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