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3 Epiphany B, 2018: No blind faith

January 21, 2018 by Cam Miller

TEXTS for Preaching

Gospel of Mark
1:14-20

Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea–for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, “Follow me and I will make you fish for people.”

And immediately they left their nets and followed him.

As he went a little farther, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him.

Fishing
by A. E. Stallings

The two of them stood in the middle water,
the current slipping away, quick and cold,
the sun slow at his zenith, sweating gold,
once, in some sullen summer of father and daughter.
Maybe he regretted he had brought her –
she’d rather have been elsewhere, her look told –
perhaps a year ago, but now too old.
Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her:
To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails
and fishes shelter in the undergrowth.
And when the unseen strikes, how all else pales
beside the bright-dark struggle, the rainbow wroth,
life and death weighed in the shining scales,
the invisible line pulled taut that links them both.

SERMON

I am thinking the punchline of that “Fishing” poem,
is the last one:
“…life and death weighed in the shining scales,
the invisible line pulled taut that links them both.”

But the one resonating within me
with the golden light of a late afternoon sun, is this one:
“Still, she remembered lessons he had taught her:
To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails
and fishes shelter in the undergrowth…”

When I think of Jesus and the Zebedee boys,
I think of them standing like that
in the brown-green Mississinewa River
running through the unploughed floodplains
of Northcentral Indiana, or
the fast clear water of the White River
in Western Michigan.

Or even more poignantly, for me anyway,
in a heavy gage aluminum fishing boat
with four children, hooking worms
and showing them
where to lower the bobber-line among weeds
that can be seen as if no water was there at all.

I know, all those paintings
of single-sail canvass luffing in the wind,
and white robed men casting nets on the shore
of a big blue lake surrounded by desert hills.
But those paintings are Europeanized depictions of Galilean scenery.
So why not Midwestern-ize
and Mid-twentieth century-ize
my own imagination of how it went down
between Jesus and the Zebedees?

That is what we have to do anyway, to make it our own.

The gospel stories will remain antique old tales
with possible but vague value,
so long as we do not make them our own.
To make them our own,
we have to climb inside and bring our guts with us.
Then we have to pull what is in our gut
through those gospel stories
as if a strainer that catches tidbits
we need to know.

Here is what I mean, and how I happen to do it.

With four kids and limited income,
there were only two times
Katy and I flew with our children together, as a family,
and one of them was to Florida
when our oldest was nine and our youngest was two.

It was a whole new experience for our kids.
They were used to long drives in the car
because we never lived closer than
eight hours from my parent’s summer cottage
in Northern Michigan,
and sometimes we drove there
just for long weekends.
But an airplane, to someplace with palms trees
and hot sun in the middle of winter?
That was different.

Our oldest had deep reservations.

From the very moment we left the car in overnight parking,
to the moment we got our luggage in Tampa
and walked to get the rental car,
our oldest daughter peppered me with questions:
Do you really think we should leave the car here?
Do you have tickets for everyone?
Have you done this and will we
be on time for that?
Wouldn’t it be better if we did this?

I’m talking NINE years old!

Finally, as we were strapping the littlest ones
into car seats in the rented mini-van
at the Tampa airport, I turned and asked her –
actually, I told her in a stern voice –
trust me and just follow along.

But right then it occurred to me
she was her father’s, and her mother’s, daughter.
“Just follow along” was not in the DNA.

Reading that story about the call of the Zebedee boys
reminds me of what a handicap it can be
to question everything and take nothing for granted.
So, I have a love/hate relationship with this story from Mark,
which of course means I’m deeply enmeshed with it.

Here is why it’s a teeter-totter for me.

I love the story because it involves fishermen –
working people with no social clout
and no credibility among the power elite.

I also love it because of Jesus’
unvarnished invitation for them to abruptly quit everything they know,
without even a promise of reward.
It flies in the face of the glittery promises
of popular religion in our own day.

On the other hand…it is unimaginable to me
that someone would feel compelled
to quit everything familiar to him or her and follow a stranger.
Even if that stranger were a celebrity,
it is a non-starter in my little brain.

It is beyond my capacity
to imagine that anyone without seriously impaired judgment
would simply traipse off on an expedition
which they had not helped plan,
and which had no clear objective or point of return.
The whole idea of it gives me the heebie-jeebies.

In fact, just once, I would like to read a Gospel story
in which Jesus tries arduously for three days
to convince some hapless dimwit –
let’s say a priest – to follow him, and then finally,
exhausted and grumpy from the effort,
Jesus hits the resistant priest over the head with a mallet
and orders Peter and the Zebedee’s
to throw him over the saddle of a donkey
and bring him along quietly.

But there are no stories of such coercion
anywhere in the Gospels that I can think of,
at least not with Jesus and his followers.

All we have are a bunch of stories
like this weird one in which we are told nothing
about the motivations Jesus had in calling these people,
and nothing about their motivations for going along with Jesus.

The very sparseness of the event makes it a wonderful story
on which to hang all manner of sentimentalism,
and to preach on the virtue of blind faith –
the kind that responds immediately
and without question.
Neither of those am I able to do personally,
and wouldn’t recommend to anyone else either.
That would be especially true now, given the current spate
of religious leaders perpetuating prosperity gospels.

But like any number of literary stories,
we do not get to know why Jesus
invited these guys to walk into the sunset with him.
And we do not get to know why
the young men went with Jesus.

But there is an additional tension
throbbing in this story
like a thumb hit with a hammer.

Most of us, and I don’t think
I am going out on a limb in speculating this –
most of us have a thirst
for a little control and certainty.

We have our own versions
of digging a routine through the day,
or week, or year.
Maybe we make lists,
or set up a calendar,
or use post-it notes.
However we do it, we like to imagine
that the time ahead of us
has some shape or a plan,
and that we get to shape it
or plan it.

Generally, we know what we have to do,
what needs to get done,
where our priorities are,
and what the overall trajectory is
as we walk, skip, and run
down the pathway of our lives.

But then someone or something comes along
and invites us, or pushes us,
and we find ourselves riding a strange current,
toward an unplanned thing.

When that happens,
especially if we get no warning
and it seems to have no purpose other than
to wrestle us out of our comfort zone,
we get a little grumpy about it.
We resist it.
We may even find a way to stop it
so we can go back to our plan.

But we also know, deep down in our bones,
that wandering away willingly –
that choosing to get up from the desk
of our routine
and follow a whisper or a gut instinct,
or some other voice manifesting itself
in some other vague, peculiar,
or even not-so-subtle way –
may get us in trouble.
Knowing all that, we also know
we ought to go anyway.

We know Jesus won’t hit us over the head
and carry us over his shoulder
in a fireman’s carry.
We know God won’t sit in our drivers seat
and steer us down the road
toward a sure and certain destination.

We know that if we are going to embark
on some hair-brained scheme
or follow an imagined voice
or any such craziness,
we have to choose it.
Doggoneit!

I do not want to believe that Jesus
preyed upon the desperate,
the weak,
and the vulnerable
like those who recruit suicide bombers.
I’d rather imagine
that Jesus’ closest companions
were strong-willed, free agents
that struggled with the decision to be part
of his impossible entourage.

We don’t get any of the details so
we are left to project ourselves
onto the story with our imaginations.

We might as well be honest about it.
Whatever we think about this story
likely reflects a struggle we are working on,
just like our nocturnal dreams
poke our wakeful consciousness.
And that is the value of these stories:
they are a mirror – a reflection in whose image
we not only see ourselves
but sometimes the faint
and fleeting outline of God.

So, what’s the punch line?
What is the “So What?”

It is this:
Every invitation and possibility that comes along
is not a bidding from God.

The fact is, we will likely never know
which opportunities were of God
and which were of our own making
or someone else’s manipulation.
We don’t get to see the map
and we don’t get to know, except sometimes.

That is the way it is for us
and the “so what” begins with accepting it.
We begin by coming to terms with, and accepting,
that ignorance is our way of life –
when it comes to God
and a whole lot of other things
we would rather have certainty about,
a lack of certainty is the ground of our being.

Such acceptance
keeps us from biting the hook of certainty
which is almost guaranteed to be wrong.
Even good science
is held in humility and with openness
to discovering it was wrong
and toward new possibilities.

The Church loves the word “discernment”
but the very idea we can figure out with any degree of certainty,
where and how God is stirring the pot,
is a reach beyond our grasp.

So, what can we do?
Well, first of all,
we can pay attention to our own experiences:
be reflective, and go digging
in what we have done and known,
to mine any gems of wisdom we can find.

Instead of just going along from one experience to another
as if sliding down a fire pole of life,
we can adopt a sculptor’s temperament,
one that patiently
and intentionally reflects
on our experiences;
that listens for the voices in the background
as well as the ones we heard loudly;
and, to see a trustworthy pattern of guidance
that we imagine may be God.

Because we can learn so much from failure,
often more than from success,
we cannot assume our failures and blind alleys
are evidence that we made the wrong choice.
Colossal mistakes often deliver
long sought-after truth.

Always, as we seek to learn from our experiences,
we need the wisdom and humility
to know and accept
that we are not following “God’s plan” –
we are following our own choices
that we hope and pray
correspond with, or somehow dance with, God.

They are our choices.
We choose,
and we must choose.
In this sense there is no following Jesus or God
or anyone else.
We choose.
We walk, one foot in front of the other.

We live our lives led by our choices.
That is what we do
and all that we can do
even if we call it by some other name.

Christian spiritual practice,
which is what the Baptismal Covenant describes,
is a self-honest acceptance that our choice
is the one that matters.

Adopting a spiritual practice,
at least in part, is done to help us
make the best choices we can make,
based upon the values and beliefs
we say we cherish.

The practice gives us a path,
a pattern
that we can follow
like a tracker
following animal signs through the forest.

It doesn’t mean we can’t get lost
or that we won’t make bad decisions
and have failures – even moral failures.
But rather, it means our choices are aimed
and have purpose.

It means we act with integrity
rather than willy-nilly as if it doesn’t matter;
or as if someone or something else
can make choices for us.
We decide.
We choose.
We act.

Although it seems like a bad strategy,
God put our lives
in our hands.
A spiritual practice,
a Christian spiritual practice,
offers us guidance in how to track it
or fish for it:
To cast towards shadows, where the sunlight fails
and fishes shelter in the undergrowth.

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: "Calling", Baptismal Ministry, Discernment

2 Epiphany B, 2018: Falling Into the Stars

January 14, 2018 by Cam Miller

2 Epiphany, Year B, 2018

Some people love the night sky, some people do not.
Those that do, can look above to darkened dome splashed with glitter
and feel invited to wonder.

Those that do,
can fall into the vastness
of interstellar space
and feel their nerve endings incited by their own insignificance.

Those that do,
can free their imagination to spacewalk. Untethered from anxiety or dread their wonderment is a tiny probe, free to explore every nook and cranny of meaning in the universe.

Meanwhile, there are those
that walk along underneath
all that nocturnal enchantment
never inclined to look up, and rather,
pleased to see what is before their feet
so as not to stumble.

Still others huddle against the darkness,
fearful of what they cannot see, knowing
dangers lurk at the end of their vision.
To look up, to really gaze into the night,
is to know there is no end to the distance
and no protection from anyone or anything.
The stars offer only anxiety
and so they look away.

For some, the vastness
is a come-on, for others it is ghastly.

For some, the darkness
is a warm pool, or others a prison.

A complimentary phenomenon is also true.

Some people love
the slender silhouette
of aloneness, some people really do not.
Sometimes the very ones who would bravely
explore the vastness of the cosmos above,
become timid and feeble
at the doorway of self or soul.

There are those who could sit all day
in the blessed quiet of the self,
rendering it a garden of delight
where distractions are few and peace
the hedgerow of safety.

For others, the prospect of sitting within,
where no voices other than one’s own
interrupt the conversations,
is terrifying.

For some, aloneness
is a nurturing freedom,
while for others it is an hourglass prison
dripping a single grain of sand at a time.

Religious spiritual traditions
tend to be dominated by monastic practices,
and not just in Christianity.
The presumption of prayer
is that it is a quiet, stationary activity
of sitting alone and communing with God.

For some, that idea makes them want to puke.
Likewise, meditation and contemplation
are assumed to be confined
to solitary activity, to which
there is a single entrance.

We have developed a kind of either/or
caricature of spiritual practice,
with introverted prayer
and extroverted worship.
But as with all things,
binary choices are a straight-jacket for the crazy.

Like most things in life,
nurturing a balance gets us farther,
and deepens our wellness.
When we can value the things we struggle with,
and work on them a little – even when it is hard –
we will discover
it strengthens muscles we didn’t know we had.
Likewise, when we go with our strengths
and use them to power us through tough times,
we will be energized and buoyed.

So, here’s the deal.

Centering prayer or meditation
is not for everyone,
any more than yoga or tai chi
will appeal to everyone.
But quiet, contemplative prayer,
or breath-meditation with a mantra,
is something that can be practiced by everyone.
They are tools to be used.
For some folks, they will be a utility tool
whipped out and used daily.
For others, they will be a specialty tool
only worth it in particular situations.

But having the tool,
being able to use it for suitable purposes,
is a vital practice.

There is not a single way to pray.
Not everyone has to be Thomas Merton
or Basho,
and can instead, be Tevye
from Fiddler on the Roof.
But having facility
with several different kinds and style of prayerfulness,
will strengthen and deepen our spiritual practice.

In times of grief, for example,
quiet contemplative prayer is simply too painful
for most people to practice.
Then rote prayer –
the prayers of childhood that roll off the tongue,
can become life-savers.
In the midst of personal turmoil and crisis,
sitting and simply taking five slow deep breaths
at morning, noon, and night,
may be all we can do.
The tormented mind
may not be able to gather itself
around the sound of a mantra
in periods of struggle.

That is okay,
so using a partial technique might be enough.
But having alternative options may be even better –
things we would not normally do,
but which might work well in that circumstance.

Walking a labyrinth, which would seem
painful and confining in one circumstance,
may be the only thing tolerable
in another.

Or swimming laps
while contemplating a gnarly conundrum
may be exactly what the doctor ordered,
but only at certain times, under particular circumstances.

Having an array of tools
for practicing our spirituality,
is a simple, homely wisdom for the 21st century.
We are not monastics,
and one kind of prayer does not fit all.
Nor will we continue to grow
if our spiritual practice is limited to corporate worship.
We need to get comfortable enough
with starring into the vast darkness of the universe,
and with entering the silence within,
that we can do both.
We probably will not do both equally well,
or with equal comfort and facility,
but we need to learn to do both.

That is why, unlike the Book of Common Prayer,
we have begun to use things
like prayer stones and candle lighting
without spoken prayers,
as forms of intercession from time to time.
Some like it, some do not,
but whether we happen to enjoy it or not
is really beside the point.
Our corporate worship should not merely comfort us,
it should push us and challenge us as well.
Likewise, music
and movement,
and sermons and affirmations –
should stir us up as well as nestle us in.
Spiritual practice is not a methodology for digging
better and more foxholes,
rather, for building a diversity of tools
and strengthening our endurance
so we can advance across the field.

So, let’s drill down to the bottom of this well.

You and I, most of us here anyway,
have been baptized.
We got sprinkled on the head as an infant,

or dunked under water as a youth,
or in some other way,
we were brought into this practice ritually.
The question now is,
are we going to practice our baptism or not,
and how well are we going to practice it.
I hate to say this,
but church-going is not the practice.
Coming to worship on Sunday is not the practice.
Saying prayers at night or mealtime is not the practice.

The Christian spiritual practice of baptismal ministry
is a multi-faceted engagement with the world around us
and participating in a spiritual community
strengthens us for the practice.

In other words, this is not the practice,
it is a piece of it.
It is the place we come
to be with people we know love us,
and find strength and solace in the arms of community.
It is the place we come to get armed
with ideas and methods and opportunities
to become more skilled practitioners of baptismal ministry.
But church is not our primary ministry.
No program we do with or from church
is our primary ministry.

Our primary practice for baptismal ministry
is among the people with whom
we live, and work, and play.
Church should strengthen us to do that,
and church should make us better at it.
But church is not the ministry.
Rather, our spiritual practice
in the context of our lives,
is our ministry.

We have inverted it over the years.
Baptism became about belonging –
affiliation with a particular kind of church,
instead of a spiritual practice.
It became about what we did in church,
and with church-people,
instead of about how we lived and practiced our spirituality
where we lived.

I can’t believe Jesus risked torture
and execution by the State,
so that we could create a church
in which we found comfort and people we agree with.
Jesus gathered friends and students
and sent them out to engage with people,
and change the world
as they shared the love of God.

Our task, together,
is to continue building a spiritual community
that enhances the tools and means
by which we practice our baptismal ministries.
We do that with one another,
but we also do that alone or in pairs,
and among those with whom we live, and work, and play.
We also do it by comforting one another
as we create a safe place like church.
Safe, so that we can be challenged,
and grow, sometimes even against the grain.

The poet, David Whyte, says it well:

“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.”

That goes for church as well.

But the psalmist adds the other dimension:
God has “searched us out and known us…”
and God has “…traced our journeys and my resting-places,
and is acquainted with all ours ways.”

In other words,
whether we free our minds to plumb
the depths of interstellar space,
or walk down the narrow steps
into the basement of the self,
we are not alone –
whether we know it or not.

Our baptismal ministry
is to carry the knowledge of that abiding love
and complete presence,
to those with whom we share the world daily.
Stay strong.

 

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Baptismal Ministry, David Whyte, Prayer

1 Epiphany (B) 2018: Monty Python or The Gospel of Mark?

January 7, 2018 by Cam Miller

For a preacher
today is a gold mine.

Light,
light and dark,
night and day,

the first day…
(Gen. 1:1-5)

“Like the water
of a deep stream,
love is always too much…
In its abundance
it survives our thirst…”
(Wendell Berry)

The moment
he came out of the water,
Jesus saw God’s spirit…
and Jesus heard a voice,
“You are marked by my love.”
(Mark 1:4-11)

Talk about a bonanza of juicy metaphors,
opulent images, and
elegantly exquisite ideas.
Wow!

I want to wax eloquent
and launch into some poetry
that dances like goose down
in the light beams above water.
But I have been grounded.

Today is the annual commemoration
of the Baptism of Jesus.

Now, the old-time Episcopalians
and former Roman Catholics,
think that Epiphany –
and this is the beginning of the Season of Epiphany –
is about magi and frankincense and myrrh.
Look back there on those Epiphany banners
and you will see the traditional images of Epiphany.
But then the Revised Common Lectionary,
just a few years ago (twenty-six to be exact),
changed the subject of the liturgical season
to begin with baptism
and emphasize ministry.
It is not about three kings at all.

So, if we don’t celebrate the Feast of Epiphany
on the actual date of January 6th,
or once every three years catch the story
on the 2nd Sunday after Christmas,
we skip over it altogether.

Today is focused on the baptism of Jesus.

The British comedy troupe, Monty Python,
perfectly captured the Church’s fetish with baptism
in the satirical movie, “Life of Brian.”

The main character, Brian,
pretends to be a prophet in the mold of Jesus
as a way to escape Roman soldiers
who are chasing him.
But in the course of the pretense,
he attracts an ardent crowd
that pursues him everywhere because they believe
he is the real deal.

At one point, Brian is scurrying away
when he drops a gourd someone earlier
had thrust into his hands.
Ecstatic at the turn of events,
a woman picks up the gourde
and declares that it must be an omen or sign
directly from the prophet.
This re-ignites the zealous madness of the crowd
and they rush after Brian all the more franticly.

Desperate to escape their fever, Brian runs away,
but in his haste loses one of his sandals.
The crowd of course, believes that Brian
has dropped one sandal on purpose,
and that it is a also sign.

Now this new event ignites a conflict
between the gourde worshippers
and the sandal worshippers.
But the sandal worshippers,
almost as fast as they form,
split into two factions:
Those who think
everyone should now wear one sandal,
and those who look down their noses
at the silly single-sandal wearers,
and scoff that the sandal
is merely a metaphor
pointing to a deeper, cosmic meaning.

I do not wish to belittle the ritual of baptism
because it is the one act that nearly all Christians
everywhere in the world, embrace.
But of course, we embrace it with conflict
just as the crowds in “Life of Brian.”
Some insist that without it, an eternal hellfire awaits.
Other demand that is be done
completely underwater or it is null and void.
Still others, insist that it is a baptism of the Holy Spirit
and water has nothing to do with it.

And then there are those who scoff that baptism
is merely a metaphor pointing to a deeper,
cosmic meaning.

Let’s look at what the Gospels have to say,
and go from there.

John the Baptist and Baptism
are treated quite differently in the earliest Gospel, Mark, than they are in the last Gospel, John.

With forty or fifty years between them,
and with totally different audiences,
there is a clear evolution in the baptism story
between Mark’s Gospel and John’s,
with Luke and Matthew marking
a kind of mile-post between them.

Here is what I mean.

In Mark, as we heard today,
it is clear that people came to John the Baptist
confessing their sins and getting baptized
as some kind of ritual cleansing
in the Jordan River.
Mark does not make clear
that John the Baptist recognized Jesus.
Nor does Mark make a clear connection
between “the one” John the Baptist predicts,
and Jesus, being “the one”.

Mark describes the event
as a private religious experience:
Jesus comes up out of the water,
and Jesus sees the heavens torn apart
and Jesus sees a dove descending
and Jesus hears the voice of confirmation,
“You are my beloved.”

A decade or so down the road,
and in different geographical and cultural settings,
Matthew and Luke evolve this story
until it becomes a very public event:
John the Baptist declares Jesus is “the one,”
and the crowd sees the dove
and the crowd hears the voice.
There is no room for doubt
in Matthew’s and Luke’s rendition.
For them, the baptism of Jesus was a miraculous event and it proves that Jesus is “the one.”

Christianity evolved
from Paul
to Mark,
and through Matthew and Luke.
It traveled its way from Judah and Galilee,
up the Mediterranean through modern-day Turkey,
hopscotching its way toward Rome.
As it did, like in the “Life of Brian,”
only without humor,
it addressed and answered
different questions in each location,
and organized itself around different concerns
depending upon what was locally important.

By the time Christianity catches up with
the author of the Gospel of John,
and his community
living and worshipping where they did,
the baptism story raised some thorny issues
that required still more evolution of the story.

For John and his community,
as the baptism story was received
from Mark, Luke, and Matthew,
it was a dark problem, arising
like a dead arm poking up out of a grave.

You see, as time went by
those that followed the Jesus movement
began to claim Jesus was perfect.
He was no ordinary human, they said,
but in fact, he was without sin.

That is a big claim,
and it contradicts the very human Jesus
that appears in Mark –
the one that goes to the Jordan River
confessing his sins.

In fact, the idea that Jesus submitted himself
to a baptism for the forgiveness of sins,
became such a scandal in early Christianity,
that the last Gospel written – John’s Gospel –
does not even record Jesus’ baptism.

Think about that.
In the last Gospel, the Gospel of John,
it does not actually say that Jesus was baptized.
It quotes John the Baptist as declaring
that Jesus is superior to him;
and declaring Jesus to be the Messiah.
The Gospel of John
refutes the idea that Jesus was baptized
for the forgiveness of sins or anything else,
and emphasizes that John the Baptist
was merely an opening act
for the main superstar, Jesus.

To summarize then,
Mark is not the same story
as Matthew and Luke,
and John different from the other three as well.
It is not just a matter of a few stray details either.
In fact, these four different stories
about the baptism of Jesus,
are four different manifestos
portraying four different views of Jesus.
They range from a grown man
who has a religious experience at his baptism (Mark),
to an eternal God, begotten not made (John).

I do not think it matters
which one we uphold,
any more than I think it matters
whether we are sprinkled or dunked in the water.
It does matter that we recognize
there is more than one perspective,
and that the differences begin in the Bible,
and right from the very beginning.
It is a liberating recognition
that we too can hold different perspectives
and share the same community
around the teachings of the same prophet.
But much, much more importantly –
down underneath the four different stories
with their different perspectives –
is something we need to recognize.
It is not about what we believe,
it is what and how we practice baptism.

Christianity is a practice,
rooted in ancient wisdom
bubbling up from the Exodus
and distilled through Jesus.
Christianity is a practice,
not a creed or a sermon or a ritual.
Christianity is a practice of ministry
not merely organ music,
bread and wine,
and prayers.
Christianity is a daily practice
of baptismal ministry
rooted in ancient wisdom.

Down underneath all the stories
is the love of God
that looks out over the fresh new Creation
and declares it is “good.”

Down underneath all the stories
is the love of God
declaring that you and I are beloved,
and so are the people we mistrust, fear, and hate.

Down underneath all the stories
is the love of God
that begs us to practice it.
To practice the love of God
as it has been given to us.

So, we are a community
with a spiritual practice
inspired by the wisdom of Jesus.

It is a practice to love:
to be loved,
and to share love.

Over the weeks of Epiphany
we will dig into the nature of our practice
a little bit deeper,
and hold it up for one another
so that we might become yet more practiced
in the art of loving, Jesus-style.

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Baptism, Christian spiritual practice, Love, Monty Python

1 Christmas 2017: Straddling the In-Between

December 31, 2017 by Cam Miller

Text (sort of): Luke 2:22-40

We are straddling the in-between.
Christmas has not ended
but only the liturgical churches are still observing it.
It is not the new year yet,
but everyone is about to celebrate it.
Trinity is moving its offices and program space,
but the Sunday morning worship will stay here.

Straddling the in-between
is awkward and can also be stressful.

In such moments,
going back to the fundamentals
and remembering the rock upon which we landed,
is an important practice for wellness.

So, I am going back to Jesus,
who is the rock upon which our foundation is hewn.
I am going back to a sermon I preach regularly
in one way or another,
maybe even weekly to some extent.
But today I will be explicit.

Jesus bar Joseph
is the name of the historical figure
gleaming at the core of our religion,
as does the sun from the center of our solar system.

Jesus is Latin for the Greek, Iesous
(pronounced “Yay-soos”).
“Jesus” instead of Iesous,
became the norm of Christianity
because Christianity became Romanized, and Latin,
was the language of the empire.
But the Greek, Iesous, nor the Latin, Jesus,
was his name.
Jesus had a Hebrew name,
not a Greek or Latin name.
That name was Joshua.

But since there was no “J” sound
in ancient Hebrew,
it was Yeshua (Y’shua).

Like all names, and especially all ancient names,
Yeshua had a meaning.
It meant, “God saves,”
or more precisely: “Jehovah is salvation.”

But we probably know all of that
and do not give it much thought, because,
well because that is what is normative for us.

It is impossible for us to know what the name
Yeshua meant to Jesus.
A lot of people in his generation
had that name.
A lot of people,
before and alongside him, were named, “God saves.”
A lot of people before, with, and after him,
believed that, in fact, God does saves.

So we do not know
what his name meant to him,
but we do know that the meaning of his name
came to define how people would remember him.

Now, because we are a highly secular culture,
there are a lot of people who think
that Jesus’ last name was, “Christ.”

But Jesus did not have a last name,
any more than millions of people
in some cultures around the world today
have last names.
Yeshua bar Joseph, was his name.
Or more accurately, Yeshua bar Yosef;
that is, Yeshua “son of” Yosef.
But Yeshua, long after his death on the cross,
began to receive a title alongside his actual name:
Yeshua Messias,
or Hebrew for Messiah.

But we also know that the title, Messias,
got changed like the name Yeshua did.
It became the Greek form, Christos or Christ.

Messias means, in Hebrew, literally,
“anointed one.”
When we say Yeshua Messias,
or Jesus Christ,
we mean them as synonymous.
In our world,
To say Jesus is to say Christ
and to say Christ is to mean Jesus.

That is because the Roman Empire
spread, inspired, converted or coerced that version
of Christianity across the globe
until you and I,
and most of the modern world,
took it for granted
that Jesus means Christ
and vis versa.
Even those who do not believe
Jesus means Christ,
know that those two words
are synonymous to Christians.

Those words, Jesus and Christ,
are laden with heavy baggage.
But that is why it can be refreshing
to go back, way back,
before the words carried all that baggage.

It is good to go way, way back,
when the words, Yeshua and Messias,
were just a name and a title
that more than one person bore
at more than one time.

You see, all the kings of Israel were
“anointed” – that is, messias.
Approximately forty-three kings,
over something like four-hundred
and thirty-three years,
were anointed when assuming power.
As I am fond of telling children and families
at baptisms, Messiah means “Oily Head.”
All those ancient kings were anointed with oil
as the symbol of sacred selection –
or divine favor.

But they are not the only ones.

In fact, six months before I was born,
Queen Elizabeth II of England,
was anointed with oil in a private ceremony
by none other than the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The reason she was?
Because the British monarch is believed
to have divine favor also.

I know, it sounds absolutely primitive in our world,
but there it is – a very long tradition
of anointing royalty with oil.

So Yeshua Messias means, literally,
“Jehovah saves, anointed one.”

Which begs the question, I’m sure you’re asking,
why should we care about any of these
peculiar and arcane names and notions?

Why not just go on with the old familiar names,
without knowing any of this messy,
possibly confusing, and somewhat troubling
dissertation on names?

This is where we are getting down to the rock.

When we say Jesus and Christ;
we are talking about two different historical figures:
one is a clear theological construction
and the other is an historical figure
obscured by the dust of time.
We need to understand the difference.

Marcus Borg liked to distinguish them
as the Jesus of History and the Christ of Faith,
or the pre-resurrection and post-resurrection Jesus.

Yeshua bar Yosef
is the man who was born, named,
circumcised, and consecrated at the temple,
and who grew up to form the sacred spiritual wisdom
that has been filtered through the Gospels.
That is Jesus.

Jesus Christ
is the god formed from creedal belief,
doctrines, and the politics of the historic Church,
and which evolved centuries
after Yeshua bar Yosef
was dead and buried.

One offers us wisdom about God
and about God’s best dream for us;
and the other IS God,
and the object of faith.

Here is the bedrock.
It is possible to be a Christian
and acknowledge the difference
and believe in both;
and it is also possible to be a Christian
and believe in one but not the other.

For the sake of intellectual honesty
and spiritual integrity, if nothing else,
we need to acknowledge the difference
between Jesus and Jesus Christ,
and not pretend that they are the same.

But I think it is also important
because in the twenty-first century,
our culture unbraids these two from each other
even if we do not.

Jesus-the-man, and Jesus-Christ-the-theology,
are fairly easily untangled, and
we do it without stress all the time.
For example, Yeshua bar Joseph,
the historical human being we call “Jesus,”
took a saying made famous by Rabbi Hillel,
and turned it into his core principle:
Do unto others what you would have them do unto you.
And then he connected it to a teaching
on non-violence:

If someone strikes you on one cheek, offer him the other.

But we know without any stress or shock,
that these two connected and primary principles
of the man Jesus,
were not preached or practiced
by the Christ that the Church emphasized
when it went on Crusades
to enforce belief at the end of a sword,
or later, to replace culture by force of empire.

The same is true with the doctrines
surrounding Jesus Christ,
who the Church defined as a man without sin,
who then died to save us from our sins.
The historical man, Yeshua,
sought out baptism by John the Baptist,
which was a baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
Plus, the man Jesus never
actually talked about himself
the way the Church has described
Jesus-Christ-the-theology.
Even so, the two became woven together
into one monolithic tapestry.

Now, I am not advocating for one or the other,
or for one over the other;
and in truth,
anyone who cares about Jesus
can’t help but blend the two together.
All of us are the products of a greater history
and the culture we were raised in.

But whichever one you believe in,
or even if you are a full-blown advocate of both,
I am pleading for us to acknowledge
and make the distinction
between the man of history
and the Christ of faith.

Most people in Geneva, New York
and the United States of America,
do not know either one very well,
and when they are wrapped up together,
do not think Jesus is credible –
merely a myth or legend.
Yeshua bar Joseph,
Wisdom teacher and prophet
who dared to speak truth to power,
is someone that needs to be heard today.

That Jesus does not require belief,
only sharing what he taught.

We are in an even bigger in-between time
than any of the little ones
I mentioned at the beginning.
We are in-between the time
when Christianity was the dominant
non-governmental cultural institution of our lives,
and the future Christianity
that is now in flux.

Our Presiding Bishop, Michael Curry,
likes to talk about the “Jesus Movement.”
I do not have any personal knowledge about
what he means by that phrase,
but here is what I think.

The big monolithic institutions of Christianity
are dying.

Macro-religion,
the big, conglomerates
we have imagined were universal,
are giving way to micro-religion:
more localized,
smaller units that must be entrepreneurial
and much more authentic to their core
in order to flourish.

Whether a congregation numbers in the thousands,
or is a house church made up of a dozen members,
Christianity will find its vibrancy
in this century,
as a movement rather than an institution.
Denominational identity like Episcopalian,
Roman Catholic, and Lutheran
may survive, but
they will become looser affiliations
than what has been known in the past.

It is all about Jesus, the man.
It is all about the spiritual wisdom
of a first century teacher, prophet, and sage
whose abiding wisdom
bubbles up through the ocean of time
and still offers us air to breathe.
Our mission is to share that wisdom,
to fathom it and practice it,
and offer it as the life-giving force that it is.

Whatever else we do,
if we do that with energy and passion,
we will find ourselves smack dab in the middle
of a reformation and movement toward the future.

We are in the in-between,
but the future is calling to us now.

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Christianity, Jesus, New Year

Christmas Eve 2017: Darkness is not all dark…

December 24, 2017 by Cam Miller

TEXTS for CHRISTMAS EVE
Isaiah 2-7
Luke 2:1-7
“Nativity” by Li-young Lee

“In the dark, a child might ask, What is the world?
just to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
A house inside a house,
but most of all to hear his mother answer,
One more song, then you go to sleep.

How could anyone in that bed guess
the question finds its beginning
in the answer long growing
inside the one who asked, that restless boy,
the night’s darling?

Later, a man lying awake,
he might ask it again,
just to hear the silence
charge him, This night
arching over your sleepless wondering,

this night, the near ground
every reaching-out-to overreaches,

just to remind himself
out of what little earth and duration,
out of what immense good-bye,

each must make a safe place of his heart,
before so strange and wild a guest
as God approaches.”

SERMON

Darkness is not all dark,
the light not all radiant.

There are some moments that throb,
stuck like a heartbeat
in the gray tissue of the hippocampus
where memory is stored.

They are not always big moments either,
not always the ones
we think we should remember.
Sometimes they are moments
that linger beyond their significance.

Christmas Eve 1977.

It was the first time I knew
emotional pain could be physical.
It happened in an instant.
We finished singing a Christmas carol
before the sermon, just like tonight.
Nothing unusual.
The music stopped,
the lights were low,
aisle candles glimmering,
small spot light on the pulpit.
The preacher, a man of few and terse words always,
said it so simply.
The first words out of his mouth,
with utter ordinariness,
“Not every Christmas arrives on time.”

Then he told us
that our bishop had just died in a car accident.

I was struck by a fierce and immediate pain
on the lower right side of my back.
It was an intensely psychosomatic response
to grief, an emotion
with which I had little experience at that time.

That bishop, John P. Craine,
embodied everything I thought I knew
about the church I would spend my lifetime in.
I had just finished my first semester of seminary,
and John P. Craine was as much as anyone,
the reason I was on the path I was on.

It was Christmas Eve,
everything looked right – my family all there
in the pew,
red bows,
white candles,
same old faces in the choir,
same old families in their same old pews,
same old musty book scent
amidst the seasonal fragrance of pine boughs.
But the darkness suddenly enshrouded
all the twinkling beauty
that had just been there a minute ago.

The light is not always radiant.
But…darkness is not always dark.
Zoom ahead nearly a decade, to 1987.

Katy and I took the trip of a lifetime,
our lifetime anyway.
We went to Africa,
to Tanzania in East Africa.
We left as soon after Christmas as we could get away.

We planned the trip ourselves,
reading guidebooks
and making reservations at places –
all without the internet!
Imagine that, if you can.
It was a long and arduous process
and we left for parts unknown
with far less assurance
of who or what would greet us
than today, when it is possible to see live-cam
video footage of the places you will stay.

Anyway, the crescendo of our three-week trip
was to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro.

Three nights up
and two nights down –
an extra night on the ascent
to acclimate to thin air.
We were warned there is no way to predict
how the altitude might affect us:
19,300 feet at the summit.
Astronaut, Neil Armstrong,
was overcome while the older man,
former President Jimmy Carter, did just fine.
I was close to being a chain-smoker and overweight,
Katy a svelte runner and former athlete.
Irony won the day.

At the final camp at 15,500 feet,
you bed down to sleep a few hours
before arising at midnight
to complete the trek to the top –
thus watching the sunrise over Africa.
We had two local guides,
David and Asir.
They woke us from our fitful sleep
only to discover that Katy’s heart was racing,
she was coughing, and struggling to breathe.

Grim-faced, David and Asir
warned that instead of climbing to the top
we needed to descend to a lower altitude immediately.
They attended to Katy
as I hurriedly collected our gear.
With David on one arm, and Asir on her other,
holding the only light among us –
a candle-powered lantern –
we began a return to the camp at 12,200 feet,
which had just taken the entire day for us to ascend.

“The dark is not dark to you,
the light and the dark to you are both alike,”
wrote the ancient poet of Psalm 139.
It has been a mantra of mine ever since.
The darkness is not always dark.

Down we trekked through the night,
Katy coughing but buoyed by two gentle spirits.
I was behind, left to keep up
at the border of a dim radiance
from the candle.
But I can tell you that the old phrase
is absolutely true: one small candle
is enough to enlighten the darkness.

Even more than that,
the darkness is not an enemy.
The darkness is an envelope of mystery
and wonder.

My eyes adjusted
and soon the canopy of heavenly brilliance
was a dome-light of magnificence.

Trusting the savvy of David and Asir,
who knew their way even in the dark,
the strange and elegant beauty of night
was like the loving voice of a grandmother.

Obviously we made it,
Katy is still here and subsequently,
the mother of four children.

But I tell you those stories as images of that paradox:
Darkness is not all dark,
and the light not all radiant.

“The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
those who lived in a land of deep darkness –
on them light has shined.”

That is from Isaiah,
whose words were a light-trail of hope
across the darkness
for the 99.9%
of the population that was oppressed.
In prophecy and poems of hope after hope,
Isaiah gilded God’s insistence on justice and peace,
with signs of hope for the future.

Likewise, the humble ordinariness
of Li-young Lee’s imagined bedtime moment.

“In the dark, a child might ask, What is this world?
just to hear his sister
promise, An unfinished wing of heaven,
just to hear his brother say,
A house inside a house…

Darkness is not dark to you,
the darkness and light to you are both alike.

Normally we use light and dark
as the dichotomy between good and bad,
and such binary metaphors
can diminish our perspective.

So many times we traverse the radiance of brightness
but see very little;
while in the darkness we may be afraid of,
we discover the presence of love –
the presence of a power
so much greater than ourselves.

The Christmas story is like that also.

We imagine the substance and resonance
will be found in glimmers of light
and sugarplum sweetness,
when in fact, the light resides in the shadowed
and mysterious darkness.

Luke’s one paragraph we just read,
is a spare description of what has become
an elaborate romanticized narrative.
He spent more time describing the birth
of John the Baptist and, later,
the activities of the shepherds that night,
than he did the manger scene.

Look at what we know from what he writes.

The arch of the story,
is a pall stretched over a quarter of the earth,
in which an emperor far, far way,
in what may seem like another galaxy from Galilee,
insists on the first century version of identity papers.
Everyone must have a photo I.D.
and be registered in the system, and taxed.
The unmarried pregnant woman and her boyfriend
had to travel one-hundred and eight miles on foot.
Even if Mary rode a donkey,
in her condition it would have taken five days.
At their destination, they slept in a cattle shed
and used an animal drinking trough
as the infant’s first crib.

That is what we know from that one, small paragraph
that has become a mammoth commercial holiday
upon which the largest retail economy in the world, ever, is dependent.

Here is what we also know from sources
outside the gospel narrative.

Infant mortality in those days, was 60%.
Think about that: 6 in 10 babies died.
It says later in the story,
an almost throw-away line,
that Mary “pondered all these things.”
We know that poverty does damage to pondering.

The brutality of poverty limits pondering,
which may be one of its cruelest dimensions.
Poverty urges concentration on the moment
more than fostering a wide-open wonderment.
Then, as now, poverty meant
meager food,
horrendous vulnerability to arbitrary violence,
and near constant uncertainty about the next day.

The poverty in which Joseph and Mary lived
was a life-defining deprivation
of food, shelter, clothing,
and basic human rights
on a scale that you and I can hardly imagine.

So all of that and more
fills the darkness surrounding the cattle shed,
where a baby that probably won’t make it
out of infancy, is born.

That is some dark, darkness.

Beyond any brief moment of pondering
that may have occurred,
Mary and Joseph were likely filled
with anxiety.
More than certainly they were
dirty and hungry,
and frantic about keeping their baby alive.

I am painting this dire scene
because we have otherwise turned it into
an astoundingly radiant night
replete with twinkling colored lights,
romantic notions of a cozy and miraculous evening
out under the stars.
Uh ah, didn’t happen like that,
nor does it ever.

But still, and even so,
such darkness does not condemn its denizens
to impotence and hopelessness.

Darkness is not all dark,
the light not all radiant.

Now look, I have no idea why this is true,
but I do know that it is true – and so do you.
Darkness is not all dark,
the light not all radiant.

If we go about our lives
fearing the darkness
and refusing to enter into it,
we will be diminished.
We will be impoverished
no matter how much stuff we have,
or how soft our nest.

I promise you,
when we refuse to enter the shadow
for fear of the dark,
we will be lesser, shriveled people.

What might have happened
had Katy and I resisted being led down
that massive mountain through the night?
Or conversely, what happens when
we refuse to turn off the lights,
never enter darkness;
refuse to acknowledge or confront
the grief and pain of our lives?
We grow brittle and fragile.

The light is not all radiant,
darkness not all dark.

This Christmas story we tell every year,
has wisdom waiting for us inside
if we are willing to enter the darkness of the tale
instead of begging for the angels to arrive.

This Christmas story
has wisdom and hope inside
if we will turn off the Christmas tree lights
and sit in its very darkest moments
and listen to the narrative.

It is not for me to tell you what you will hear,
but hear it you will, if you are willing to listen.

I invite us to enter into the shadow
of the Christmas story –
its very center where light does not shine –
and hear the anxious children
who suddenly are parents
with no social safety net,
no citizenship,
no savings account,
no presents under the tree, and
nothing but one another
and their community of family and friends
between them and an indifferent regime.

Sitting with them there, in that darkness,
is where we will see a great light.
Isaiah promises it:
the people who walk in their darkness
will see a great light
, he said.

That is what the Christmas story
is really about –
entering the darkness in confidence
that we will encounter and hear
the love of God waiting for us there.

May your Christmas be blessed,
and the love of family and friends
be near to your heart.

Amen.

 

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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.

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Trinity Place is an outreach program of Trinity Church, an open and inclusive space not requiring any religious affiliation on the part of those using it. Trinity Church moved its parish office and after-school tutoring program into an adjacent part of the building and we expect to offer musical fare and alternative inter-faith worship events at Trinity Place as well.

 

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