the darkness, the time for us to rise with him to eternal life? Was this it? Are we there yet?

And Jesus looks at them and gives them the same answer that he gives us two thousand years later, It is not for you to know the times or the periods that the Father has set…

It is not for you to know.

Just look at things from our vantage point today. We are now more than two thousand years after the ascension and still, we wait. The disciples could not have conceived of this. Their minds would not have grasped it. Just as you and I cannot grasp God’s timing today.

2012 has become the next hotspot in terms of end of the world foretelling. Evidently, the Mayan calendar ends on that year. Probably, this is because the Mayans could not conceive of the human race lasting longer than this, but many people have taken this to mean that the end of the world is to occur in 2012.

I do not believe any of this. You see, I truly think that Jesus knew what he was talking about when he told them that it is not for us to know. Whenever human beings get in the business of fortune telling, of trying to examine the future as if it is some game that God has given us clues to, some kind of puzzle that can be solved if we just piece together slivers of our lives or the lives of others, we make a mess and we waste our time. Jesus told us that this kind of thing is God’s business. We are not to know.

I walked through the MOSH museum yesterday. They have a great planetarium. There are photographs from the Hubble spacecraft: photographs of nebula, of whole galaxies dancing in the darkness, of blue stars and supernova. These photos represent events that are so vast and I cannot take in their size. They are so beautiful that I find myself wanting to stare at them for hours. They display the glory of God, a glory that is simply beyond human understanding. As I stood before them, I felt awe.

In the movie Contact, Jodie Foster is a scientist who courageously volunteers to travel light years away from earth in a ship designed by aliens. She sees beauty that is so spectacular, so beyond human comprehension, that she finds herself speechless. She tries to record all that she sees by speaking into a tape-recorder, but when she comes to the events of the cosmos, she pauses in great silence and she says, “They should have sent a poet….They should have sent a poet.”

Why is it so hard for us to simply not have the answers? Some things are simple to great for words. Some things simply cannot be described or calculated. Why can we not leave certain things up to God? The disciples wanted the whole story wrapped up in their life-times, they wanted it all clean and neat. What was about to happen was so much larger than that.

People will often ask me about the salvation of souls. When a man dies who was angry or who took his own life, I will be asked the question, “Is he going to hell?” But the truth is that I cannot answer, or I could answer but my answer would be insufficient. I do not know the times and I do not know the places. All I know is what Jesus promised, that if we know him and love him we will come to Him.

And whenever we get into the business of determining the salvation of others, we get in just as much trouble as we do when we try to figure out the schedule for the end of the world. We just make a mess of things. Why can we not simply leave this up to God? It is our job to tell others about Jesus and our love of him, but salvation is not for us to determine. It is God’s job, not ours.

When Jesus ascends into heaven, the disciples are left standing there staring after him. They no doubt are wondering where he went, wondering if he will come back. They don’t want to move on with their lives because that would confirm that he is gone, so they just stand there gaping. Two men, messengers of God, angels, have to appear and tell the men that he has gone, but that one day, he will come again in the same way that he left.

So the disciples go home, or the closest thing that they have to home. They go to the Upper Room and they meet together, lost and confused. And that is where the Holy Spirit comes.

If they had stayed looking up to heaven, trying to calculate Jesus’ next arrival, they might never have become the Church. The Holy Spirit came to them when they went back to their lives and tried to figure out how to live in the present moment. For the Holy Spirit does not come in the past nor does God live in the future. God meets us in the now and helps us to see more clearly now, not then, but now.

I would love to see Jesus come again. I would love for Him to come and make all the wrongs right, fix the brokenness of the world, ease the pain, punish the wicked. Sometimes I still look up to heaven and want to ask, Are we there yet? But every time I do, I just get this deep silence in response. For I cannot begin to fathom the answer.

When we were on our way to Colorado and Max asked that question, I leaned over from the front seat (JD was driving) and I looked at his little face. “It’s going to be a while, buddy,” I said. “But I will be with you every step of the way.”

Maybe that is the better question, instead of asking Jesus, Are we there yet or Jesus, Is so and so going to heaven, or Jesus What will happen next, what if we asked one simple question,

God, will you stay with me, every step of the way?

I think that God answers that question, for we can fathom His answer.

Yes, he says. Yes.

Sheep

This past Friday night, the Baccalaureate service for Episcopal High was held at the Cathedral.  The procession was very long, with well over a hundred seniors, faculty, Board of Trustees, Administration and clergy. Most of the seniors sat in the first few rows, but one row was directed to sit in wooden chairs in front of the altar rail. The vergers ushered them to their seats. They looked around, feeling uncomfortable.  And then they all stood up and promptly left their seats, marching to the back of the transepts where they sat in folded chairs. When I got to the front, I wondered where they were.  Once I located them in the back, I wondered if I should stop the service and herd them back to their assigned seats. I decided not to, but I thought to myself, "Ah, sheep!"


When the early Christians began to form a community, there were no processions and noformal liturgy, but they did have rules. And their rules were no joke. Many of us today would see their community as communist or at least monastic. They had no private ownership. Everyone brought their money and belongings to the community and the leaders divided it all up. In other words, everybody shared.

When Ananias and Sapphira sold their property, they only gave the apostles a portion of the income, holding back some of it for themselves. When Peter accuses Ananias, the man falls down dead. And later, when his wife comes in, Peter asks how much she sold the land for. She, too, lies and gives the lower price. Peter accuses her as well, and shows her the feet of her husband, who lies dead on the floor but the disciples have covered up his body with a sheet so only his feet are showing. When Peter accuses her of lying, Saphira too, falls down and dies.

It is not exactly an advertisement for private ownership. But how do we compare the community of the book of Acts with our lives today? It would be simply unacceptable for me to tell all of you that we are all going to share our money and belongings. It would be chaos. You would not accept that and even I would wonder if it was really a good idea.

I think that we get stuck on the ownership issue and fail to neglect the main point of the early Christians. That point being that they were really interconnected. For Peter and Paul, life as followers of Christ meant life together, as a group. You did not believe alone. You believed in community.

A man visited with me after a funeral a few weeks ago. He told me how the funeral meant so much to him, that it warmed his heart like some kind of resounding bell had been sounded deep inside, a bell that had been silent for a long time. I invited him to return to church.

“I’m spiritual, not religious,” he said. He told me that he prayed alone, in the morning. He liked to walk in the woods and contemplate the majesty of God. “I used to go to church, a long time ago. But the people disgusted me. They were so petty. I just figured I’d be closer to God out here.”

Being together is frustrating. It is much easier to pray alone. In church, we have kind people and we have jerks. Sometimes it is so hard to get along with one another that we can hardly worship. Believe me, there are times when I myself feel like fleeing out to some pasture alone to contemplate God. It would be a heck of a lot easier.

But the disciples saw the Risen Lord in community. Even Mary Magdalene, who saw the Lord alone, was told by him to go and tell the others that he had risen. Most of the Resurrection appearances were in the company of at least a few of the community. The Holy Spirit came to the Church when they were gathered in community. It is when we come together that God is most potently present.

“When two or three are gathered in my name,” Jesus said, “I am in the midst of them.”

Why? Why not just let us be church alone? It would be so much easier.

The reason why God told us to worship together is because God knew how very interconnected we are. We are not really ourselves unless we are together. Human beings are communal creatures. As much as we get into fights and skirmishes with one another, we function as one body. We were meant to be together, not alone.

Jesus tells us that we are like sheep. And sheep always travel in packs. If they wander off alone, it is usually bad news. Their safety and their salvation are in sticking it out together. And that is what we are supposed to do.

In America, we live by a myth called the Self. We truly believe that you can make yourself happy. We train you to think for yourself, focus on your own health, your body, your education, your career. We ask one another “How are you?” as if it is the individual whose mood is most important. And we neglect to recognize how much the lives of those around you affect your own happiness.

If a newborn baby is not held, it will die. So you must be held and supported and you must hold and support, in order to be fully alive. We sheep have to stick together.

Max and I are reading a book. It is called Follow the Drinking Gourd. It is about the Underground Railroad and how the slaves in the South were led to freedom before the Civil War. These slaves were taught a song by a man named Peg Legged Joe. Peg Legged Joe would hire himself out as a handyman to plantation owners. While he was working on the plantation, he would teach the slaves a song. Follow the Drinking Gourd, the song went, Follow the Drinking Gourd. The song had details about how to follow the Drinking Gourd, what we would call the Big Dipper, northwards to freedom. The song detailed markers along the way north. Once the slaves had the song well-memorized, Peg Legged Joe would move on to another plantation, to teach more slaves the song.

The bravest slaves would follow the song, letting the big dipper led them north to freedom by night. But the slaves would not have made it were it not for the people that they met on the way. They were hustled into barns, fed in secret rooms, hidden in wagons full of corn. Mile by mile they traveled on the wings of those they met. Without the community of the Underground Railroad, they would not have survived.

Think over your life for a moment. You would not be here were it not for the love of others. Someone fed you as a child. Someone gave you a job reference. Someone introduced you to your best friend, your spouse. Someone invited you to church. We do not exist apart from one another. We cannot survive without one another.

And so God comes most potently to us when we are together. In fact, I am not allowed to celebrate the Eucharist alone. It simply does not work. The bread and wine will not become the Body and Blood of Christ for me alone, only for us.

The early church knew that they must stick together. The disciples shared everything because they knew the truth, that everything is ours, not mine. My future belongs to my children, my past to my parents. Last Sunday I stood between our former Dean, Edward Harrison and our Seminarian, Quinn Parman, and I realized it that I was standing between the past and the future. I am part of something much larger than myself. That’s why we worship together, because this is much bigger than any one of us.

When you wake up in the morning, don’t just think about how you are doing, what your day will bring, think about us. Think about your church, your family, your country. How are WE doing? That is really the question. For you cannot really think of yourself apart from your community.

It is such a relief, the day that you leave me behind and begin to think about us. It is such a relief because not everything is up to you. You are one of the sheep. I am one of the sheep. And we are most joyful, most faithful, yes, most challenged, but most blessed when we are together.

Slow of Heart

Did not our hearts burn within us as he walked with us on the road, as he opened the Scriptures to us?
                                                                                                  The Gospel of Luke


When the two disciples were on the road to Emmaus, they were processing. So much had happened in the past week and they needed just to talk about it. They were trying to understand what had happened to Jesus and how to reconcile the rumors that they had heard about his resurrection. They must have been the kind of friends who just need to get away together and talk and talk about the events that transpired. Two extraverts who trust one another, they hoped to bring each other clarity, or at least a sense of closure. Their minds were working furiously trying to catch up with what had happened, and their hearts were troubled.


When Jesus met them, they did not recognize him. They thought that he was a stranger, a fellow traveler, so they used this opportunity to spill their guts to him. They told him everything, about how they wanted Jesus to be the Messiah and how he disappointed them by being crucified. They told him about how confused they were, about how Jesus died but people were saying that he had risen. All of this just poured out of them for they needed someone to talk to, someone objective who could clarify for them what all of this meant. Someone who was capable of listening.

When they finished their story, the stranger spoke. Now, we would expect him to console the disciples or to reflect upon what they said. But Jesus responded in the strangest way. He yelled at them. He chastised them. You Fools! He says. You are slow of heart.

You are slow of heart.

What does Jesus mean, slow of heart? When Jesus expresses his disappointment, he does not talk about their minds or their intelligence. He does not call them ignorant or stupid. Instead he talks about the state of their hearts. He is disappointed with the state of their hearts.

What is so important about the heart and what does the heart have to do with recognizing God?

Sam Grinstead was a doctor. He came to Baltimore and found himself partnering with an older doctor who ran a thriving general practice out of his old Victorian home in a nice section of downtown. It seemed natural when Sam proposed marriage to the doctor’s youngest daughter, Delia. She was her father’s favorite, so pretty, newly graduated from college. She seemed content to be his secretary and his wife. She was fifteen years younger and seemed to adore her new husband. She never had to move out of her childhood home and when her father died, her husband just took over.

Sam and Delia had three children, two boys and a girl. They both worked hard to bring in new patients and send their children to private schools. Sam depended on Delia for everything. Delia busied herself not just with secretarial work but with carrying her children from one place to the next, filing medical insurance bills for the practice, telephoning patients, making lunches, volunteering in school.

By the time that their youngest child was 15, Delia felt as if she were suffocating. Her chest hurt and she could not explain why. Without being able to articulate anything, she left her husband suddenly, walking away on the beach at a family vacation and hitching a ride to a small town an hour away. She rented a room and went to work for a law firm as a secretary. Everyone thought that she was crazy. She left a good man, a doctor at that. And what about her three children? Even she thought that she What kind of a mother was she? Even Delia herself thought that maybe she was crazy, but something was hugely wrong with her married life. Her heart was just breaking.

The more she reflected the more she realized. Her husband did not even look at her. He did not know her. He did not know how she had changed and how she felt. He did not know when she was sad or angry. He never listened to her or asked her questions. They lived like two strangers alone in a marriage. And her heart was dying.

When she left, Sam began to realize what he had done. It hit him all of a sudden, late at night. He realized that he had never hit her or abused her in any way. But he had not seen her. She had become invisible to him because he thought that he knew her. He would have told everyone that he loved is wife. But in reality, he did not love her at all. He just cared for her. He did not really even know who she was.

When Peter steps out before a crowd of Jews in the beginning of the Book of Acts, he tells them that they missed the Messiah. He tells them that the man that they crucified, the man that they hated, this Jesus of Nazareth, that he was the promised savior of God. And they had not even recognized him. They thought that they knew who he was, but they were wrong. They were not listening. And they had made a terrible mistake.

When Peter says this, the Scripture says that the Jews were cut to the heart, just like Sam was cut to the heart when he realized the truth about his marriage. The heart often knows things that the mind cannot grasp or reason. And sometimes, when we say that we know someone, we made up our minds about this person and we really do not know them at all.

The Book of Acts is a story about a change of heart. The people who become the first Christians did so because their hearts are changed. They learned how to listen to God. They learned that God often does new and different things, things that we could never have guessed or predicted. They learned that we cannot assume that what we thought was right yesterday is right today. They learned to love God with their hearts and to live their lives by this love.

Love means never defining a person but being open to the fact that they are unfathomable, capable of surprising you and changing you. To love someone is to honor the mystery of God within them. Love is something that is always listening, always honoring, never fully comprehending. The moment we cease to listen to one another is the moment when we cease loving one another.

When Delia came home for their daughter's wedding, Sam asked to speak to her alone.  He told her how sorry he was, how much he had failed to see her, failed to know her.  And she came back to him.  You could say that he departure jumpstarted his heart.  And he learned to love for real.

When the disciples finally recognize Jesus, he disappears. But they remember how their hearts burned within them as he walked with them, how their hearts burned as he opened the Scripture to them.

Their hearts burned.

Every Sunday, we read the following prayer at the beginning of our worship…

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known and from you no secrets are hid. Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts…

Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts…

It is as if we are asking God to clean our hearts, to make them a blank slate so that we are open to the newness of love and the ever changing revelation of God and of the ones we love.

If we are to love God with all our heart and soul and mind, we must learn to listen to God. We must realize that God is going to do a new thing with us every day, that God’s love will live and grow within us. If we are to love God, then we must learn to love one another with the same kind of open devotion, realizing that the people we love are not stagnant creatures which can be defined but rather magnificent creatures who are ever changing and growing, who must be seen and heard each day anew, as if they were never known to us before.