Trinity Church Geneva

  • Who
    • History
    • Community Today
    • Staff and Vestry
  • What
    • Worship
    • OUTREACH & ADVOCACY
    • Trinity Place
    • Weddings
  • When
    • Weekly Schedule
  • Where
  • Sermons
You are here: Home / Archives for Cam Miller

Thanksgiving Week: “Attention is the beginning of devotion”

November 20, 2022 by Cam Miller

Text for Preaching

“Gratitude” by Mary Oliver

What did you notice?

The dew-snail;
the low-flying sparrow;
the bat, on the wind, in the dark;
big-chested geese, in the V of sleekest performance;
the soft toad, patient in the hot sand;
the sweet-hungry ants;
the uproar of mice in the empty house;
the tin music of the cricket’s body;
the blouse of the goldenrod.

What did you hear?

The thrush greeting the morning;
the little bluebirds in their hot box;
the salty talk of the wren,
then the deep cup of the hour of silence.

When did you admire?

The oaks, letting down their dark and hairy fruit;
the carrot, rising in its elongated waist;
the onion, sheet after sheet, curved inward to the pale green wand;
at the end of summer the brassy dust, the almost liquid beauty of the flowers;
then the ferns, scrawned black by the frost.

What astonished you?

The swallows making their dip and turn over the water.

What would you like to see again?

My dog: her energy and exuberance, her willingness,
her language beyond all nimbleness of tongue,
her recklessness, her loyalty, her sweetness,
her strong legs, her curled black lip, her snap.

What was most tender?

Queen Anne’s lace, with its parsnip root;
the everlasting in its bonnets of wool;
the kinks and turns of the tupelo’s body;
the tall, blank banks of sand;
the clam, clamped down.

What was most wonderful?

The sea, and its wide shoulders;
the sea and its triangles;
the sea lying back on its long athlete’s spine.

What did you think was happening?

The green beast of the hummingbird;
the eye of the pond;
the wet face of the lily;
the bright, puckered knee of the broken oak;
the red tulip of the fox’s mouth;
the up-swing, the down-pour, the frayed sleeve of the first snow—

so the gods shake us from our sleep.

The Sermon, “Devotion”

What did you notice?
What did you hear?
When did you admire?
What astonished you?
What would you like to see again?
What was most tender?
What was most wonderful?
What did you think was happening?

These questions Mary Oliver asks,
then answers,
are the ones
she would urge us to ask.

She once wrote,
with advice to writers,
that attention is the beginning of devotion.
Attention is the beginning of devotion.

Devout may not be a word
that feels like something we want to wear —
often associated with people that might seem to us,
”too religious.”

But think about it:
devout just means devoted.
We are devoted to many things.
A partner or spouse, for example,
or children.

If we are devoted to someone
or something,
we pay attention to their needs.

We look and listen
and pay attention to them.
If we are devoted,
the last thing we want
is to be negligent,
so we pay attention
to their needs and wants.

If we desire to be spiritual people
then we pay attention
to the ordinary presence of God.
It is a presence
that is always at our feet and fingertips.

Normally, God is none too obvious
but if we pay attention, sometimes
we get a glimpse.

So now we are knocking on the door
of how and what thanksgiving is:
when we pay attention
to the ordinary holiness
that exists all around us
we bump into gratitude.

That is what Mary Oliver
is hitting us over the head with —
in her customarily lovely way.
Deuteronomy too, just not so lovely.

You have heard me
talk about this in Deuteronomy before.
Israel comes down
out of the wilderness
to the edge of the Promise Land.
That nomadic society
of escaped slaves
that had been wandering
in the wilderness
for forty years finally,
finally are ready to cross
the Jordan River
and emigrate into the Promise Land.

But just as they are ready,
Moses makes them all sit down.
He says, “remember,
remember who you are
whose you are
because if you forget,
you will begin to think you are self-made.”
Isn’t that so true about us?

We are quick to welcome recognition
yet easily forget about who
contributed to our success?
The list would be very long
if we stopped to name all the people
across our lifetimes
that fed the fires that fueled any success
we ever had.

Anyway, Moses yammers on and on,
hammering them not to forget.
The part we heard today
is basically an ancient “Thanksgiving Liturgy.”
Israel is told to enact it annually
so they don’t forget
where they came from
and who brought them there.

Prosperity, Moses kept warning them,
causes people to forget.
And once we forget
who we are
and whose we are,
we start doing things
that lead to self-destruction.

So that is all pretty good stuff for us
as we turn toward Thanksgiving,
and really good stuff
as we kick-off
our annual stewardship season.

I will be so bold as to say that
the act of giving to Trinity
is one of the important ways
we remember
who we are
and whose we are.
Yes, we partner
with both money and labor
to support ministries in the Finger Lakes.
Yes, we collect food
and clothing
and do what we can
to share with Geneva.
Yes, we are trying to get
Trinity Place used more and more
by the larger community.
Yes, we spent six years
and risked our reputations
and spent thousands
and thousands of dollars
to make sure the historic church building
was preserved
and remained a resource
for the city and entire region.
Yes to all of that —
and all of that is stewardship.

But this might be news to us:
creating a healing community
where it is safe to open ourselves
to the whisper of God
in the presence of one another,
is also stewardship.

All of it is stewardship.
Not just what we call outreach
but what we do
and how we do it
when we gather.
All of it
is stewardship.

Creating a place
where we hold space
even for those who are not here yet,
a place and a community
that reminds us
over
and over
and over again
who we are
and whose we are…
is stewardship.

So…I am going to assume
we all value the heck
out of that,
and that we want to be
as good a steward
as we possibly can
in support of Trinity.
There is no exhorting
or preaching
or persuasion needed.

Allow me then,
to share with you
a narrative
about Trinity Church Geneva.
It is the narrative
you have already helped to create
and that is being unfolded
even as we speak.

It is the narrative
that calls forward
our best possible contributions.

Here it is.

A once proud and powerful congregation
fell upon hard times,
as did many others all around it.
The building they loved
was bigger than them.
It was so big
and so hungry
and so powerful
that the congregation realized
they had to leave it or they would die with it.
As fate, or God, would have it,
they found a fairy godfather
who would restore and preserve
their beloved building
and find a way to make it pay for itself.

This allowed the little congregation
to find a new home —
one that fit better and that they could afford.

Suddenly they realized,
not quite all of a sudden but gradually,
that they had been reborn.
They still were a little congregation
but they had new people
and new opportunities
and a new mission
with a new vision.
And one of the things
they discovered along the way,
was that their smallness was a gift.
While they welcomed anyone,
and tried to bring other people in
on a regular basis,
they realized that their potent
sense of community with one another,
was itself a gift.

So they decided that no matter what else
they could do and would do,
they wanted to sustain that sense of community
because it was healing,
and it encouraging,
and it strengthening.
It was in fact, one of their core resources.

But how could they afford to go on
as a small congregation?
They had a piggy bank
but they couldn’t spend it all
and still keep going.

They could only spend a little less
than the interest it made
if they were going to be able to
keep their piggy bank full.

So they had to get stronger, financially.
They had to lean on one another
financially
in a way they had not done
for a very long time – if ever.
They asked one another
to take a serious look
at what they were contributing to the congregation
and determine if they could give more.

They had a plan
for how to grow
but it required the little congregation
to be devoted — devoted
to making the plan work.

Being devoted meant paying attention
to whether or not
their personal financial contribution
matched their own gratitude —
gratitude for the community
and the healing
and the hope
that being with the little congregation
had given them,
both in the past and the present.

Well, that is the narrative,
and the story we tell about ourselves
truly matters.

Now here’s the deal,
straight out with no perfume on it.

2023 is a crazy big
and important nexus —
a crossroad for the community of Trinity.

So now you have something to think about
over the next few weeks
when we ask for 2023 pledges or contributions.

You will get a pledge card in the mail this week.
Don’t fill it out right away.
Don’t just write in what you did last year.

Think on it.
Think about your gratitude.
Think about your devotion.
Pay attention
to the needs and wants
of the community that cares for you,
that offers a healing circle to you,
that nurtures and challenges you,
that probably surprises you
now and again too.

Attention is the beginning of devotion,
and being devoted to Trinity
means paying attention to the needs
of the community.
We need to grow in financial strength.

Thank you in advance,
for giving it some attention.

Share this:

  • Facebook

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Attention, Devotion, God

All Saints’: Force Multiplier

November 6, 2022 by Cam Miller

Link to Marie Howe poem, “My Dead Friends:” https://poets.org/poem/my-dead-friends

Isn’t this the most wonderfully
personal public intimacy —
All Saints’ Day I mean.
We create this moment in time,
one spot in one place,
with other people,
when we are surrounded
by personal saints who entered
our lives,
left profound and lasting
influences and love,
and then left us —
always, we think, too soon?

It is such a soft moment, isn’t it?
Grief and gratitude intermingle
with fond memory
to give us back those saints
if just for a moment.
Here they are — with us.

Take a deep breath,
maybe even close your eyes
and see and feel this sanctuary full
of so many wonderful people
who we keep with us over time.

Take just a moment to welcome them in,
their presence in our memory
and beyond.

“I have begun,
when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear…”

That Marie Howe poem
is so straight forward and matter of fact
and yet captures something
so thin and vaporous.
There is an old values-clarification exercise
I used to invite people to do,
those who came to see me
for help with an issue
they were struggling with.

Imagine, I would invite,
that you have a board of directors
for your life — people whose vote
would be meaningful and influential
even if not the final say.
Pick three or four of five people
who have influenced you —
people whose love blessed you
or whose example amazed you
or whose quiet presence always comforted you.

Once they had the image
and people in mind,

I would ask if anyone was missing
or needed to be replaced.
Then I would invite them
to have their “board” discuss the issue at hand.

Sometimes it worked
sometimes it didn’t
but my point today is that
we all have one:
a group of folks who speak to us
even beyond the grave
because we know what they would say
or we can even hear them say it.

They join, at least the helpful ones,
the angels of our better natures.
They become, inside us,
the board of influencers who help
guide and comfort,
challenge and strengthen us
to live with greater integrity.

I am too Protestant
to have saints with a capital “S.”
I like what The Episcopal Church does
and names historic figures
who deserve special attention for what they did
or how they lived,
and give them a day on the calendar.
There is no spookiness and smoke
surrounding them. Just folks
like we have folks,
who guide and comfort us.

So what I would like us to think about
is what a force multiplier
saints with a small “s” are.
We have approximately fifty people
in our micro-church here on Castle Street
and an additional hundred to two-hundred
who connect with us online.
But that is not all.
We have saints.

We have everyone here, now, in this place,
and with each of us
are those who have come before
and shaped us
and taught us
and imbued us with love and wisdom.
They are part of us
and they are force-multipliers
for any small group of people
who aim to be agents of God’s love.

When someone questions
the value of a micro-church
I tell them that any community organizer
would love to have fifty people
who invest money and time
in a common mission.
With that size group
a good community organizer
could change a neighborhood,
maybe even a city.
And while that is not our mission
or our aim,
our micro-community
is full to the gills
with saints squeezing through our pores
with wisdom, love, commitment,
and challenges
for us to live our lives
and empower our ministries.

I think that’s pretty cool.

I’m going to ask Lisa to play
a brief interlude just now
and invite us all to take this time
to gather our saints —
bring them to mind,
offer up thanksgiving for them,
touch our grief with the balm of gratitude
and just hold our saints for moment.

Share this:

  • Facebook

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: All Saints', Marie How, the dead

19 Pentecost: In Conflict with God

October 16, 2022 by Cam Miller

Don Diego del Corral y Arellano por Diego Velazquez (a 17th c. judge)

Scroll down for video version of the sermon

Texts for Preaching

Genesis 32:22-31

The same night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.

Luke 18:1-8

Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, `Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, `Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.'” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”


Some of you have been around
The Episcopal Church
and this congregation
long enough to remember the lament
over the absence of the 1928 Prayer Book
and Elizabethan English.
”Oh, the poetry and beauty of it all”
the sense of grief gushed.
Some even had a sorrowful sadness
about “the missing Victorian language
of these awful new hymns.”

I confess to internally rolling my eyes
whenever I heard those laments.
And don’t get me started on the King James Version
of the Bible — what a horrible translation!

Well those horses are out of the barn,
and thank goodness.

I have zero interest
in rehabilitating 16th century
British culture and religion.
In fact, the further we can outrun that past
the better.

The readings today
conjure up a basic conflict
between our British ancestors
and the Bible they corrupted.

It is a conflict between a radical 1st century
Palestinian peasant,
and the well-educated
upper class culture of Britain
that had a lust for the appearance of order.

It is a conflict between
British Enlightenment thinkers
who cherished so-called pure reason 
that defined a well-ordered universe,
with ordinary 21st century people like us
whose brains are crowded with information
and whose growing sense of chaos
pushes us to question
the supremacy of reason.

It is a conflict between
the perspectives of Biblical people,
who mostly experienced the harsh margins
of powerlessness and violence
at the hands of empires,
and Imperial England
that raped indigenous cultures
in pursuit of colonization.

Painfully, we also remember
that Colonialism had a willing partner
in the Church of England
because it confused Christian faith
with British and European civilization.

The language of worship and theology
that The Episcopal Church inherited from England
is a domesticated religion
that cleansed the conscience
and stands in conflict with the radicalism
of Jesus in particular,
and the Bible in general.

Now this is an old story,
which you have heard me yammer on about
many times before.
I can’t help it
because today’s readings require it.
(But…
I think it has an added word for us
at Trinity Place
in 2022.
More about that in a minute.)

So I am picking on our British past
but it is also true that European civilization
from the Roman Empire to German Theologians
all engaged in the domestication of Christianity.
They had to
because the Bible,
particularly the Wisdom and Prophetic traditions,
of which Jesus is a part,
is radically subversive.

Biblical Christianity
is subversive of Imperial culture
regardless of who the emperor is.

Where we would add refinement
the Bible is course;
where we would add gentleness
the Bible is militant;
where we would add reason
the Bible never considered it; and
where we would translate into proper English
the Bible speaks in vernacular.

Enter Jacob and Jesus.

Jesus, like the sages and prophets before him,
argued and wrestled with God,
and in the process
sometimes changed God’s mind.

Our Enlightenment ancestors
standing inside a windowless cube of reason,
could not imagine a God
who ever changes anything,
especially God’s own mind.

We have stopped telling
the most important stories in the Bible
except to very young children, who,
if it weren’t for the fact
they are allowed to watch “Halloween 2, 3, 4, and 5”
would be terrified
by the God in those stories.

We have domesticated the Bible
and the Biblical characters
because they are subversive partisans
who engage in combat with God
as much as they do with Pharaoh and Caesar.

So, we should know
that God expects a good fight from us
not a polite prayer
with impeccable syntax
that whimpers our neediness.

God expects a fight from us,
so we need to push back
and not accept things as they are.
God’s perspective

is just a whole lot more vast than ours,
so our little issues
do not amount to as much as a pimple
on God’s galactic radar.
That means we better be prepared
to kick up some dust.

It is all right there in the text
if we pay attention to it.
In our polite, well-educated
and culturally filtered version of Luke’s story,
the judge says:
“I will grant her justice so that she may not wear me out by her continual coming.”

But a translation
more faithful to the Greek text, I’m told, says:
“I will grant her justice
so that she will not pummel my eye.”

So she will not give me a black eye!
Really?
See how we domesticate the message?

If you are translating Luke’s story
from a position of privilege and power,
one in which you respect the arbitrators of justice,
because they are your kind of people —
then you want this parable to suggest
that the poor old widow is a nag
and the judge,
tired after a long day’s work
finally gives into her.

But that is not the emotional content
behind Luke’s story.

The judge gives in
because this widow is scrappy
and will give him a black eye
if he keeps denying her justice.

This is a story Jesus tells
with a punch line as clear as day:
our relationship with God
and our spiritual practice
is laden with conflict.
We need to be tough…spiritually tough.

We need to be like Jacob
who wrestles with God
and won’t let go without a blessing.

As I said a few weeks ago,
our very definition of faith
is rooted in that Jacob story:
Emunah, “to hold onto.”

Moses argues with God more than once,
and more than once
he changes God’s capricious mind.

The prophets
insist that God live up to God’s promises
of justice and mercy
and they do it
with some of the most passionate language
in human history.

Jesus scorns,
scorns,
the frilly formal Temple worship
and the polite customs
that the educated and privileged enjoyed.
Instead he insists upon
a more earthy,
a more passionate
kind of prayer.

Our worship and prayer language
needs to become wilder
not more refined;
crazier and more passionate
not more formal and orderly.

If prayer is only an act of last resort for us
then we need to find another way to pray.

If we are afraid to put it all out there
and insist on a little justice or mercy
then we need to find another way to pray.

We need to look again at the Bible.
We need to reject the domesticated version
that upholds the pillars of polite society
and public order.
Tenacity
toughness
anger
passion
lament…
these must be the active ingredients
in our spiritual practice.

Now before I turn specifically
to what this might say to us
here at Trinity Place,

I want to put a period on the end
of this tough-guy sentence from Jesus.

It is really because once
every three years
I get to drag out a sentence of the Bible
no one ever notices.
It never comes up in the lectionary,
but it is in the Gospel
immediately preceding
today’s story from Luke.

Someone asks Jesus,
“Hey Jesus, where will the reign of God arrive?”
to which Jesus answers,
“Where the corpse is, the vultures will gather.”

“Where the corpse is, the vultures will gather”
is not one of those popular lines
Evangelicals learn to memorize
or that appears as a chorus
in Victorian hymns.

But it is another example
of the extreme difference
between the Jesus of the Gospels
and the Jesus of polite religion.

Now, how might we hear Jacob and Jesus
and the undomesticated gospel
in relation to Trinity Place?

What I would say,
is that we need to stop thinking about Church
as the model for what we are.

We have inherited a model
from the 19th and 20th centuries
that is clearly dying —
gasping for air, especially in our part of the country.
”Church” as we imagine it
is a corpse where the vultures are gathering.
It isn’t dead yet
but Church as it has existed
really is dying.
What form it takes next is not clear yet
and we may be — may be — a pioneer.

We already made a radical break
by giving up our building
and believing we could be church
without owning property.
But that was only one skin
we needed to shed.

I do not pretend to know
what travels into the future
and what gets left behind,
but I am convinced that the form
and the model we have known
and that we haven’t really let go of yet,
is one of those skins
we need to consider shedding.

Well that is a lot to digest:
A tougher relationship with God
that includes conflict,
and an even more dramatic separation
from our past
with how we do and be
Church.

But I know you didn’t come here
to be put to sleep.

Share this:

  • Facebook

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: domesticated religion, Jacob, wresting

17 Pentecost: Leaving the 100 Acre Woods

October 2, 2022 by Cam Miller

A video is available when you scroll to the bottom of the text

I go away for one week
and someone slips in two awful readings.
Billy Collins is a saving grace, however.

Psalm 137 has an iconic beginning
and an horrific ending.
And Luke’s gospel story
has Jesus, who is talking to slaves
and horrendously poor peasants
who are de facto slaves,
and using them as fodder
in his parable.
I’m going to slip the noose
with these readings
and sneak into territory they imply
even if not directly.

There is that haunting cry:
”By the waters of Babylon
we sat down and wept…
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
in a strange land?”

This is a cry,
a lament for what has been lost,
and a grief
transformed into bitter,
violent resentment
as we see at the end.

It is the lament of the exiled,
those who look back
to what was
and should have been
and land in a pool
of nostalgic vengeance.

We hear it today in our own world
rising up from the rubble
of lost manufacturing jobs,
union members who remember
how it used to be
before they were exiled
to a gig economy.

We hear it today
among Christian church-goers
who used to be a majority
with bulging congregations
and have been exiled to a secular culture,
in which one religion seems much like another
and none of them quite fit
with modernity.

We hear it today
among Liberal Arts academics
that used to carpet the floors and walls
of the academy
before their forced march
into a STEM wilderness where big incomes
for engineers and programmers
replaced pure knowledge for its own sake.

We hear it today
from the fear-festering pockets of White America
calling for or demanding a return to “normalcy”
when power and privilege never had to be
thought about because they were assumed,
and a multi-racial, mutli-cultural nation
sounds to them like exile.

Whoever or whatever brought us
to the places
we do not want to be,
“dash those little ones on the rock!”

Nostalgia soon morphs into resentment
leading to bitterness,
and arriving at vengeance.

But authentic faith,
the little mustard seed kind,
is a bulwark against nostalgia
for the way things used to be
and against the anger
that arises when brittle beliefs
crumble like autumn leaves.
Faith, as we know,
has nothing to do with beliefs.
Beliefs are things we pad our minds with
in the hopes they will protect us.
Faith is something else altogether.
In that whacky and weird parable
Luke has Jesus tell,
there is a similar kind of bitterness
beneath the apostle’s plea
for Jesus to increase their faith.
They want more…they want protection.
When they don’t get it —
when faith turns out to be something else —
they will be bitter
and wander away.

Crushed by grief,
endangered by trauma and tragedy,
raked across loss
as all of us have
or will be,
how can we have faith?
How can our faith survive
the ordinary ravages
of an ordinary life?

This is the question
posed by Psalm 137
and Luke’s funky little parable.
(Well, maybe it is the question posed
and maybe it is just my take on them.
But either way,
this is where we arrived today).

It takes us back to bedrock,
to the place we cannot dig any deeper.
So let’s revisit it.

We start with an ancient Hebrew word.
You will remember it
because I bring us back to it often:
‘Emunah (em-oo-nah).
It means a fierce
and ferocious holding onto.

‘Emunah
was a word they used
to describe the experience
— the experience not the idea — of “faith.”

You see, faith
was not an intellectual set of beliefs
for our ancestors,
it was ‘Emunah:
a holding onto God.
It indicated a fierce and ferocious
grasp on the experience
of God.

‘Emunah – holding onto God
and not letting go.

And of course, holding onto
and letting go are choices.
Faith is a choice.
More about that in a moment.

Billy Collins helps us
describes
that wonderful yet
melancholy border
between childhood and the next phase,
whatever we want to call our next phase.
It is the phase in which
we choose faith or not,
because before that phase
we don’t have to choose.
In post-childhood
we have to choose to hold onto
a power greater than ourselves
in a life that is bigger
and more ferocious
than any single belief we ever have.

Do you remember the last scene
from the original Winnie the Pooh?

In it Christopher Robin
leaves the 100-Acre Wood
for the last time.
The 100 Acre Wood
is a metaphor for childhood
and reading it as an adult to a child,
we know he is never coming back.
The child we are reading to
doesn’t know it yet,
but we know
Christopher Robin
is never coming back.

At turning 10,
that first big number,
when we discover that we bleed,
and that mom and dad can’t always fix it —
and by extension
that mom and dad
cannot always protect us —
suddenly the world
seems a more dangerous place.

On the day we turn 10 — metaphorically —
or on the day we leave the 100 Acre Wood,
or on the day our parent dies
and we are still a child,
or on any day when the magic light
drains out of our bicycle for the last time
and we bleed,
is the day we arrive
at the border of ‘Emunah.

That is the day
when you and I have to decide
for the first time,
to choose God
or retreat into our nest of beliefs.
It is the day we know there is a choice.

Now please do not misunderstand me:
I am not talking about believing in God,
as in all the things
we were ever told about God
in Sunday School
or from the Nuns
or the Preacher.

I am talking about choosing God:
choosing
to hold onto
our “experience” of God.

You see, young children
do not have difficulty believing
that Mohammed moves mountains
and Jesus walks on water
and God protects us from disaster.

We do not have to work
to believe such things
because there is magic everywhere
when we are small.

The world is a magical place
before we arrive at that border.
But at that border
and beyond,
‘Emunah — holding onto God —
is that tiny mustard seed
of faith
that Jesus tells us
is powerful.

Holding onto God no matter what:
no matter how painful the loss,
no matter how depressing the outcome seems,
no matter how bleak the options appear,
no matter how confusing the events shake out.
Holding on…holding on…holding on…no matter what.

You see, faith is not a thing that protects us —
that if we have it
we will be safe
or rewarded
or protected.
It is a thing we hold onto…no matter what.

Faith is rooted
in our experience or experiences of God.
It doesn’t come
from what someone told us about God
or Bible stories about God.

That is where our beliefs
come from.

Our beliefs
are the ten thousand images
of how we want life to be
that cover the walls
of the cave or hut or house we live in.
Beliefs come from others
and are made up within our minds
and they help us make sense
out of a world
that probably does not make a lot of sense,
and beliefs help us to feel bigger
in a universe in which we are so small
as to be insignificant.

But when we have faith —
the kind the ancient Hebrews meant
when they used the word, ‘Emunah —
we know that our beliefs
are just beliefs.
We know it
and though it is a little scary
we can still live forward
because we are holding onto
God.

Faith
is holding onto God
even when the pages of our beliefs
flutter by
and we no longer know
what to believe.
Not knowing what to believe
is okay
because we are holding on…holding onto God.

You see, most of our religious mistakes
come from the fact that we live
in an economic culture
in which everything of value
is transactional.
We ask of everything:
”What good is it?”
”What can I get for it?”
”How much is it worth?
”What will you give me for it?”

Which is what we also ask of faith.
But faith has no answer
for transactional questions.
Faith
does not buy us anything.
Faith
does not protect us from anything.
Faith
does not have value beyond itself.
Faith is simply the ability and choice
to hold onto our experiences of God
regardless of how far
they recede into the rear-view mirror.

Can we step into any hurricane
that surrounds us
and know, deep
in our bones,
that no matter what happens
it will be okay?
Not even that we will survive,
but because of God,
because God is good
and we are part of God,
we are and will be okay?

I think that is what it means
to hold onto faith.

No theology professor or spiritual director
ever told me that, but
it seems to me,
that mustard-seed faith
is about that kind of holding onto God
while letting go of beliefs
as our foundation.

Now I know we have to have beliefs,
it is part of the life of the mind
and human beings were given
beautiful minds.
But beliefs are not faith
and most of them will dissolve in a storm.
But an experience of God,
small or large
dramatic or quiet,
is enough to hold onto for a lifetime.

‘Emunah — hold on to it.

Share this:

  • Facebook

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Belief, Faith, Pooh

9 Pentecost: Forget about worship…worry about where your treasure is

August 7, 2022 by Cam Miller

We should feel alarmed and threatened.

Isaiah is telling us,
with the voice of God
on his lips no less,
that formal, public worship
should be eliminated.

Luke is telling us,
on the voice of Jesus no less,
that we should sell everything we have
and give even the proceeds of that sale
to the poor.

Now, I could perform a little dance
around these two voices
and explain away the radicalism
in favor of a more mainstream view,
but it would just be a dance.

So let’s go a little deeper
and see if there is something for us
in these two prophets
that lived more than five hundred years apart

Isaiah is a poet extraordinaire,
a second generation prophet-poets,
with Amos, Hosea and Micah
being among the first.

Isaiah leans on Amos and Hosea,
and Jeremiah leans on Isaiah,
and on and on until we get to Jesus.

Then Jesus leans on Isaiah and Micha
and on and on
until we get to the prophets and martyrs
of our generations.

We must always remember
that Jesus did not just appear out of nowhere,
and teach what he taught
as if it began with him.

Rather, Jesus swims in the river of wisdom
that flows from the earliest
human encounters with the holy,
all the way to you and me
where that wisdom meets up
with the still small voices we hear
within the silences of our own lives.

Basically, Isaiah had the unenviable task
of speaking truth to power
at a time when everything looked pretty good.

The Northern and Southern Kingdoms
we associate with Israel
were getting along for once,
and they were prosperous
with strong armies
and even some newly invented
military technology
that none of their neighbors possessed.

Uzziah had his own stable of in-house prophets –
seers, dream weavers,
and oracles
that mostly told him
what he wanted to hear.
The Temple had a caste of clergy
who regulated a pretty tight ship,
and served the power of the king.

Their attention was on doing ‘good church’
as seminarians would say
about worship.

But the prophets like Isaiah,
did what poets are supposed to do:
they saw.

Not only did they see,
they described what they saw
in powerful language
that was often threatening
to the king and clergy.

It wasn’t all dark and terrible either.
Some of the prophesies
were magnificently hopeful
and encouraging.

But in today’s reading from Isaiah,
what we have
are words that pierced the armor
of prosperity and power.

Basically what Isaiah is saying,
or what God is saying on the lips of Iaiah
if you wish to believe that claim,
is that what really matters
is not religion
but integrity.

What God wants from us,
Isaiah seems to be saying,
is not worship but integrity.

Now, integrity is measured
by the distance between
what we say we believe and value
and how we actually live day to day.

It is a really scary word
when if we think about it that way.

What God really wants from us,
Isaiah says, is our integrity.

Scholars and theologians of good will
argue about whether
Isaiah is suggesting
that all worship
be thrown out with the bathwater, or not.
The Temple,
whether in Isaiah’s day or ours,
has a vested interest
in keeping the Temple
at the center of the religion
and the prophets
often seemed at tension
with the temple, which
they accused of lacking integrity.

But I think it would be a reach for us
and most church-folks today,
to think about eliminating worship
since worship is often
the only element of spiritual practice
that many people engage in.
But we could make a case,
based upon the prophets,
that instead of calling for a new prayer book
or better music,
we should be calling
for the elimination of worship.

That’s right: eliminate worship
in favor of lives of justice and compassion.

When worship gets in the way,
cut it out Jesus might say,
as with the offending eye.

Or as Isaiah wrote:
“…learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow.

Come now,
let us argue it out,
says the Lord…”

But calling for the elimination
of worship
is the same as Jesus’ tough talk
about selling all our possessions
and giving the proceeds to the poor.

Like that is going to happen.

But let’s back up
on this Jesus talk
because there is something
hiding here in plain.

There is no way Jesus
would tell his audience
of highly deprived and impoverished listeners
to sell all they have
and give it to the poor.

They were the poor!

I’ve described the situation before
but it is worth reminding ourselves
when we hear Luke tell a story like this one.
Wealthy Roman citizens
who lived in Italy
and likely didn’t travel far,
engaged in real estate speculation and development
out on the outer margins of their empire.

They would wait until
drought or floods caused real hardship
to peasants farming their little plots,
and then their agents would arrive
offering loans
to help the peasants buy seeds for the next cycle.

Because they were desperate
and had no recourse,
the peasants took the loan
and almost without fail,
would eventually default on it.

Then, all of a sudden,
their land,
which was the one thing
that peasants had to keep them from slavery,
belonged to an absentee landlord.

The peasant then became a tenant farmer
or worse,
was kicked off the land with nothing.

Heck, that is a scenario
that happens in the United States.
In my home state of Indiana
and elsewhere in the breadbasket,
most of the farmland now belongs
to large corporations
who have repeated that same ancient pattern.

The reason I mention this
is because Jesus was talking to the bottom 99.99% —
which in that society
and in that time,
were desperately poor
and without the slightest social safety net.

“Give away your possessions?”
What possessions?

“Give alms?”
With what?

It just doesn’t make sense for Jesus
to say such things to the audience
with whom he was speaking.

BUT…Luke’s audience
would have contained people
who actually had slaves,
and people who worked for people
who had slaves.

Luke did not know Jesus,
but he was speaking to Gentile Romans
in a society removed by time
and geography
from Jesus.

And that is true for all the Gospel editors –
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

Luke and the other Gospel editors,
along with Paul,
are speaking to people like us.
That was their mission.
They sought to take
the stories and teachings attributed to Jesus,
and interpret them for the distant,
non-Jewish,
more affluent
people of the empire…us.

But be that as it may,
there is a gem of a sentence
in today’s reading from Luke,
that has Jesus written all over it.
It is the very prophetic sounding phrase
about the contrast between our heart
and our treasure.

That, by the way,
is a hallmark of an authentic
first century Jewish parable:
a spare, single point of contrast
unfettered by all the fluff
of an allegory.

Luke’s words on the lips of Jesus
boil down to a question of integrity:
“…where our treasure is,
there our heart will be also.”

Where our treasure is,
there our heart will be also.

So simple.
So eloquent.
So exquisitely truthful
in such a poetic way.

Our treasure, our heart.

Where we place our treasure
is where we plant our heart.

We know that is true.
We know it is true
even without having to verify it in a laboratory.
We know it is true
before the words are even spoken.
We know it is true
in the marrow of our bones.

We know where
we want our heart to be,
and we know
what and where
our treasure actually is;
and we wince to acknowledge
the distance between them.

So here is how Isaiah and Jesus come together.

Maybe we won’t have to eliminate worship
if we can manage to create
and sustain
worship traditions and practices
that challenge
and nurture
our integrity.

Maybe worship could be a good thing
instead of a vestige of empty religion
if it led us to examine
and see
the distance between
our values
and our practice.

Maybe worship could be a good thing
if, when we gathered
and did it,
the experience nurtured
and strengthened our integrity.

Let’s work on that, okay?

Share this:

  • Facebook

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Treasure, Wisdom, Worship

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • …
  • 43
  • Next Page »

Search

Contact

  • Email
    infotrinitygenevany@gmail.com
  • Phone
    (315)325-4216
  • Address
    Trinity Place
    Offices & Program
    PO Box 287
    Geneva, NY 14456

Follow us

Trinity Place

 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).

 

 

 

Like us on Facebook

Like us on Facebook

Staff and Vestry

The Rev. R. Cameron Miller is our rector, which means the resident clergy leader. In addition … Read more

Newsletter

Coming soon!

Links

  • subversivepreacher
  • Episcopal Diocese of Rochester
  • The Episcopal Church

Site Navigation

  • Who
    • History
    • Community Today
    • Staff and Vestry
  • What
    • Worship
    • OUTREACH & ADVOCACY
    • Trinity Place
    • Weddings
  • When
    • Weekly Schedule
  • Where
  • Sermons

Copyright © 2023 · Outreach Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in