Sermons – Page 3

4 Easter: That Terrible Trinity

May 12, 2019 by Cam Miller

Okay, this is a little weird for a sermon,
but it’s all I got for today.

Of all the creatures on this blue planet,
the two with whom we have
the most generous relationship,
are cats and dogs.
Here is a basic difference between
cats, dogs, and humans.

I have lived 23,861 days
give or take a few.
A dog would have no concept of days,
every minute of every day being all there is.
A cat could care less about the past,
and its only concern about the future
is how to get the best out of it.

A human
can actually calculate the number of days,
obsess about what was missed
and fret about what is to come
all without ever stopping
to experience the moment that is.

Now the truth is,
we have no idea what it is like
inside the mind of a cat or dog, it is
just our projection.
In this case, mine.

But being human,
we all share that
like germs on a grease spot.

Past, present, and future are so human –
maybe even uniquely human
among the creatures on this planet.

Each one of us lives in a hall of mirrors
made up of those three panels –
past, present, and future.
We cannot escape it,
it is what defines us,
and how well we manage
those relationships
will determine our wellness –
spiritual and otherwise.

The past, only lived out in the memory,
is chock full of
nostalgia,
melancholy,
resentment,
trauma,
happiness,
bitterness,
and sorrow.

The future, only lived out in fantasies
or projections of the mind, is where
anxiety,
fear,
dread,
hope,
and anticipation live.

Everything else hangs out in the present.
Love, joy, grief, pain, and gratitude
are all present tense.

Time, like manna, cannot be collected
or stacked up in a pile like dirty dishes
nor stored like plasma
or last summers canned tomatoes.

Time is a use-it-or-lose-itkind of thing.
And yet we act as if time
is a hand of cards we hold –
the pastare the tricks we have collected
and stacked in neat little piles
at our place at the table,
while the future
is a brand new deck
we are about to draw from.

But in fact, we only have
what we are holding at the moment.
We can no more stack our days
in the sleeve of memories
than we can predict the future;
and we can no more re-live our memories
than we can play the future
as if it were a sequence on a DVD.

Re-living the past and predicting the future
are equally illusory
and equally seductive.
The proof of this pudding
is that Goddoes not reside
in either the past or the future,

That is why we have great difficulty
encountering God.
God only resides in the present.
Encountering the holy
is elusive and capricious,
and darn impossible to hold onto,
and hard on us humans.

Of that terribly Trinity
– past, present, future –
we love two and hate the other.
We fondle the past with great pleasure,
and beg the future
as a pauper at the feet of a king.
But from the present,
we hide our face as if
the moment were a horrible
misshapen victim.

Joan Borysenko helped me
to understand the power
of living in the moment,
something I had heard so much about
from every religion I studied
but found elusive.

She is a physician and researcher
who was on staff at
the Harvard Mind/Body Institute
before peeling off on her own publishing career.
I once heard her describe the power
of the present moment
as she discovered it in her own life.

She told us that as a very young child
she was gripped with a debilitating obsessive/compulsive disorder.
Everything had to be just so for her,
counted and placed to perfection
before she could go anywhere or do anything.
She described her liberation
from this prison of rigid compulsion
when she discovered
the perfect freedom
of the present moment.
All of a sudden one day
at a young age, as if
by spontaneous healing,
she found herself in the present moment
instead of living in anxiety about the future.

Whereas she was used to living in the dread
of “what if,” she discovered
that by residing in the present moment
there was no anxiety or remorse,
only what was happening right then and there.
That revelation freed her
from stacking, sorting, counting, and planning.
Her life-long recovery had begun.

Now most of us do not live with the tyranny
of that kind of powerful obsession
but many people struggle with something.
Any recovering alcoholic or drug user
can tell us about the power
of living in the present moment,
when memory calls for a drink
and anxiety insists on getting high.
“Living one day at a time,”
or one hour at a time,
or one minute at a time,
even when it is not the happiest moment,
leads to freedom from past and future.

Being in the moment
keeps us from obsessing
on what was or what will be
and allows us to focus on
just now– even if just now
is a struggle, actually, especially
if just nowis a struggle.

Everything else
is what one Buddhist meditation teacher
calls our “planning mind.”

Planning mind is that mental tendency we have
to race ahead of this moment
in anticipation of what we need to do,
what we have left undone, and
what we have forgotten.

Then again, sometimes
our thoughts fall back into yesterday
where we do comparison shopping
with the present.
By which I mean that
sometimes we nurseour nostalgia
as if it were honeyed mother’s milk
we could never give up.

Sometimes we suck on resentments
as if a straw in a snow cone,
knowing that the sweetest stuff
is still down there somewhere
if we can just get to it.

So the past draws us with power,
as does the future
even though both are at least somewhat illusion.

For example,
memory is not a photographic essay
of what happened once,
nor video evidence
of who was there and what happened.
Memory always wears the lens of the present,
coloring what would otherwise
be a grainy old black and white movie.
Memory adds details that were never there,
fitting it for the present mood or cause,
changing it with or without
intention and yet forever.
Memory is indeed a trickster.
It is a great gift, of course,
but one that can confuse our senses,
color what was,
and blind us to the present moment.

Likewise our “planning mind,”
while a benefit,
can cut us off from the present
like a butcher knife.
While acknowledging and embracing
our “planning mind,” which stutters over
what has not yet happened,
we must also learn to discipline its voice
to only speak when spoken to.
Indeed, we need memory
to call to us from out of the past
and remind us of what we have learned.
And we need our planning mind
to patiently stay in place, silent
in the future
until evoked for a specific purpose.
Focusing on either the past or future
can be tremendously helpful to humans
when used surgically for a specific task.
But they are a terribly debilitating
blunt instrument when used indiscriminately.

Practicing simple presence,
being held in the moment
and refusing to look back or forward,
is an exercise we need in our repertoire.

Now, why in the world,
did I get on this subject today?

Because…
Psalm 23 and John’s Jesus
talking about hearing his voice,
are all about our ability
to enter and hold
the present moment.

The guidance of still waters,
following pathways of justice,
enduring the vale of death’s shadow,
the consolation of God’s presence
in the face of foes…all of it,
is only available in the present moment.

The voice of the holy,
whether we ascribe it to Jesus
or the Holy Spirit
or a still small voice,
is cradled only in the present moment.
We can remember such times from the past
and hope for such times in the future,
but what was and is to come
are trustworthy only when mediated
by the voice of God in the present.

This should probably be a “how-to” sermon,
but in truth, every liturgy
is a practice session in mindfulness,
or being present in the moment.
That is what we are invited to do,
enter into this moment
and experience the presence of God among us.
The prayers,
the music,
the candles,
the bread and wine…
that is what all of this invites us into:
here and now
in the presence of God.
The one fly in the ointment
is this thing – is the sermon.

The sermon pulls us into memory
or points us toward action
and so messes with the whole thing.

Which means that once again,
I am part of the problem and not the solution!

Anyway, for what it is worth, mindfulness
or being held in the present moment,
is something we can practice.
In fact, it needs to be a part
of our spiritual practice.
I would go so far as to say, it needs to be
part of our baptismal practice.
The shepherd –
the voice, the rod, staff, and all that we seek –
are found in the present.
What’s crazy, is my dog already knows that.

3 Easter 2019: Ghost Busters

May 12, 2019 by Cam Miller

Pyle, Howard; Johnson, Merle De Vore (ed) (1921) “Blueskin, the Pirate”

I’m not sure we’re ready for this, but here goes.

What if I told you a story
about the time I saw my Great Aunt Elma,
five months deceased,
standing on the dresser in my bedroom
wearing a 1940’s mink fur tippet
with those poor little mink heads still on it?
Would you believe she was there
or would you listen politely
and assume my grievous imagination
had projected itself into the darkness?

Or this, what would you think
if I told you about an All Saints’ Day visitation
from a long dead childhood surrogate mother?
This was back in Columbus, Ohio
and one of the primary nurturers in my youngest years
was the centerpiece of the sermon I was preaching that day.

On my way into the church that morning,
very early when no one else was around,
I was greeted near the door by someone
I had never seen before.
All these years later, honestly,
I do no remember whether it was a man or a woman.
In those days, in that parish,
and with four very young children,
I got to church about 7 am on top of very little sleep.
Anyway, the person handed me “The Watchtower,”
the propaganda magazine of The Jehovah’s Witnesses.
After juggling my stuff and awkwardly unlocking
a series of doors, including my office,

I threw the magazine on my desk.
I never gave it another thought
until I stopped, dumbfounded,
in the middle of the sermon.

Suddenly I remembered that the woman
I was speaking about,
had been a Jehovah’s Witness.
What do you think?
Serendipity, coincidence, strange visitation, epiphany?

Just so you know, the first story is completely made up –
no Aunt Elma on my dresser.
The second story is the absolute truth,
with details as factual as I remember them.
But, being me,
I have never actually answered that question myself:
serendipity or epiphany?

John’s Gospel drives me crazy.
Katy can tell you how grumpy I get
when I have to preach his stories
more than once in a while.
Unfortunately, around Holy Week and Easter
it is John, John, John.

First of all, John doesn’t just tell a story
the way Mark does, he declares it
and then rubs it in your face.

It is the Gospel written
furthest in time from when Jesus lived,
and written by someone who never met Jesus.
And yet, John’s Gospel has the most and the longest speeches
delivered by Jesus as if verbatim,
with details and theological pronouncements
that did not even exist when Jesus was alive.

“I am the way, the truth, and the life,
no one comes to the Father, except through me…” – only in John.

“I am the light of the world…” – only in John.

Foot washing – only in John.

Raising Lazarus from the dead – only in John.

“The Jews,” as a categorical condemnation – almost entirely in John. (Matthew, Mark, and Luke specifically name the Pharisees and temple clergy as Jesus’ primary opposition, while John castigates to “the Jews” sixty-seven times).

And the difference between John’s resurrection stories
and those of the other three Gospels,
are like the difference
between my Aunt Elma and All Saints’ Day stories.
Mark, Matthew, and Luke,
like my All Saints’ story,
invite the reader’s own conclusion
about how and why the tomb is empty.

But John,
like my Aunt Elma story,
tells us what happened so graphically,
and with specific conclusions about what it means,
that we are left saying “yes” or “no.”

And John even tells us,
more than once,
that he is telling us these stories
as “proof” of his other proclamations.
He essentially says to us,
Jesus is God in the way that I tell you he is God,
and here is my proof.”

So, you see, John leaves an accident
on the floor of the living room
with all kinds of company in the house,
and then I am supposed to preach about it.
That is what makes me grumpy.
By the way, nobody else
has this story about eating fish with Jesus
on the shore of lake Tiberius either.

So, I am not going to dignify John’s story
by going into its weeds
and deciphering what it all means.

Suffice it to say that John wants us to believe
that Jesus’ resurrection was physiological
and not a ghost story.
Ghosts don’t eat fish.
And John also wants to verify that Peter was forgiven
for denying Jesus three times
on the night Jesus was arrested.
I suspect that by the time the Jesus movement
had wiggled its way across sixty or seventy years
and hundreds if not thousands of miles
to where John entered it,
those were some issues that got argued about.

So two thousand years later
we get stuck with the echo of those arguments
when we should be focused on our own.

I guess we are also kind of stuck
where we were last week, with the Thomas story.
By which I mean, it is kind of like teaching school these days
and knowing that different people
have different learning styles,
and that one is not better than another,
but that general education
has traditionally focused its pedagogy
toward one learning style.
The Church, likewise,
has pretty much been focused on proclamation –
“here is the truth, believe it.”
That works for some people
but it sure does work for me, and
I am supposed to be one of the proclaimers!
So let’s get down and dirty with the resurrection.

In spite of what John writes, is not a yes or no story.
Clearly, by reading all four Gospels,
we see that some people had a post-crucifixion experience
that shocked and amazed them,
while others stood in disbelief
and still others must have been agnostic.

It has been the assumption
of Christian scholars, historians, and theologians alike,
that Christianity traveled up the Mediterranean
and proliferated across the world like a virus
because of the resurrection.
It is often said that “something powerful”
must have happened
to propel a small, new strain of Judaism
into a great new world religion.

Maybe.
But that something powerful
may not have been the resurrection stories –
or not only the resurrection stories.

There is another theory at work these days,
that suggests another reason
that Christianity went from approximately
forty small communities in the year 100 –
about the time John was writing –
to a million or so followers by the year 325
when Emperor Constantine forever changed things
by dragging it into the mainstream of history.

Early Christian communities were focused
on bringing about the Kingdom of God
“on earth as it is in heaven.”
They saw themselves as a parallel kingdom
within the Roman empire.

They did some interesting things that,
whether intentional or not, made them proliferate.

Instead of focusing on converting men,
which many of the religions did,
Christians focused on recruiting women and slaves.
They also became primarily an urban movement,
and that movement placed a passionate emphasis
on healing and bread.
In our parlance, they created a rudimentary social safety net.
Well, urbanization took off across the empire,
and of course, there were many more poor people than rich.
Likewise, women didn’t go to war and get killed.
For those reasons and more, the little Kingdom of God
grew like a mustard seed in the weeds.

But to be perfectly honest,
we have very little good historical data
on Christianity from the time of Jesus
through the first two hundred years.
It is a black hole with some echoes emanating out of it.

All we have is local lore,
the proclamations of geographically located people
whose voices got heard over everyone else’s.
A big church would have been fifty or sixty,
and a bishop would have been someone
who could claim the loyalty of a network
of a half dozen or more small congregations.
There were often violent disagreements
between groups of Christians, even
within the same town or city.
Athanasius, for example, had thugs
who cudgeled the opposition.
What constituted a church was more like a house-church,
with somewhere like Trinity Place
being a big, established one.
There were arguments about the resurrection.

Had Jesus been saved by God,
brought back to life in a statement of victory over death?
Or did Jesus do it on his own power?
Was Jesus raised from the dead
or did he rise from the dead?
Both sides called themselves orthodox,
and the many versions of this argument
were hotly contested.
Meanwhile, all of them had some version
of the Kingdom of God
they were trying to create on earth
as it is in heaven.
They did stuff that included healing and bread.

During the same time period, in the Roman empire,
at least twenty-six different people
claimed emperorship
and fought civil wars or battles of usurpation.

As the little kingdom within the empire grew
the grand empire around them became weaker.
Serendipity or an act of God?

I would not hazard a guess,
but I do believe that what propelled a small movement
gathered around a sagely holy man and prophet,
was what he taught
and the wisdom of his followers
to keep teaching and practicing it:
healing and bread,
imploring the kingdom of God
to come on earth
as it is in heaven.

I do believe that just like us,
all these years later in Trinity Place,
some were motivated by stories of resurrection
and promises of life after death;
while others were motivated by sublime wisdom
and insights that proved transformative;
while still others sought healing, some sought bread,
and while some served bread, others offered healing.

Honestly, I am able to still marvel
over that All Saints’ Day experience,
and laugh at how thick-headed I can be –
taking so long to recognize the serendipity
or epiphany, whichever it was.
That is not the only mystery and strangeness
I have been subjected to over the years,
but none of them proves anything to me.
I take that back,
they confirm for me the need for humility
and openness.
But John’s stories and my own
ineffable experiences
do not prove anything about Jesus to me.
If I needed any confirmation about the wisdom of Jesus
it is what I have witnessed in the community of faith
that engages in the practices of healing and bread.

But please do not hear my cantankerous relationship
with the Gospel of John
as calling your baby ugly.
Rather, it is simply feeling backed into the corner
by a part of our religious tradition
that insists that I take John’s words as proof of his claims,
instead of being able to witness
the presence of God in our midst,
where I do,
and how I do.

We have a diversity of lenses
and we need to recognize the glory
of all those visions we behold.

2 Easter 2019: My Tribe

April 28, 2019 by Cam Miller

This sermon might not be for you –
just a head’s up.

Being religious in our world
is not comfortable for some of us.
“Spiritual not religious” is a euphemism
for a vague belief or intuition about God
alongside a very clear rejection
of historic, communal faith.
In our cultural parlance,
spiritual is good
but religious is bad.

I suspect that most of us here,
whether or not we
have been church members all our lives,
we understand the critique
implied by that difference.
Given the failures, scandals, and
egregious sins of organized religion,
I mostly I agree with that critique –
except that it goes too far
and caricatures religion as if all the same.

But today is Thomas the doubter’s day,
and so I want to give a shout out to my tribe.

Thomas is the guy who said,
“Wait a minute folks,
you’re asking me to believe what I haven’t experienced?
I ain’t gonna do it.”

Now, John’s Gospel, and the traditional
preachers and teachers of Christianity
have ridiculed my buddy Thomas for centuries.
Even so, he was absolutely right
to make that objection.
I echo it too.

Do not embrace,
and do not believe,
and do not invest yourself
in that which you have not experienced.

Blind faith is a blind alley
in which we put ourselves at risk.

A leap of faith
only makes sense
if we can see the other side
to which we have
a snowballs chance of landing on.
So, you go Thomas!
For the tribe of Thomas,
there is an insistence upon
personal participation in the narrative
before we risk our lives
for the sake of the story.

But not everyone here
is a member of the Thomas tribe.
Some of us here have a nascent ability
to walk hand-in-hand with God,
and are not troubled by
doubts, distance, confusion,
or thick-headedness.
If that is you, I beg your patience
because this sermon
is not really addressed to you.

This sermon is to my Thomas buddies.
But if you listen in, it might serve
as a little sensitivity training
about how it is for those of us
who are spiritual pedestrians.

There are two things I want to say
to my brothers and sisters
who share Thomas’ insistence
that we must experience something ourselves
before we can put any faith into it.

First, if we require experiential learning,
then we need a broad and creative
definition of “experience.”

Many of us have been deformed and mangled
through a harsh indoctrination
in the leftovers of Age of Enlightenment.
We have been taught
that life and the universe
operate under the dictatorship of pure reason.
We have been taught to trust
only that which can be replicated
in a laboratory,
or that we can at least size up
with our physical senses.

So, our first task is learning to perceive
and apprehend
through our other faculties
in addition to the much-touted intellect.
We also have an imagination,
an intuition,
a glorious scale of emotions,
not to mention our tactile sense organs.
Leonardo di Vinci is a perfect example I’ve mention before.

He imagined the tank,
the helicopter,
the hang glider,
and numerous bridges and machines
centuries before the technology
and engineering existed to build them.
It is not difficult to imagine
that Steven Spielberg
has done the same thing in our generation.

Likewise, we all know people
who are incredibly intuitive
and able to know things
about people and situations
without anything being said or done in advance
to offer up that knowledge.

On a more concrete level,
Lisa Gibson over there,
likely hears things most of us do not hear –
not only because she has the trained
ears of a musician,
but because by birth she probably hears
more than we hear even without the training.
Some people hear more, smell more,
and perceive more than other people do.
Life and biology
do not provide a flat playing field.
So what I am driving at,
is that for those of us who have difficulty experiencing
the holiness that others
seem to sense all around and within them,
maybe our problem is one of capacity.

Perhaps the problem is our need
to more vigorously exercise
one or more of our sensing capabilities.

We have all the senses we need
with which to experience the holy in our midst
but perhaps we do not use them all –
or do not use them well enough,
or do not even appreciate
all of them well enough.
I am suggesting that our problem
is not an absence of discernment capability
with which to apprehend the
wispy and impetuous presence of God,
but rather, in how much of our capacity we use.

That is the first thing
I want to offer up for us Thomas’s to reflect on.
We need to challenge ourselves to ask
how much of our capacity
to sense and experience holiness
do we actually use?
Can we build capacity
the same way we would go about building
muscle or language
or mathematical skills?

So, give that some thought,
brothers and sisters of the Thomas Clan.

Secondly, there is one sensing capability
I haven’t mentioned, and which
is a truly difficult and cantankerous one
because we have been indoctrinated
into the cult of rugged individualism.

The capacity for greater spiritual depth
requires we draw upon a communal component.
That is difficult for many of us,
perhaps all of us, to truly embrace.
Beginning somewhere in the last century or two,
human beings began to imagine themselves
in a way that was radically different
from all of our other ancestors.

We came upon the idea
that we could individually know something about God
and the spiritual nature of the universe,
that had not been handed down
through past generations.
That idea was a radical break
with all previous spiritual wisdom.

The idea that I can have my “own values,”
and that those values
are not rooted in a communal wisdom
that is older, deeper, and wider than me,
is a radical break
with all previous spiritual understanding.

It is a whacky idea
that we are loners in the universe,
radically separated individuals
capable of individually accessing knowledge about God
that is unmediated through centuries
of religious ideas and rituals and sacraments,
and that comes to us in some pure
new revelation,
unassociated with all former revelations.
It is a radical break
with all previous spiritual wisdom.

So, the second thing I want us to consider
as members of the Thomas clan,
is that community
is one of our sense organs.

Stop and hold that for a moment:
community is one of our ways of knowing.

Community means it is not necessary for us
to personally know everything there is to know,
because community
holds a treasure trove of spiritual wisdom
in the same way brain cells hold memory.
And just like brain cells,
when community breaks down
we begin to lose knowledge.

There was a fascinating and very concrete
bit of insight about this
provided in the first weeks after we invaded Iraq.
In those first weeks
there was a landscape of relative peace
before the resistance kicked up,
and our electrical engineers
and power technicians
were sent in to get Iraq’s power grid
back up and running.
It was important to winning
the ‘hearts and minds’ campaign
as well as to benefit our armed forces.

But the effort was very slow
and took much longer than anticipated.
As it turned out, Iraq’s technology before the war
was terribly antiquated,
and our youngest generations
had learned their trade and honed their skills
on our more modern technology.

They didn’t have the capacity to bandage
the old back together again
because there was some rudimentary know-how
that had been forgotten.

In other words,
they could not band aid the equipment
back together again
because they didn’t have someone
like Howard with them.

We think about the Dark Ages
and wonder how whole cultures could forget
knowledge and technologies
in so short an amount of time.
But all we have to do
is consider how many of our own children
know how to survive without electricity?
What rudimentary life skills,
from making a fire to generating power,
have most of us never learned?

Community is a source of knowing
but it is a fragile source,
and requires continuity in order
for wisdom to remain robust.

Spirituality is not an individual exercise,
it is a communal wisdom
in spite of what passes for spirituality
in the culture these days.

What I want my Thomas brothers and sisters
to know, is that God
is not a commodity to be purchase.

God is not a secret knowledge
to which only some people have access.
God is not even something
to be known or had in any kind of way.
God is to be experienced or not.

So, because we are Thomas’
we need to really stretch our sensing capacities
so that we are open to knowing
when God chooses to be known.

Because we are Thomas’
we need to really stretch
our curmudgeonly resistance
to any dependence upon others
so that we can receive knowledge and wisdom
from the community.

Because we are Thomas’
we need to lower our resistance
to being thoroughly involved in community,
and move beyond our comfort zone
so that we tap into the wisdom and power
that is greater than ourselves.

To my brothers and sisters who share
Thomas’ strong, and I might add smart,
need to experience
that which we are being asked to believe,
here are the two things
with which we need remedial help:
building the capacity of our sensing capabilities,
and deepening our rootedness in community.

It is not a matter of blind faith
or a leap of faith – that is for other people.
We require more:
we require an EXPERIENCE of God
and so, we need to use our strengths
to enhance our weaknesses
to open ourselves to the holy in our midst.
We are Thomases,
so we ought to be able to do that!

Easter 2019: Your Easter Wonton Soup

April 21, 2019 by Cam Miller

So, let’s think about this.

Jesus’ women-friends
go to the tomb to take care of business
and come back and tell Jesus’ men-friends
the body is missing.
And the men friends think the women-friends
are telling an idle tale.
Now there is a story with the ring of truth to it.

Being a man,
I thought that perhaps Kim Rosen
was spinning a fanciful poem
when she writes that
the caterpillar liquifies
inside the cocoon.

But I have to tell you,
and maybe you already knew it,
that is exactly what happens.
With the release of enzymes,
the caterpillar digests itself.
Really, it does in fact liquify,
becoming caterpillar soup –
not puree but more like wonton soup
with groups of cells forming the wontons.

You might think my calling them wontons
is not very scientific,
but neither is what biologists call
those various groups of cells that eventually form
the eyes and wings and feet.
They call them, “imaginal discs.”
Really, imaginal discs.
That’s pretty poetic for science.
So, the caterpillar dissolves all of its tissues
except for the imaginal discs –
the wontons –
and uses the soupy mush to feed those multiplying cells.

If that’s not amazing enough, hold on.

It’s not just magnificent butterflies either.
A fruit fly even –
you know, those annoying little nothings
that hover around the bananas
and are so easy to smoosh –
begins with an imaginal disc of fifty cells
for each single wing.
Each of those imaginal wing-discs
will eventually be composed of fifty-thousand cells.
So, from little wontons
floating around in a disgusting soup,
black nits composed of fifty-thousand cells each
emerge into “the inevitability of wings.”
Don’t you find that amazing?
No?
Okay, try this.

One study of a particular moth,
suggests that it remembers,
IT REMEMBERS,
what it learned in the later stages
of being a caterpillar in that time before soup.

In other words, even though it melts
into the thick darkness of dissolved rot,
its memory swims through
and arrives on the other side
with those wings.

If you are not amazed by that
nothing I can say is going jump inside your skin.

Speaking of skin, did you know that our skin is an organ?
I didn’t, not really.
I may have heard that before,
but I was a humanities major
with a very poor science background.

Our skin is our largest organ.
It weighs about eight pounds altogether –

mine probably weighs more than Peg Kennedy’s.
We know the skin has several layers
but did you know our skin ages quickly?
Oh, I’m not talking about wrinkles here.
The cells on the outer layer of skin,
the dermis, is replaced every month or so –
which means we lose about thirty-thousand cells
every minute of our lives.
Hold that more a minute:
about thirty-thousand cells die
every minute of our lives…
and that is just the skin.

The entire surface layer of our skin
is replaced every year.

Now on some level I knew that
but when I look at a snake shedding its skin,
I never think of myself doing the same thing.

It turns out that we are more like a caterpillar
than we might imagine.
We just don’t see it
because, like the caterpillar melting
into wonton soup, we are living it.

Hardly anything in our body lasts more
than a few years.
We think we are this solid physical form
we have had since infancy
only a bigger, older incarnation of it.
Not true.
We have died one piece at a time
and been reborn
over and over and over and over again.

I am not lying.
Every tissue and organ in our body
dies and recreates itself.
The cells in the human body have an average age
of seven to ten years –
but looking around this room,
some of us have lived seven or eight times that,
at least one of us nine times that.
That means we are dissolving
and reforming and being transformed all the time.

Different parts of our body
die and are reborn at different rates,
so it is not a spectacular break-out-the-fireworks event.
The heart for example,
by age fifty, will have been replaced
by at least half, while, as I said,
the skin is replaced in total
every year or so.

Not amazed yet? Try this.
Stars…
are colossal nuclear reactors
that burn so hot they transform
hydrogen into helium,
and eventually helium in to other elements.
When a star reaches the end of its life
it explodes and we call that a supernova.
It was supernovas
exploding in abundance at the core of our galaxy
that scattered massive amounts of
carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen,
phosphorus, sulfur outward.
In other words,
the basic elements
and building blocks of life,
of which our bodies are made,
came from stars exploding
millions of years ago, and millions of light years away.

Forty-thousand tons of cosmic dust
falls on earth every year.
That is what we are made of –
the dust of stars.
So when I say at someone’s funeral,
“earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,”
it describes where we came from
as much as where we are going;
and it would be more accurate to say,
“stars to stars, ashes to ashes, stardust to stardust…”

We are composed of stars.
That is not just some hippie song lyric
or moonlight poem,
it is factual.
Astronomers have mapped
that part of the galaxy
where our dust-ness is likely to have originated.
We think we know which supernovas we came from.
Okay, so, whether on a cellular scale
or a galactic one,
we really are like that caterpillar
that melts away only to be reformed
in the hidden darkness
before its return to flight.
If we cannot be amazed at that
I fear there is nothing to say about resurrection
that can make any sense whatsoever.

Our problem
with going from science to theology
is really only an challenge of imagination.
The ability of memory
to traverse a dark soup of death
and come out the other side on a new pair of wings,
sounds like an idle tale
without the science to go with it.

But we do not have any science
to go with our primal narratives.
The wisdom laced into those ancient stories
that once seemed ridiculously fanciful,
can seem less farfetched given what we know from science.
All we need, is to allow ourselves
a grand enough perspective.

I am not here to make the case for the empty tomb
or Jesus eating fish on the shore of life
when he had sailed across the river of death.
But I am here to make the case
for your life and mine to be transformed.
No matter how old you are,
no matter how limited you may be,
no matter how solid you think your body is –
you are being remade right now,
in this moment,
one cell at a time.
You have already died –
over and over and over again;
and still you breathe.
You have been transformed,
remade,
resurrected,
one cell at a time
beginning with primal stardust
billions of years ago
and continuing right into this moment.

We have absolutely no room for cynicism.
Change and resurrection happens as naturally as,
well as naturally as
a fruit fly builds wings
from its own wontons.
Pessimism and skeptical negation
of hope and opportunity
are not born out by the facts.
Resistance to amazement
and openness
results from constricted perspective –
when our vision is hindered
and our perspective is too small

We are being remade daily
hourly even,
whether or not we believe it.
So when we get morose,
full of despair
that nothing good is possible any more,
we need to back up,
climb to higher ground,
and take a breath.
“I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
…be glad and rejoice forever
in what I am creating…”

If we could somehow have told those ancients
they were re-growing new skin every year,
they would have thought we were nuts.

Just like we seriously doubt Isaiah’s claim
that God can and will do a new thing.

But if memory can survive
the death of its body
and reappear with wings,
and our skin and other organs
are in a constant state of death and reformation,
it takes little imagination
to envision a new heaven and a new earth
remade and reformed
hour by hour,
day by day,
life by life.

Once again
we are riding a whale while looking for minnows
as we struggle with questions about resurrection
even as we are living it
one cell at a time.

In a cosmos
and within a skin
in which death and rebirth
and transformation
is a story told hourly,
the fire of our hope should burn bright,
the power of our drive and resistance should be fierce,
and the tenacity of our love should be relentlessly resilient.
And if we find ourselves in a dark corner
questioning if new life is possible
and hope is reasonable,
we need to step back.

In fact, we need to do whatever it takes
to gain a larger,
wider, more engulfing perspective
so that we can see
the astounding rebirth and elegant transformation
going on around us every minute –
it is, so to speak, the soup we live in.

Happy Easter.

*Liturgical Poem for Easter was: “An Impossible Darkness” by Kim Rosen

Palm Sunday C, 2019: Palliative – to relieve without curing

April 14, 2019 by Cam Miller

I’m just saying, Palm Sunday
is the hardest sermon to preach all year long.
Just remember that when you’re tempted
to throw your prayer stone.

When Easter arrives, we can dream again.
But for now, standing below the cross
on Palm Sunday,
we cannot dream.
Standing at anyone’s grave
we cannot dream.

In the shadow of death
the only dreaming is denial.
Instead of dreams, it is our memories
that areactivated in the aftermath of death.

Death pulls us into our memory.
By remembering
we stay close to the one who has died.

We stand around
and we remember the one who has died
and we laugh
and cry
and grow thoughtful
and reflective,
and we want to stay in that remembering zone
because it feels almost like a drug.
When the only other thing we feel
is the exhaustion of grief,
the “memory zone” is palliative.

If death has ever been a visitor in your life
then you know that channel of remembering
that feels so good
because it keeps us hanging
in the nether world
of the person who has died.
It is the remembering
that keeps the loved one from slipping away.
Remembering is not quite a palliative
but close enough
when we are standing in the shadow
of a loved one’s death.

Pal-li-a-tive.
“…to relieve without curing; to mitigate;
to alleviate.”

“Palliative care,” is medical care not intended to cure
but rather, to address the emotional, social, spiritual, and pain management needs of the terminal.

I am going to ask us to do a hard thing.
I am going to ask us to slip into the memory
of this Palm Sunday story
without the palliative
that was placed in it.

First, I will draw out the palliative
and then leave us at the heart of this story
so we can use it for contemplation during Holy Week.
Then, on to Easter, we can dream again.

Here is the palliative of the Passion story,
it is nothing new if you have heard me preach
that last three years:
Pontius Pilate,
the Roman military governor of Judea,
stands before the blood-thirsty crowd
and complains about the innocence of Jesus.
“Please don’t make me do this,” he pleads.

We used an abbreviated and modified version
this morning,
but here is a verbatim of Luke’s version
of the Pilate Palliative:

“Then they all shouted out together, “Away with this fellow! Release Barabbas for us!”

Pilate, wanting to release Jesus, addressed them again; but they kept shouting, “Crucify, crucify him!” A third time he said to them, “Why, what evil has he done? I have found in him no ground for the sentence of death; I will therefore have him flogged and then release him.” But they kept urgently demanding with loud shouts that he should be crucified; and their voices prevailed.

So, Pilate gave his verdict that their demand should be granted. He released the man they asked for, the one who had been put in prison for insurrection and murder, and he handed Jesus over as they wished.”

Luke has made it so clear and blatant
who is at fault, that unlike John’s version,
Pilate doesn’t even have to wash his hands.

In Luke’s version the crowd purifies Pilate of blame.

We can guess why it was palliative
for Luke to tell the story this way,
but since Pilate is whitewashed in all four gospels
with varying shades of emphasis,
why suspect the historicity of it?
Here is why:
We know that Pontius Pilate was ruthless.
He was a blood-thirsty, cruel,
and tyrannical manager.
He was so repressive and violent,
crucifying so many local peasants,
that the not-so-squeamish Caesar
yanked him from duty
just a couple of years after he crucified Jesus.
Pilate’s violent, repressive administration
fueled riots and rebellion by the locals.

That is not the picture the gospels painted of Pilate
when they were telling the tale
forty to eighty years after the crucifixion,
but Pilate’s recall, based upon his ruthlessness,
is in Rome’s historical record.
Pontus Pilate did not need a palliative,
no excuses were necessary for him.
He apparently just loved to kill peasants.
We also know that the ranking priests and elders
who formed the small establishment
around the Temple,
governed their little fiefdom
with a rigid, stingy hierarchy.

We know too, that they were greatly disliked
and disrespected by ordinary people
who were marginalized by these Temple clergy
and their privileged status.

At the same time, we also know this temple clergy,
beyond the temple courtyards and inner sanctuaries,
were impotent.

They were a powerless paper aristocracy
with no influence over Pilate.
In the scheme of things
they had even less power over the direction
of Roman governing authority
than immigrant laborers in Finger Lakes dairies
have over what the New York State legislator does.

That Temple hierarchy was hated to be sure,
bloated with self-importance
and perhaps even acting with malevolence
toward the peasants of their own religion,
but beyond the walls of the temple
they were also impotent –
and as history would show,
even in the Temple
they were powerless without Roman backing.
To tell the story with a nice-guy Pilate
put into a bad situation
by the bad-guy Jews,
was a palliative
for that second generation of Christians
who wrote down and disseminated the story.

So, who were Matthew, Mark, Luke and John comforting with this palliative story that blamed
‘the Jews’ for the arrest, trial, and death of Jesus?
And why should WE care?

They were protecting Rome.
It was Roman rule being whitewashed.
Pontius Pilate represents Rome
and the effort to conceal its guilt
by casting blame on the Jews
was done for a very good first century reason.
After that first generation of Jesus-followers,
Christians were no longer Judeans or Galileans,
they were mostly Roman –
in other words,
they were no longer Jews but Gentiles.

So, our passion story as it has come down to us,
like all remembering at the graveside,
was told partly as a palliative –
to relieve and alleviate the pain of loss.
That second generation of Evangelists
who we have to thank even for Trinity Place,
were telling the story in a way
that was more palatable to Romans and Gentiles,
and with little or no concern
about the Jews of Judea and Galilee.

The palliative in Luke’s Gospel
is that impotent clergy
and a violently repressed population
forced a ruthless, cruel tyrant
into executing a poor, undeserving Messiah.

There are two problems with this palliative for us.

The first and most awful one
is that it has been the source of Christian
anti-Semitism for more than a millennium.
With this palliative
Christians and the Church itself
have participated in inquisitions, pogroms,
and genocide against Jews and Judaism
for centuries and centuries.

That alone
means we cannot allow this ancient palliative
in our most sacred story,
to go unnoticed or unmentioned.
That is why I bother to address it each year.

But here is the other reason
this palliative may have shaped our story:
We do not know what really happened
between the Last Supper
when Jesus gathered his friends for Passover,
and his crucifixion on the cross.

We doknow
the Romans arrested him,
because that is who had the power and authority
to police locals.
We do know
Jesus was charged with insurrection
because crucifixion is the punishment
that fits that crime.

We do know
that Pontius Pilate was the one who condemned him
to be executed because he was the only one
with the authority to do so.

We do know
that Jesus was crucified
because it is corroborated by other,
even non-Christian
sources of the period.

But we do NOT know
how and why
he got from Passover with his friends,
to the cross with his enemies.
We do not know,
it is a blank, except for
what is written in the gospels.

When we stand at the grave
and cannot understand
why someone so young,
so vital, so close,
so beloved has died,
it makes us even crazier with grief
because we do not understand “WHY!”
We have no answers to death, and so
we reach for palliatives.
We reach for answers
whether we know they are true or not,
because they make us feel better in the moment.

But making the death of Jesus
seem more palatable
may relieve our anxiety and fear
but it will not cure them.

Making this sacred story go down easier
does not lead to dreaming again.
Only Easter leads to dreaming again. Only Easter.
At the heart of this sacred story
there are questions and mysteries we cannot answer,
and pretending that we can
is to engage in hospice spirituality
that presumes we will never get well
so let’s just make one another comfortable.

The story of Jesus,
the sacred story of the Passion,
is not supposed to make us comfortable.
It holds a truth not a palliative.

The sacred story of the Passion
is about the power of God’s love
coming face-to-face
with OUR use of coercive power,
and how we always try to kill the love of God.
Human coercion
always tries to kill the love of God.

That is what this story is about
if we take away the palliative myth about Pilate
being forced into killing Jesus
by the marginalize citizens of Judea.
Jesus was not the first
and he sure wasn’t the last,
but he shows us in excruciating detail
that our response to God’s love
is the use of coercive power
that seeks to kill.

Power in our hands can kill,
not only Jesus, but the love of God
as it makes itself known among us.
Or so it would seem until we can dream again.

On Palm Sunday 2019,
in the coming days of Holy Week,
we are challenged to confront
our participation in coercive power
and how we contribute to the death
of God’s ever-present love.

Not the Jews.
Not the Temple clergy.
Not even Pontius Pilate – because really,
he is only an agent of OUR bidding.

This story,
this sacred story told without a palliative,
asks how you and I
try to kill the love of God in our midst
with the misuse and neglect
of our power.

For some of us – like me, a large, straight male –
that will mean reflecting
on what our power actually is,
because we live in denial of it.

For others, whose power is more immediate
and obvious,
it will mean reflecting on
how we might use our power differently.

But either way,
this sacred story of ours,
without the palliative,
challenges us to consider our participation
in the attempted murder of God’s love
by the misuse and neglect of our power –
not just then…but now.

How do we participate
in trying to kill the love of God
with the misuse or neglect
of our power?

Next week we try to dream again.

4 Easter: That Terrible Trinity

3 Easter 2019: Ghost Busters

2 Easter 2019: My Tribe

Easter 2019: Your Easter Wonton Soup

Palm Sunday C, 2019: Palliative – to relieve without curing

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