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2 Advent C: God is Manna

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Well, preparing for today
was humbling and challenging.

Last week, inspired by the birth of my grandson,
I reached for the intangible.
I sought to capture an experience
rather than define or describe
a theological idea
or liturgical season.

Like any effort to capture an experience
for someone else, it failed;
but it failed pretty well.
It wasn’t a laser pointer
but it did hover poetically enough
in the vicinity of the experience I wanted to evoke,
at least according to those who stayed for the discussion.
And if Facebook is any indicator,
it reached about two-hundred more viewers
than an average sermon post.

So, it’s like that old preacher’s adage:
If you take your shirt off to make a point one Sunday,
what are you going to do the next?

Staring at the readings for today,
I just did not want to fall back into the usual –
which is taking an archeological pick and brush
to carefully remove some top layers
of historical soil and theological detritus
so we can see the context
around which the original text was written.

Don’t get me wrong,
I still think that is important.
In fact, I went back to see how I had
addressed these readings in the past.
Since they come up every three years,
I took a peek at 2 Advent, Year C,
all the way back to the year 2000.
I was not impressed.

So I want to lean on T. S. Eliot some more,
even though we do not have a reading from
the Four Quartets this week.
I want to stick our fingers
into the wet glob of goo
his poetry does, with its notion of the unity
of past, present and future.

The unity of past-present-and future is oh-so abstract
in comparison to talking about
John the Baptists’ historical relationship to Jesus.

It’s also not as concrete
as what we know about those two heroes
as we gaze back through the haze
of the Jewish-Roman war
that buried both of them
beneath a historical layer of sand.
The unity of past-present-and-future
is the stuff that cotton candy is made of
and can easily leave us with nothing
but a sugar high.

That’s the risk, but here goes.
In a culturally historic interview with Bill Moyers,
the academic, Joseph Campbell,
who specialized in comparative mythology,
offered us a brilliant metaphor
about the evolving lenses
through which human beings have viewed
life, meaning, and hope.

He pointed out that the tallest buildings
in the great centers of power,
were icons that reflected the central myth-making
power in each epoch of human history.

At first, temples to the gods and massive cathedrals
took the place of pride
as the focal-point of past civilizations.
But at some point,
at least in Europe if not elsewhere,
those religious buildings
become dwarfed by citadels of political power
and governance.
Great domes, palaces,
and massive governmental plazas
replaced cathedrals as the central focus of cities.

But then, beginning in the twentieth century,
even those most prominent government complexes
are made to look shabby
by huge modern towers of concrete, glass, and steel
built by corporate multi-national conglomerates.
Campbell didn’t live to see it,
but the grandest icons of that world now
are the huge sprawling campuses
of Facebook, Google, Amazon, and
other Tech companies.

It is a visual, even visceral example
of how past-present-and-future
live side by side in the same moment.
In cities both large and small,
these icons of human myth-making
live with one another.

In Geneva, we have 19thcentury
Episcopal, Presbyterian, and Methodist Church buildings
on the hill looking down on
at a 20thcentury prominent City Hall in the middle of town.
But we do not have a dominant commercial building
because the economy is diffused
between small business, retail, and campus.

The point is this:
John the Baptist and Jesus
live side-by-side in the 21stcentury
with Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and Neil DeGrasse Tyson –
and between them are all the highfaluting theologians,
criminal priests,
saints, martyrs, and black preachers
that have filled the air
with their ideas and witness.

It is simply impossible
to lift up the Biblical text
as if it were a photographic negative
we could hang to dry in a darkroom
so that we can see what it all really looked like.
Emperors Nero and Constantine;
Doctrines Nicene and Trinity;
theologians Augustine, Aquinas, and Niebuhr;
scandals Galileo, Inquisition, Colonialism,
witch-burning, and sex-abuse;
movements Reformation, Evangelical, Pentecostal, Fundamentalist, and Monkey-Scopes;
not to mention Evolution, Industrial Revolution, Einstein, Hubble, and landing on Mars;
all live side-by-side
in the same moment
with John and Jesus.

We are a jumble.

You and I cannot know Jesus and John
without the presence of Karl Marx,
Madam Curie, and Frederick Douglas.

Just think about that…
All that past is folded into this present moment.
And the future?

We know the likelihood
that a comet of enormous proportions,
like the one that blotted out the dinosaurs,
is in our future.
We may not be alive to suffer it,
but we know it is out there – just a lottery pick away.

We also know that the chickens of our decadence
are coming home to roost too –
environmental degradation caused by
our willful neglect, waste, and denial
is piling up and may soon swoop over us
with accelerating speed.

We know that in the future artificial intelligence
and robotics will eliminate nearly all the jobs
and many of the professions
that were elements of the Industrial Revolution
and Age of Information.

If Da Vinci’s drawings of helicopters,
tanks, and flying machines
are an example of the human imagination
wandering centuries ahead of its ability to actualize it,
consider the implications of movie narratives
such as Star Wars, the Hunger Games, and the Matrix.

You see?
Past, present, and future
are all folded into the dough
and we cannot separate it.
It all gets baked together
and is in us.
But do you know who or what
lives only in the present?
The one thing
that is neither past or future
is God.

While we can fiddle with past descriptions of God,
and read copious predictions about God,
the experienceof God
is once and only
in the present – now.

God is manna – that divine food
given to the escaped slaves
to sustain them in the wilderness.
Remember its properties?

It could be eaten
but not stored or hoarded.
It could be harvested at that moment
but never left to the next day.

God is our manna,
available in the moment
but never truly grasped in the past
or predicted in the future.

At Christmas,
we can tell the story of baby Jesus
but we cannot re-create the moment.
At Easter,
we can re-tell about the empty tomb,
but we cannot duplicate it.
At communion,
we can remember what Jesus did
but the experience of that love
is only available
in any given moment we are in.
You see, that is what I think we are,
as church in the 21st century.
We understand now,
that those lenses
which claimed our fidelity
are only blurred glass through which we see darkly.
Whether temple,
state house, or bank,
none of them hold the truth about God,
and only God holds the truth about whosewe are,
and whatwe are,
and, most importantly,
what it is we can genuinely hope for.

So, we come here, around this Wayfair altar,
seeking an experience with God,
and sharing our experiences
as we try to figure out with one another,
what they mean.
We have all this past –
these human geological layers of time and history
stacked one upon another –
and we have to sift through it.
And for some reason, it is better done together, with others.

We know sifting through history won’t give us
the experiencewe’re looking for,
but maybe it will open us up
to the experience of God we seek?

And we have all this fear, anxiety, and blindness
about the future –
it is in the air all around us like dust particles
filling our lungs, hearts, and minds with confusion.
By coming together
and sharing Eucharist and food
and the questions on our hearts,
maybe it will open us up to the experience of God we seek?

Maybe that is why we come here in the 21stcentury –
that’s my guess anyway.
We come here,
whether we can name it at the time or not,
to get open.
We come here
to use the past to soften us,
and to look into the future to rattle us,
all so that we might be open
in the moment –
which is the only place where God lives,
and moves, and has being.

If you were to ask me why I come here,
to church, to Eucharist,
to hanging out with fine people like you,
that is why.
A place like this…is one of the few places we can come
where other people gather,
with the potential
to open us up to God
who is present only here
and only now,
only in this moment.

1 Advent 2018: Quivering over the unity of past, present, and future

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Well, there is nothing to bring on Advent
like waiting for a baby to be born,
and nothing harder than trying to write a sermon
than when your daughter is in labor.

Young Declan Miller-Uueda was born on Thursday morning –
which is my sermon-writing time – a healthy boy
with a happy, healthy mom and dad holding him.
Needless to say, gramma is there now,
and I will be soon.

I want to say, “Thank you!”
for the incredibly thoughtful surprise grandparents shower
you gave us in anticipation of his birth.
My daughter, Anne, and her husband, Dan,
were also touched by the kindness of people
they don’t even know
extending the love of community across the miles.
Thank you.

Now, Advent.

T.S. Eliot had a thing in his poetry about the unity of time –
it was a theological thing.
Eliot was deeply theological, an Anglican’s Anglican.
In fact, when I was in seminary
I took a semester course just on Eliot’s “Four Quartets.”
The only other semester course devoted to one person,
at least that I can remember, was to Paul.
I don’t think Jesus even had one whole semester
devoted just to him!

Anyway, Eliot had this notion of the unity of time –
that past, present, and future
are or will be one.
He plays with that idea over and over and over again.
It is, what I call, “a thoughtwall.”

Now, just so you know,
that piece from Little Gidding we heard this morning,
Eliot wrote with Pentecost in mind.
But his quivering over TIME speaks of Advent too.

Advent is a thoughtwall,
because both the beginning
and end of TIME
are thoughts that seem impossible
to climb over or to peek over to the other side.

That strain of eschatology that runs through the bible,
some of which we call apocalyptic –
like that passage we read from Luke this morning,
and even the eye-squinting prophecy
from Jeremiah that imagines the future –
finger and fiddle with TIME
like a knot of fishing line.
From way, way back in human history,
we have been mesmerized by TIME
and tried to make sense of the relationship
between past, present, and future.

If we think about it,
even the mythology of heaven and hell and morality
is simply playing different notes on the same keyboard.
We try to make sense of the relationship
between what is happening now,
with what happens after we die,
and how all that hangs together
with the entire communion of saints.

Our ideas and theories
about the Afterlife
are only one of many unsuccessful human efforts
at understanding,
reconciling,
and making peace
with the past, present, and future.

T. S. Eliot was trying to do the same thing
in his poetry,
and I confess,
this sermon is a similar quivering.

But all of our speculations about TIME
are wrapped up with our smallness
as we huddle beneath the vast expanse of interstellar space.
We want toknow,
and we want to understand
and we want to have some sense of influence or control,
but we are just so very small.

My little grandson, Declan,
is cradled beneath a huge, impenetrable cosmos
of powers and forces,
elements and dynamics
before which he is completely powerless.
And truth be told, sixty years into the future
when he will be a full-grown man, God-willing,
that powerlessness before the cosmos will still be true.
That is a truth, a fact of our very existence,
and if it changes at all over time,
it is only infinitesimally.

Did you see the news articles
about the object hurling through space
from another solar system,
and passing by Earth
on its way to yet another solar system?
It was an oblong shape
measured to be 750 feet long
by 115 feet wide, reddish in color,
and made of metal.
In fact, some Harvard scientists
are speculating it is a “light sail” –
literally, a probe sailing on solar power
sent from intelligent sources
from another solar system.

Meanwhile, I look out at the oak tree
at the edge of my yard,
squirrels unselfconsciously poking around in the snow
scratching for nuts without an inkling
of solar probes in the vast reaches of space beyond us.
The difference between those squirrels and us
is not all that great
when we start widening our perspective
outward onto the universe.

Or my dog,
sitting at the window staring at the squirrels
with not one bit of an inkling
that TIME extends beyond that moment,
or that space lengthens
into billions of light years beyond her yard.
You and I, in the grand scheme of intelligence,
are not that much more sophisticated
than my dog or those squirrels,
and not that much more capable
of unpacking what is
and is not
out yonder.

If we can crawl up to that truth,
the hard and scary fact of our smallness,
we can begin to feel authentic humility,
and what it means to be in awe–
or as the ancients called it,
standing in the “fear of the Lord.”

By fear, they did not mean afraid, exactly.
They meant something more like that shaking,
shuttering joy I felt
even hundreds of miles away
from where Declan was born.

What I am trying unsuccessfully to point to,
to help us actually touch,
is a feeling –
or maybe it is more of a moment.
It is that moment of being awakened,
when something opens us, and out rushes…amazement.

Advent is best appreciated
as an embrace with that feeling – or experience –
rather than as an explanation
or idea
or some concept.
It is like Eliot’s effort to unify past, present, and future –
we can’t really do it
but trying to wrap our minds around it
brings us, sometimes, if we are lucky,
into that experience.

Maybe, it is more like looking
at a candle flame or the fire-light in the dark.

We can sit there thinking about fire,
and what we know about the physics and chemistry
that makes it possible
for wood or wax or wick to burn.
We can explain it
or we can enter the light –
literally, allow our thoughts to enter the flame
and experiencelight.
We can encounter the light
within the darkness and experienceit,
or we can miss that encounter and simply
remain in the explanation of it.
That is what I mean about embracing Advent.

This is where the church-thing we do
and spiritual community, is subversive.
We operate on a different level
but we do so in plain sight.
We begin a new year
and we start a new season
while everyone around us is still in ordinary time –
just going about their business
as if nothing had happened.
But we know something has happened,
and it is beyond rationality.
Something has happened,
and it is beyond normal awareness.
We are too small to see it
or hear it
or understand it,
but on some intuitive, maybe even musical level,
we know it is happening.

So we ritualize it –
and then we wait to see if, suddenly,
we will be forced open
and something like a wind will rise up from within us
and blow out in what can only be called amazement.
It sounds whacky and crazy, I know,
but that is what we are doing here
on an ordinary Sunday in this former wine bar
sharing prayers, song, and Eucharist.

So, I invite you into Advent,
not as an idea
or with some twenty-five cent theological explanation.
But as an experience.
Allowing ourselves to become open
to our smallness,
open to awe and joy
and unutterable amazement
before the window on deep space
or in the presence of a new born.

It brings a clog to our throat
and a stinging tear to our eyes
and somewhere inside we call out,
or quietly whisper,
“Thanks be to God.”

Proper 28 B 2018: Spiritual Symmetry

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There is a phobia or syndrome
whose name I’ve forgotten,
in which anxiety is centered in the dread
of a human structure collapsing.
When looking at a bridge for example,
or a tall building,
the person will obsess
about structural weaknesses
or points of vulnerability
and what could go wrong
to make it come tumbling down.

I have a mild case of that phobia
but when I was much younger
it was more pronounced.
I could get freaked out to the point
it would sometimes cause me
to get cold and clammy.

Here is an example.

I used to have season tickets
to The Ohio State football games.
For ten years I went to the 105,000-seat stadium
where I was crammed like a sardine
in with tens of thousands of others.
The stadium was built in 1922
and sometimes as the game went on
and fans cheered and shouted with vigor,
I would look above me at those huge steel girders
with rivets the size of my fist,
and all I could think about was…the Titanic.
“Hmmm,” I would muse to myself,
“the Titanic was built in 1911
with defective steel caused by human error
in the manufacturing process…”

Such thoughts led me to think about
escape routes
should the deck above me fall
as the thousands of bodies up there
started stomping their feet and singing,
“We will, we will, rock you!”

I see the humor in my thoughts,
and I did even then.
But not so much as a kid.
When I was young,
a passenger in my parent’s car
and everyone else enjoying the five mile drive
across one of the world’s longest
expansion bridges,
spanning the straights of Mackinaw, in Michigan,
I would push my face up against the window
and inspect the cables for fraying as we passed.

Later, as an adult,
flying home from Africa with Katy,
I revealed that the source of my white knuckles
was the thought
of the those little rivets in the wings popping out.
But even more troubling to me
than the idea of the plane crashing, I confessed,
was to then be eaten by a shark.
She assured me that we wouldn’t be alive
when we met the shark.

Well, I call such thoughts, “The Jesus Syndrome.”
Of course I would – but not
because I think of myself like Jesus.
I call it that because
it reminds me there is good reason
to have limited confidence in anything human,
and to always keep the long view,
even while trying to accomplish
the short-term task.

I love the image from today’s gospel
in which Jesus is gazing upon
the amazing Temple,
whose majesty was extolled
across the Roman Empire.
“Yep,” Jesus says matter of factly,
“one of these days those babies are coming down.”

If we think about the first century
and Judean and Galilean peasants
living in those parts,
there would not have been many superstructures
for them to ogle over.

Peasants did not travel far
and they would have had no access to
a palace, Praetorium, and coliseum.
The Temple in Jerusalem
would have been a unique experience
for someone marginalized like Jesus,
because it was a rare architectural giant
they could actually walk into –
even though, once inside, they would have had
very limited access.

Calling my little phobia “The Jesus Syndrome”
also comforts me with the idea
that Jesus had crazy thoughts too.

But this story reveals
that Jesus’ thoughts weren’t all that crazy.
His fantasy about the Temple falling down
turned out to be true.
Thirty-eight years after Jesus was executed
the Roman army reduced the Temple to ruins
and all that remains of it today
is that bitter irony called the “Wailing Wall,”
which rests underneath
the Muslim Temple Mount.

But there is something else to notice here too,
and we get a whiff of it in that squib from Daniel.

Every story has an ending.
Every story has an ending but, like beginnings,
not all endings are equal.
We have been washed and dried
in the Tumble Press of Walt Disney
in which every story has ahappyending.

The United States civic culture
is spun from the threads of happy ending stories
whether old Westerns,
political mythologies,
animated folk heroes or romance.

We rarely tell a story
that does not have a happy ending.
At least not in the popular culture.

Some streams of alternative culture
do let the end come with violence,
or without resolve,
but they are perceived to be dark,
cynical and negative.

Still, every story must have an ending.
We tend to think of the Gospel
as ending with the resurrection –
a kind of tortured happy ending, I suppose.

But that is not how Jesus
chose to end the story of his public ministry
in gospels of Mark, Luke or Matthew.
His last public story, in each of those Gospels,
is the one we heard in part today.
It is a story about the endof time
and it is a pretty dog-gone dark story.

In all three Gospels, the last story Jesus tells,
is provoked by some knuckle-headed pilgrim
ogling at the Temple
and exclaiming how beautiful it is.

Something about that sends Jesus
into his darkened depths
to forecast what is going to happen
at the end of time,
when God runs out of patience
or humans run out of options.

This is an element of the biblical narrative
I have ignored most of my professional career.
I have dismissed apocalypse and eschatology,
along with Fundamentalist talk of Armageddon
and the Grim Reaper.
Like most liberals, I focused instead,
on the stories and sayings of Jesus,
which I like a whole lot better.

I am not proud of my self-serving cowardice
but there it is.
We could explain away
the fact that the last public story Jesus tells
in all three Gospels,
is a story about a dark and violent ending
to human history.

But recognizing it is in all three gospels,
I think we have to take it seriously
rather than explaining it away.
Whether it was actually Jesus’ last story
or it was the story-tellers
placing it as Jesus’ last public story,
it was done with intention.

In other words, Jesus was living close to the end
and he knew, even if they didn’t,
that his compatriots
were living close to their end too.
It was plaguing his thoughts
and filling his heart,
so when someone made a stray comment
about the beauty of the stained-glass windows
– oops, I mean the glory of the Temple –
it evoked all that emotion in Jesus
and it came gushing out.

One of the best funeral sermons
I ever heard, was delivered
by a seventy-something year old priest,
talking to hundreds of seventy
and eighty-year-old friends
gathered to say good-bye
to a long-time associate.

The preacher began
by saying to his contemporaries,
that it was an auspicious occasion
for all of them to think about
what they wanted their own lives to stand for.

And then, he went on to ask
specific questions designed to provoke
an evaluation of the distance
between what we say we stand for
and how we actually live our lives.

It was brilliant,
and something I could not have preached
at the time, due to my youth.

I think that may be the kind of thing
Jesus was doing
by ending the story of his life
with a reminder of even the Earth’s mortality.
What do you stand for in this world?
What does your “one small and precious life”
mean in the vast sea of time and space?
Who are you exactly?
Who are you…and what do you want
your life to be remembered for?

As crazy as it may seem,
I think that is a wonderful Thanksgiving meditation.
It connects up with what we are grateful for
because, what we are grateful for
is probably associated
with what we want to be remembered for.

Those things we value most
are probably also the things
that we should want to assist others
with enjoying.

So, as we consider what we are grateful for,
we could also ask ourselves
whether or how we have assisted others
with gaining access to them as well.

Some of that is easy and just plain obvious.
We value good, nourishing food
and as we give thanks for it,
we could also ask ourselves when and how
we have enabled others to have access
to good, nourishing food too?
That could lead to a reflection
on those who make it possible for us to eat –
farm workers – immigrant farm workers –
farmers, truckers, and folks
who work at the grocery.
We are grateful for what they produce and deliver,
so what have we done, or what could we do,
to ensure they have access
to good and nourishing food also?

You see, it is an easy equation to contemplate.

This is a great time of year
to do a gratitude inventory –
brainstorm a list of all the people and things
we are especially grateful for.
Then we can do an inventory
of when and how we might be able
to assist others to access
those very things
we have so appreciated ourselves.

It doesn’t have to be a big, complicated list,
and we certainly do not have to carry
responsibility for the whole world on our backs.
I’m talking about simple inventory of our abundance.

There is a kind of spiritual symmetry
between what we are grateful for
and what we may be able to do
to return that very goodness to others.

My guess is, when all is said and done,
we would be pleased to be remembered
for providing to others
what we have been so grateful for ourselves.

Well, like I said,
all stories have an ending,
and all sermons do too – or at least,
we hope they do.

Mine is to give thanks
for this congregation, for our communal
courage
and strength;
and so to ask, how might we,
as a spiritual community,
encourage and strengthen others around us?

May you have a blessed Thanksgiving this week.

 

 

Proper 27 B, 2018: Written on the pages of your life

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In spiritual direction
there is an exercise – more than that really,
a concept –
that sometimes helps
with tracing the movement of God
in one’s life.
It is the idea that our lives, our
life stories, are scripture.
It turns out that when we learn to read
and tell our own stories,
in the same way we learn to read
other people’s stories
or those in books and in the bible,
then we begin to see the movement of the spirit
in a way we had not seen before.

In other words, every person’s life is scripture –
God written upon every day
and every hour
and every minute of every person.

In 2013, I left full-time professional ministry
as I had known it for thirty-three years,
and moved to a place
I had never heard of
until a couple of months before we moved there.
I embarked on work I had never done before –
which was serving a small congregation
in a small town,
in a very rural area,
not to mention
trying to become a published writer.

There was no way to know in advance
what, if anything, God was writing upon my life.
But it turns out, that was no different
than any other day in my life –
or yours for that matter.
Neither you nor I know
what God is writing upon our lives
at this moment in time,
in this phase of our lives.

We do not know, in real time as it happens,
what God is doing with us,
or how the quill of God’s pen
is scribbling through the pages of our lives.
But if we have an imagination,
and if we will embrace the spiritual wisdom
of those who have come before us,
then we may consider
that every day
and every hour
and every minute
has a whisper or a song or a verse
written on it.

Trusting that, even when we have not
seen it yet, is the muscle memory of faith.

I have a good friend who is an ordained minister
and he tells the story
about when he informed his parents
that he had decided to go to seminary.

His father was an insurance company executive,
someone who had done quite well
in that business.

My friend had tried insurance
and after some time knew it was not for him,
and that he needed to follow
that curiously compelling desire for ministry.
His dad’s response was simple and direct:
“I don’t understand how those people
keep score.”

For his father, it was clear
how to keep score –
job title, office view, salary, stock options.
How in the world
would someone keep score
in a profession where
no one has any real power or wealth,
and if they did,
they weren’t supposed to show it off?

Well, I hate to tell you this,
but clergy are terribly competitive
about congregational size, programs, and budgets – I call it “Steeple Envy.”
The church as an institution
has become obsessed with metrics.
We have fallen into the abys of capitalism
with its culture of greed and predation.

How do we measure the value of
a congregation of 48 active members
worshipping in an old wine bar?

I have been in moribund congregations,
that learned how to fill the seats,
but they were no more valuable with full pews
than they were with three-quarters empty ones.
They were more economically viable,
but no more valuable – if
we gage value by the Gospel instead of capitalism.

Fatness and plenty do not define abundance,
nor do victory and achievement.
Instead, abundance is defined by
the presence of God in our midst
in hours and in days
both wonderful and hazardous.
The definition of abundance
is that God has written,
and continues to write,
upon our lives
every day
every hour
and every minute.

More often than not
we imagine that WE are the authors
of our own stories,
and we go along the margins of the page
and follow the standard interpretations
of the story
as it has been given to us.
But just following that course is lazy;
and not very wise.

Let’s turn to the story from Mark
about the widow to clue in on value in the Gospel.
It is a reading placed in the lectionary
at only at this time of year, in the autumn.
That is very strange
and it should raise our suspicions
since it is a story from Holy Week –
you know, between Palm Sunday and Easter.

Placed as it is in the context of the Church’s stewardship season
it could be used as a cudgel
to beat us up about our contributions.

But when we hear it
in the context of Jesus being challenged,
attacked, and tested
by people with power and authority,
it is something else altogether.
You see, not only do we have to look and listen
for the words God has written upon our lives,
we also have to pay attention
to who else has been writing on our lives,
and then decide
if we are going to go along
with whoever has been writing those otherscripts.

If we think about Mark’s story
in its actual context
during the last tumultuous week
of Jesus’ life,
then we see that the power of the widow
is not that she gave her last two bits
to the Temple.
I mean really,
Jesus didn’t care about architecture –
in fact, in the next chapter
he tells them how the Temple
is going to be destroyed
because of injustice associated with it.

No, the power of the widow
in Mark’s story
is that she revealed the stinginess
and pomposity
of those who were in control.

What she did ripped off the veneer
of respectability
that whitewashed the self-centered intentions
of the current class of religious
and community leaders.
In short, her action was subversive.
Shewas subversive.
What I mean by subversive,
is that her act took what was considered
normal and accepted
and told the truth about it.

You see, subversive
doesn’t mean dark and treacherous
any more than abundance means fat and wasteful.
All we have to do to be subversive
is to tell the truth
on what is otherwise considered
normal and acceptable.
When we do that,
we let the genie out of the bottle.

Whether we are teachers or lawyers,
healers or bankers,
technicians or managers,
parents or students or retired,
we can be subversive
by finding ways to tell the truth
about what has otherwise
become normal and accepted.

We can find ways, for example,
of pointing to how our economy is based upon
greed and self-interest
and what happens to the environment
when consumerism is the economic engine.
We can find ways, for example,
of wondering why it would be considered
attempted murder if I poisoned
the well on your property,
but if I am a farmer or own a factory
and my toxic by-products
run off the land and into the lake we share,
I’m not a criminal.
Instead, I get years and federal dollars
to gradually reduce but not even eliminate
poisoning your water.

We do not have to be flashy
and eloquent with our truth-telling;
the widow wasn’t.
And Jesus,
until the last chapter of his life was written,
was more cunning than direct.
You and I can find ways to be subversive
and to corrode the protective shield that covers
the script that others have written for us.
That is our job it seems to me,
and what the widow was doing.

You see, if we start reading the book
God is writing with our lives
it is subversive
because it will agitate us
and those who know us,
to reconsider how we have organized
the world in general, and our lives in particular.

I think it is possible to read the book
God is writing with our lives
while sitting in a tree,
holding a gun, and waiting for a deer to show up.

And it is possible to read that book
while folding clothes at The Linden,
knowing they will just get unfolded again.

And it is possible to read that book
walking the dog
and smelling autumn leaves on the sidewalk.

It is even possible to read the book
God is writing on our very own lives
while we are at work
or running errands
or doing any number of mundane
and routine activities.
But…
none of those is a ‘gimme’ –
we have to be paying attention.

We have to wake up.
We have to DO things that wake us up.
We have to intentionally make our feet
step outside the lines of routine
and so leave the ordinary.
We have to push ourselves
to do something different
and feel the difference.

We have towalkoutside the lines
and talkoutside the lines
and think outside the lines –
even if we go back inside the lines
like a rubber band snapping back into place.

It is the journey
and the jumble
and the activity
that will have allowed us to see
and hear
and read
the book God is writing on our lives.

We won’t actually get to see the whole book –
probably only a sentence
or a paragraph if we are lucky.

But that is how we pay attention:
by waking up
in the midst of the ordinary.
It sounds easy of course, but
we know it is not.
It is never easy to push ourselves
beyond a comfort zone.
It goes against our nature.
Nobody likes it.
Nobody.

But that is how we begin to decipher
the script others have written for us
from the one that God is writing for us.
We wake up
in the midst of the ordinary
and the routine.

We wake ourselves up,
or we find friends
who will wake us up,
or we DO things
that will wake us up.
That is what the widow did
for anyone who was looking or listening.

She showed them the difference
between the contribution to breakfast
that the hen and the pig make –
you know,
giving an egg
verses giving up the bacon.
Then Jesus,
subversive as he was,
pointed it out for everyone else to see.
That is our job too:
to keep people around us
or do stuff
that will wake us up
in the midst of the ordinary.
Then when we wake up
we’re supposed to tell others what we see.

The value of this congregation
has not changed with the numbers,
nor the architecture.

Did you catch that?
The value of this congregation
has not changed with the numbers,
nor the architecture.

That statement,
all by itself, if embraced,
if lived out as if it were true,
is subversive.

 

All Saints’ Day 2018: The Bellybutton of the Galaxy

by

In the year 2002, a young blue star
at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way,
made a sharp and unexpected turn.

That star was among a group of stars moving so fast
only something massive
could have changed its orbit.
How fast was it moving?
One-third the speed of light.
How fast is that?
Well, the Earth moves at about 43,000 mph
and the speed of light is over 670,000,000 mph.
So that little blue star
was moving at about 225,000,000 mph,
give or take a few million.

What has the sheer gravitational force
to coerce a star moving that fast,
to abruptly change course?
Turns out, because it is speed and mass,
we can figure that out with computers.

It is a black hole:
a monstrously powerful black hole –
and it is the bellybutton of our galaxy.

How powerful is this black hole?
Don’t ask me how they know this,
but the black hole at the center of the Milky Way
has already swallowed four million suns
and condensed all of it into a tiny space.

Now there are between 200 and 400 BILLION stars
and other stuff floating around in the galaxy,
so swallowing 4 million stars is a very small beginning.

But digesting 4 million stars
gives that black hole enough gravitational pull
to bend the orbit of a star
hurling through space at 225,000,000 mph.

All this came from a NYT article titled,
“Trolling the Monster in the Heart of the Milky Way.”

I understand very little of astrophysics but I love to read about it,
just like I love to look into the night sky
and wonder.
What is clear though,
is that there is a hungry black hole
hiding behind space dust and stars we call Sagittarius.
One day the Earth, or remnants of it,
will get swallowed up too.

If the fact that Earth will someday disappear
renders human life meaningless to us,
it is because we have pulled
a gelatinous mask of ego
over our eyes
and are unable to see
beyond our own feelings.

When existence gets boiled down
to being all about us, then
hope and meaning
are soon swallowed up
by the black hole of ego.

But if instead, we can lift our heads
and our hearts
above death, grief, and sorrow
then we can touch hope
and reach out and grab meaning.
That is what Isaiah did.
He imagined God
preparing a gourmet feast for us
on the holy mountain.
Isaiah somehow touched hope
as he looked at the apocalypse
and destruction around him,
in which the ancient empires smashed into one another
in war on every side like comets in space.

My suspicion is that he was able to do that
because he was able to rise up
above his own grief,
and peer out over the field of current suffering
and make out the images of life
that would return in the future.

In other words, like an ever-widening camera lens,
he enlarged his field of vision,
moving outward in concentric circles
until he could behold a vision beyond
his own self-interest…
behold a vision beyond his own self-interest.

When he did that,
he was able to imagine how the present moment
could be redeemed, and how new life
could grow in places it never grew before.
Isaiah was a master at it –
able to name meaning
and touch hope even while standing in dark times
with those otherwise
broken by despair.

It was not wishful thinking or fantasy either,
but poetic imagination
that opened up the dark hole of the moment
to explore the possibilities
of what might, and could happen.

It is comical how, not so many years ago,
if you thought there could be life on other planets
out there in the universe,
you were considered a crackpot.

Now there are teams of highly trained scientists
looking and listening for it –
imagining and theorizing which sectors
of the vast expanse
might be looking back at us.

As our telescopes and computer models improved
they widened our perspective
and now the discovery of other life out there
seems an inevitability rather than a laughable eccentricity.

So Christian faith must move from human beings
as the center of the universe
and the apple of God’s eye,
to something smaller
and something more a part
of something bigger
than ourselves.

Meaning and hope reside,
not in how you and I are feeling about
what is happening in our own lives,
but in a bigger picture.
Imagining what that bigger picture is,
is an act of stewardship.

Oh, now you knew I was going to go there, didn’t you?

Fear not,
I have never directly asked for money or pledges
in a sermon (at least that I can remember) –
and try to avoid it in worship altogether.

But we do have some lovely charts
and a nice story to share
with our pie today.

While we will talk about the role of money
in determining our future,
we won’t be asking you for a pledge today.

Stewardship is not about money.
Money is a toolof stewardship, not stewardship.

Stewardship
is the word that describes
the quality of our foster care
for that which has been given to us
to care for and nurture.
Stewardship is ourrelationship
to the matrix of life and resources
we value and use,
but do not own.
The Earth of course;
our children, nieces and nephews, grandchildren;
our neighborhood, town, city, and land;
our wealth and power,
if indeed we do believe that we do not really own
such things, but have use of them
to further the work of God’s love.
That is a big “if.”

Meaning and hope
are the core elements of life and faith,
and we have been made stewards of them
by virtue of our baptisms.

Let me repeat that please,
because it is about as important a declaration
as anything I have ever declared.

Meaning and hope
are the core elements of life and faith, and
we have been made stewards of them
by virtue of our baptisms.

Meaning and hope
are not fostered or nurtured
by how we happen to be feeling about the world around us,
they are cared for by what we DO.

So allow me to remind us
of what we have promised to do
as stewards of Meaning and Hope.

There are many more eloquent ways to describe it
but the language of our baptismal covenant
is utilitarian and specific, so I will use it.

Here is what we say we will DO
in order to be good stewards of Meaning and Hope:

  1. Continue sharing our ancient spiritual wisdom.
  2. Continue sharing community, communion, and prayers with one another.
  3. Persevere in resisting evil, which includes the acknowledgement and repentance of our own.
  4. Pointing to and sharing the presence of God in our midst, including where we discover it in the Gospel.
  5. Seek God in all people.
  6. Serve God in all people.
  7. Love our neighbors.
  8. Love ourselves.
  9. Be activists for justice and peace.
  10. Be respectful of the dignity of every human being.

I am going to repeat those again too.
They do not need any real explanation
because we all know how to do each one,
and we have all done each one
with varying degrees of success.
We have all neglected each on too,
with varying degrees of denial.

Here they are again:

  1. Continue sharing our ancient spiritual wisdom.
  2. Continue sharing community, communion, and prayers with one another.
  3. Persevere in resisting evil, which includes the acknowledgement and repentance of our own.
  4. Pointing to and sharing the presence of God in our midst, including where we discover it in the Gospel.
  5. Seek God in all people.
  6. Serve God in all people.
  7. Love our neighbors.
  8. Love ourselves.
  9. Be activists for justice and peace.
  10. Be respectful of the dignity of every human being.

If we do those things,
even some of those things,
and we do them on a regular basis
to the best of our abilities,
then we will be good stewards of Meaning and Hope.

Doing those things
allows us to widen the lens
upon which we see life,
and move out beyond our own ego-driven
excitement or despair.
Meaning and Hopewill never be discovered
in the range of human emotions
that react like electricity
to the events all around us.
They are uncovered and touched
when we move outside ourselves,
to the outer rings of perspective
where desire and grief
or pleasure and pain
are but some of the millions of molecules
in the atmosphere.
You and I, as Christians,
as baptized people of faith,
are the stewards of Meaning and Hope.

By doing those things
we say we are going to do
in the Baptismal Covenant, we enhance
our relationship to Meaning and Hope
and we become its stewards.

So now we know what this place is, Trinity Place –
Trinity Church.
It is not programs.
It is not outreach.
It is not worship.
It is not classes.
It is not food and fellowship.
Those are tools.
It is a place from which you and I
get the perspective we need
to be better stewards of Meaning and Hope
so that we can share it
among those with whom we live, and work, and play.
Whatever activities or programs we do here
is spice and gravy
on top of the real meat and potatoes,
which is what we do ‘out there’
in our daily, routine, and ordinary lives.

The power of Trinity Place
is what it fosters for those of us who come here,
so that we are empowered to go into our lives
with strength and renewal
to practice the elements of our baptismal covenant.
We are supposed to get strength,
and courage,
and wisdom,
and nurture here
so that we can go out there
and do what it is we have been given to do.

The things we do here
should also strengthen and renew us
for our lives, which after all
we live in fullness ‘out there.’

So I am hoping
that we can affirm this place,
and one another,
as a powerful resource for our stewardship
of Meaning and Hope –
our stewardship of naming meaning
and touching hope.

They may sound like big ideas
that live in the clouds above our heads,
but the ability to name Meaning
and touch Hope
is the difference
between God and a black hole.

Can I get an “Amen?”

 

Our Vision

Our vision…a Trinity Church known in the community as a welcoming home to everyone, responding effectively to the needs of our community, in collaboration with fellow Episcopalians and other faith communities

Our mission…to strive in our daily life and parish life to respect the dignity of every human being, and to treat each person entering our doors as if that person is Christ.

We are striving to be as open as the table Jesus hosted, in solidarity with the people of Geneva, and an accessible partner to others who share our sense of the gospel.

It also means we have opened ourselves to the future, and not only moved but adopted a new way of being church from the more traditional model. Join us at Trinity Place, 78 Castle Street in downtown Geneva, NY.

 Trinity Place, An Open Space for Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts

“Open Space” means open and inclusive, welcoming the Geneva and FLX community to use our space, and to partner with us in building an inclusive community for spiritual inquiry and wellness. 

“Growth, Wellness, Healing, & the Arts” means we are pointed toward a particular dimension of life, specifically that which strengthens the relationship of body, mind, and spirit. 

Trinity is a Christian community of worship and spiritual practice welcoming all, and an Episcopal Church in particular. However, we welcome all spiritual traditions and those who have no particular spiritual background but are engaged in a mission consistent with ours. We are looking for partners in mission not members (although we love to welcome new members too).

 

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