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2 Christmas 2020: Who Makes Meaning?

January 3, 2021 by Cam Miller

Paul Gauguin, “Where do we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?”

A Link for this Sermon in video format follows below

In the beginning…

In the beginning…
was the word
was formless void
was light
was the spirit moving over the deep
was a big bang.

In the beginning…it is the beginning.
We have crossed over to the new year
in secular time.
On the Church calendar we are
not quiet yet into Epiphany – and still
in Christmas season.

But we know, even if the tree is still up,
that this is the second-to-the-last stop
on the train to a new beginning.
We are at the beginning of a new year: 2021.

This is as close as we ever get to a fresh start.
It is the beginning.
So I want us to notice something about New Year’s
because it is instructive
to so much else that we do
when we gather as “Church.”

Today is actually no different
than any of the preceding 365 days.
No different than the preceding
Millennium of days.
No different than the preceding
billion years of days.

In the history of the Cosmos
today is not even another day,
it is an unmeasured event in a string of events
that has no measure or shape.

We measure time
in units that are relevant to us –
to our daily life
and experience
but such measurement is meaningless
in the universe.
The Cosmos is indifferent to our sense of time.
But even so, cosmic indifference
means nothing to us
because we make meaning.

That is what we do,
we human beings we make meaning.
You know, we hang time upon the sun
and a season upon the moon
and a moment pregnant with meaning
upon the New Year.
That is what we do,
we human beings: we make meaning.

In the endless strand of Cosmic events
we use time
to chop up meaningful moments
like a knife slices scallions for the salad.
That is what we do,

we human beings, we make meaning.

But ritual – from which we make meaning –
is such a struggle for many people these days,
and religious ritual
seems especially onerous.

Think of the teenager
who has grown up with ritual
but sees it as empty and rote –
a drudgery that adults drag him or her through.

To the uninitiated in religion,
those who did not grow up with church ritual,
what we do for worship may seem like
standing in a crowd of people
speaking in another language –
the novice can pick out familiar words every so often
if he or she listens really hard
but otherwise, it is completely alien.

In the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer,
on page 880, you will discover the “Rules
for Finding the Date of Easter Day.”

I am going to read this out loud even though
it is a lengthy quote.
Here goes.

“Easter Day is always the Sunday after the full moon that occurs on or after the spring equinox on March 21.

This full moon may happen on any date between March 21 and April 18 inclusive.  If the full moon falls on a Sunday, Easter Day is the Sunday following.  But Easter Day cannot be earlier than March 22 or later than April 25.

To find the date of Easter Day in any particular year, it is necessary to have two points of reference – the Golden Number and the Sunday Letter for that year.

  1. The Golden Numberindicates the date of the full moon on or after the spring equinox of March 21, according to a nineteen-year cycle.  These Numbers are prefixed in the Calendar to the days of the month from March 22 to April 18 inclusive.  In the present Calendar they are applicable from A.D. 1900 to A.D. 2099, after which they will change.
  2. The Sunday Letteridentifies the days of the year when Sundays occur.  After every date in the Calendar a letter appears – from A to g.  Thus, if January 1 is a Sunday, the Sunday Letter for the year is A, and every date in the Calendar marked by A is a Sunday.  If January 2 is a Sunday, then every date marked with b is a Sunday, and so on through the seven letters.

In Leap Years however, the Sunday Letter changes on the first day of March.  In such years, when A is the Sunday Letter, this applies only to Sundays in January and February, and g is the Sunday Letter for the rest of the year.  Or if d is the Sunday Letter, then c is the Sunday Letter on and after March 1.

To Find the Golden Number

The Golden Number of any year is calculated as follows: Take the number of the year, add 1, and then divide the sum by 19.  The remainder, if any, is the Golden Number.  If nothing remains, then 19 is the Golden Number.”

Okay, you get the idea.
This is like the difference between
using a computer to send an email
and understanding how a microchip works.
If you’re like me, Easter Day is on the calendar
so who knew how complicated it was to find it.

I was ordained a priest on the spring equinox,
March 21, 1981.
That means this March is the fortieth anniversary
of my priesthood – holy mackerel!

Anyway, the preacher at my ordination,
who is a dear friend of mine,
took the congregation through a hilarious,
imaginative scenario
in which I was hiding out in the hills
of Southern Indiana
with a small tribe of Episcopalians,
after some kind of devastating holocaust.

As he described it, there I was
desperately trying to figure out The Golden Number
and the Sunday Letter
so we knew the date of Easter.
Judging from everyone’s reaction to this image,
no one thought I was likely to be able to do it.

Keep those calendars coming!

The point is, we go to great lengths to mark time,
to preserve ritual,
and  to nurture tradition.
That is what we do, we human beings,
and it is how we make meaning.

Behind every one of our religious rituals
is an elaborate matrix
of ideas and traditions,
as well as people, that are set aside
just to execute that ritual.
If we hold them up under the light of day,
standing naked in comparison to our daily chores,
these rituals look like a rubber chicken
used for silly gags.

Under the florescent light
of the 21st century,
our ancient rituals look like museum artifacts
rather than living moments in time.
In other words,
they no longer  seemfilled to the brim
with meaning.

Take the bread and wine ritual, for example
and put it out on the sidewalk.
Take it away from subdued candle luminosity
and away from the filtered light of art glass.
Set it on the concrete
with the noise of passing traffic
and without the soundtrack
of church music and singing
that swabs it with aural afterglow.

What is there then?

Cheap wine and odd bread
without butter or mayonnaise.
You see what I mean?

New Year’s day
is a day like every other day
since the beginning –
whenever that beginning was
and whoever its author.
But we make New Year’s meaningful
by giving it power
by giving it clothing
by giving it drama.

It is the beginning
from which we can have a fresh start.
We can loose weight now,
even though just yesterday we could not.

We can spend our time differently now,
even though yesterday we were unable to.
We can quit smoking now,
even though yesterday we didn’t stand a chance.
Today is different –
it is the beginning.

You see how we do that?
It isn’t fake.
It isn’t rote.
It isn’t stupid.
It isn’t just made up.
It isn’t arbitrary
or irrelevant.

Rather, it is powerful,
it is meaningful, it is ritual.

We bring ordinary grape juice
that has been transformed by nature,
and it not only becomes wine
but somehow becomes Jesus, too.
We take ordinary wheat
transformed by a natural process into bread,
and we allow it to become life.

We take the historical Jesus,
a human being with extraordinary wisdom & gifts,
and we allow him to become our guide
to more abundant Life.

Heck, our rituals are so powerful
they can transform a cold stone or brick building
into a sacred space,
simply with the deposit of thousands of prayers,
staccato silences,
private tears,
healing touches.
Presto, a sacred space.

The same thing can even be done
with a group of unrelated strangers.

Have them pray together,
sing odd songs with one another,
repeat certain ceremonies,
take bold internal risks,
makes some personal investment,
bond them with the vulnerability of intimacy,
the tensions of working with strangers and others
and the challenge to grow their hearts a size bigger,
and the unexpected happens.
They become a spiritual community
where encounters with the holy happen
and the people involved actually change
as a result of being together.

Ritual is powerful.
It is transformative.
It is healing.
It is a weapon in our struggle
for freedom from all that imprisons us inside.

So, if you have cheated yourself
out of ritual lately,
and diminished its influence and power
by dismissing it as – well, just ritual –
then give yourself a New Year’s gift
and allow the joys
and power of ritual
to return in 2021.

Today is just January 3rd
but through ritual
it is the beginning.
It is your beginning.

One of the unrecognized thefts
of the pandemic,
has been ritual – especially
for communities of ritual.
That has robbed us of a powerful source
of change, healing, and growth.
It is time to take them back
even before the pandemic is ready to let go.

Obviously we cannot meet at 78 Castle Street
and do what we used to do
without every really thinking about how fortunate
we were to do it.
But we can take ritual back
by adding them back into our own lives
at home,
around the home,
among friends,
and out in the world.
We can do what is possible
for the moment
and be creative with adding ritual
to the long, flat landscape of pandemic.

Prayer stones
candles
daily walks
daily walking prayer
weekly letter-writing
daily journaling
set times of meditation, prayer, or contemplation
set phone calls or zoom with a friend of group…
there are so many things we can do
and doing them as a ritual
gives them a power
that will surprise us.

It is a new year, a new beginning –
make it so.
It is within your own special power.

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: In the beginning, Meaning, New Years

Christmas Eve 2020

December 30, 2020 by Cam Miller

A YouTube Video Version Follows (keep scrolling)

Shh…the cervix of the rational world is growing thin,
making way
for us to be born
into the mystical dimension
of a cosmos cluttered with more practical things.

To begin like that
may scare some of you
and creep out others
but if we can’t lace our speech
with such buttery light reality now,
on Christmas Eve,
then we never can.

Here we are, standing
on the very spot
where double-exposure of two worlds happens –
two realities always present to each other
at one and the same time
just like watercolors bleeding into one another
yet never fully joined.

Yes, the Beast of War
still snorts and heaves as loud as ever,
its hot breath dripping from enraged nostrils.
But also, there are few wolves
who oddly decided
to curled up with lambs –
and I’m not talking about in a mint jelly kind of way either.

You see, it is always like that,
both/and – beast of war
and wolves with lambs.

Even among us –
this peculiarly extended community
across time and continents
connected through the thin whisper of electrons –
some of us are suffering the haunt of grief,
the lamentation of fractured relationship,
the anxiety of illness,
or the guillotine of lost income.

At the very same time, for others,
the breath of God echoes on the wind
bringing an unexpected healing,
an oasis of peace from mental torment,
even rest to an exhausted soul.

Shh…don’t say it out loud,
because the rational world –
stretched like a latex glove over our brain –
will not believe it,
does not wish to see it,
will go to great lengths to live in denial of it.

So let’s not stir up our rationalism just now,
let it lie like the bony old dog it is.

Instead, stir up your imagination.
Invite your intuition and sail
that pond of emotion,
activating all five of your other senses.

That thing swirling around us
squeezing between our toes,
curling behind our ears
with its fingers running gentle over the scalp,
is the thin veil
between God and Creation
stretching thinner and thinner.

From one to ten it thins.
A veil so sheer it almost isn’t there;
so diaphanous and gauzy
it really doesn’t appear.
It is the veil between God and Creation –
a semi-permeable membrane
that gives shape without structure.

This double-exposure
of believable and unbelievable
is sometimes especially intense –
sometimes especially confounding.

As with negative ions stroking the skin
after a thunderstorm,
the thinning of this veil
crowds the air thick with knowing.

Shh…can you feel it, even now,
this pandemic Christmas Eve:
This socially distanced intimacy,
this time of masked smiling,
this silent night tethered to anxieties and hopes?

Sometimes, and now may be one of those times,
the veil gets stretched so tightly
across the border between us and the holy,
we can almost see little faces looking back at us
from the other side.

Little noses and lips smooshed
up against the invisible but opaque pane of days,
and our faces likewise pressed against the clear window
bringing smiles to the other side.

It is also true that skinny old dog
sleeping in the corner,
normally content
to sleep between meals and attention,
gets aroused when the veil is thinned.
The practical,
rational,
thoughtful mind
travels down a well-worn
rutted road
following the tracks of oxen,
horses,
and wagons wheels
it follows.

It doesn’t wander from those paths
and instead, works to keep itself in those ruts
and on those tracks.

It is the prove-it-to-me voice
within our heads,
and it ticks down the list of reasons
the veil is not there,
or if for some reason experienced, is not real.
It grumbles about commercialism
and keeps an eye on weather reports,
while barking about pandemics and war.

That voice is easily hassled and disturbed
by bad smells,
ugly scenes,
lost opportunities,
fearful possibilities,
and the knowledge that the Christmas tree
will die and just be thrown away in the end.

And still,
there is the other voice,
the quietly humming voice
coming from within the chamber
of our otherwise hardened hearts.

There is that definite cooing,
whisper-of-song
that bids us to look again
at the winter landscape
and see if we can’t perceive
a sign of Spring hidden there.

It is always like that,
both/and – two voices
with just one strand of music.

We have to choose which one
we will listen to now,
in this moment.
At Christmas, in the bleak mid-winter,
there is a strange magnetic power
that has the unbelievable seeping through
the thinning veil
between God and Creation.

It sneaks through our resistance;
it pokes through but sometimes
draws the attention of our cynical,
hassled, rational inclination
to just get through it all.

As much as we insist, and need,
the intellectually credible,
we also yearn for a lifting of the veil
on the strange and mystical.

It is always like that,
both/and – resisting and yearning.
It is what we do, we humans.

All this worship stuff
that we do on any given week,
is only an attempt
to say something intelligent
about the unbelievable holiness
that moves like smoke through history,
that sings it songs
in the ears of our otherwise routine
and unremarkable lives.

All our Bible readings
with all those antique images;
and all our hymns –
jolly or morose;
with all our poignant stories and poems;
our overly formulaic prayers,
and our predictable rhythms of Communion…
all of it, is just our way of stuttering
over what we are unable to say.

If, in all this stuff we do,
we think we are going to discover a big “Truth,”
or uncover some tidy summary of God
to unwrap each year in a digestible formula,
we are mistaken.
All of these things we do on Christmas
or any given Sunday,
are merely a highly articulate form of stammering.

As the veil between God and Creation thins,
just like a cervix in preparation for delivery,
we suddenly realize that our most eloquent
statements of faith crumble
into shards of nothingness.

That is the beauty of such thin moments
like the one we are in.

When we come upon a thin moment
there are only three things we can do
if we want to enter into it
instead of resisting it:
watch,
listen,
wonder.

Now that old dog in the corner,
our insistent rationalism,
will bark
will guard the entrance,
will growl at anything threatening it.
So don’t wake the old thing. Let it lie.

Instead, watch and
listen, and
wonder.
Don’t analyze the story.
Don’t try to figure out a mystery.
Don’t apply logic to a thin place.
Don’t dissect and evaluate it until it’s gone.
Instead, watch and
listen,
wonder.
Experience it.
Feel it.
Enjoy the moment.
Later you can wake up that old dog
and give it a bone
but in the thin moment
just watch, listen, and wonder.

Even in this time of pandemic,
when it feels as though there is a fog around us,
and we may be more isolated than ever before,
we need to watch and listen,
and wonder.

We have entered a thin moment
and the cervix is tapering the border
between God and us –
and strange things are afoot.
Watch. Listen. Wonder. And enjoy.

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1 Christmas, Year B, 2020

December 30, 2020 by Cam Miller

Snow
Anne Sexton

Snow,
blessed snow,
comes out of the sky
like bleached flies.
The ground is no longer naked.
The ground has on its clothes.
The trees poke out of sheets
and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
I bite it.
Someone once said:
Don’t bite till you know
if it’s bread or stone.
What I bite is all bread,
rising, yeasty as a cloud.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
Today God gives milk
and I have the pail.

This is not really a sermon,
more of a prolonged Christmas greetings
in lieu of a sermon.

Anne Sexton’s poem ends:
”There is hope everywhere. Today God gives milk
and I have the pail.”
That’s quite an image for the end of December
as we teeter on the precipice
of a worsening pandemic, a crumbling economy,
and a political free-for-all.
But hope there is,
and hope is indeed the mother’s milk of the holy.

This is a hard time to be hopeful
for many people
so I don’t want to deny the very real struggles
many of us are having this Christmas season.
I can hear it in voices everywhere,
sometimes even when people are trying
really hard to steal themselves
against sadness,
sorrow, or depression.
Christmas isn’t a magic pill or silver bullet
that neatly wipes away every tear.
So let’s just name it
and recognize the struggle.

Now some people are like cats –
you know, like the way you can drop a cat
and it will always, always land on its feet.
Dogs and humans not so much.

When we fall
we do an ungainly sprawl
like Jerry Lewis,
maybe roll a few times too.

But there are some folks who are able
to move through this very tough time
like a knife through butter.
However they may actually feel inside,
and likely it is a rumble like everyone else,
they are just graceful with how they navigate
this social isolation,
hazardous health crisis,
and dangerous social matrix.

But in either case –
fluid or drooping –
hope is not the cause nor the palliative.
Hope is a whole different category.

Hope is not wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking is what we do
when have a specific outcome in mind.

In which case, it is usually an outcome
favorable to ourselves,
that we then imagine is what should
and will happen.

Authentic hope,
as compared with wishful thinking,
is less outcome-focused
because with all things that truly matter,
we do not really get to know the outcome
ahead of time.

Wishful thinking is a way of comforting ourselves
when we realize we have no control.
We pull the wool down over our eyes
and feel warm and safe
believing in a happy wish.

But hope is very different.
Hope is an act of faith.
Hope is a trust-fall into the arms of God.
Hope does not require denial or complacency
and invites our best efforts to shape the future.
Hope enters the struggle to change
the things that can be changed,
and does not resist acceptance

of what cannot be changed.
In all of it, hope is the thing
that surrounds and imbues us
so that we can keep moving through it –
so that we do not give into cynicism
or resign ourselves to complacency
or drown ourselves
in the abuse of mind-altering substances
or the horrendous misuse of people and money.

Hope is neither physical, emotional,
or mental. Rather, it is
a spiritual lens
through which we choose
to see.

When we see what is going on
through the lens of hope
then we can keep going,
keep doing,
keep reaching out and trying.
It is a spiritual super power for mortals.

So, this Christmas and moving into a new year,
I not only “wish” you hope,
I invite you to put on that lens –
AND in community that is connected
even without touch –
to keep on moving on, moving on.

That is my belated Christmas present to you:
An invitation to put on the lens of hope
and understand the acute difference
between authentic hope and wishful thinking.

May this come in handy for you
in the days and weeks ahead.
And…may the peace of God flood your days.

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Proper 24 A, 2020: Marked

October 18, 2020 by Cam Miller

Worship Video with Sermon Included

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Pentecost 19A Sermon with Worship

October 11, 2020 by Cam Miller

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Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: Abundance, inclusion, Open Table

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    Geneva, NY 14456

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Trinity in Time of Pandemic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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