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Proper 25C 2016

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Texts for Today
Excerpt From, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek” by Annie Dillard

Thomas Merton wrote, “There is always a temptation to diddle around in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.” There is always an enormous temptation in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end. It is so self-conscious, so apparently moral, simply to step aside from the gaps where the creeks and winds pour down, saying, I never merited this grace, quite rightly, and then to sulk along the rest of your days on the edge of rage. I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.

Ezekiel excoriates false prophets as those who have “not gone up into the gaps.” The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clifts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock – more than a maple – a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.

Gospel: Luke 18:9-14

SERMON

No matter how old
or young we are,
there are gaps to stalk.

One morning this week I watched
as a toddler wandered around a room full of clergy
who were droning on about boring Church stuff
of little consequence to anyone.
Meanwhile the toddler was leaning
and falling
and bumping his head
and crying,
and getting back up and doing it all over again.
To that little muffin
the entire world was a gap,
and the only way he was going to learn to walk
was to stalk every gap he could find.

I have witnessed first hand
people on their deathbed stalking the gaps –
demons of the mind they wrestled to the ground,
or reconciliations they had feared their whole lives,
and forgiveness’s received and granted
with pain as well as with its release –
and they simply refused to be timid
even as they came to their death.

So whether you are a Freshman
sitting pretty with four years to go;
or a senior sweating the day after graduation;
or a mid-lifer just figuring out
you have less ahead than you do behind;
or you are just plain old
and have the aches and brittle bones to prove it;
stalking the gaps
is not only available to you,
it comes highly recommended
as a crucial element of our spiritual practice
and true well-being.

I just love that Tomas Merton phrase,
and Annie Dillard’s commentary on it:
Merton: “There is always a temptation to diddle in the contemplative life, making itsy-bitsy statues.”

Dillard: “There is always an enormous temptation
in all of life to diddle around making itsy-bitsy friends
and meals and journeys for itsy-bitsy years on end…
But the world is wilder than that in all directions,
more dangerous and bitter,
more extravagant and bright…
We are making hay when we should be making whoopee,
raising tomatoes when we should be raising Cain,
or Lazarus.”
The Biblical reference
in the longer quote about “stalking gaps,”
is to Exodus 32 when Moses is on the Mountain of God
and just before he receives the 10 Commandments
on the stone tablets.
As any student of the holy mysteries knows,
a human cannot look upon God and live.
So God tells Moses to go hide in a cleft in the rock,
in other words, find a gap.
“Get in there,” God says, “and when I pass by in all my glory,
you can peek out at my butt (that what God says),
but you cannot see my face or you will die.”

So that’s what Moses does.

As the pluperfect nexus of all life-and-energy
whirls over the top of the mountain
more intense than an F7 tornado,
Moses, shivering and shaking most likely,
watches as the Creator of the Cosmos
brushes past him.

In all the world of theological legend,
only Jesus and Mohammad have ever gotten so close
to the God of the Universe
while still breathing air.

But that super-charged gap is not the only one.

You and I have many other smaller gaps available to us
that we have not dared to stalk.
I think church should help us stalk the gaps in our lives
rather than spread out a pall
to cover them over
so we do not have to notice them.
What church often does instead though,
is encourage us to be like Dorothy
at the end of her journey in OZ,
when she clicks her heels
and wishes for home.

But I must be careful here
with this stalking-the-gaps language,
because I don’t want us to imagine
that spirituality is only about adventure.

Sometimes the gaps we need to stalk
are right in the midst of where we live
and sewn right into what we are doing now.

Many of the most familiar religious myths
focus on heroic adventure
when in fact, the work of spirituality
is more often akin to farming.

It is about being present to what we plant,
and nurturing what we have sewn.
It is about moving through the cycles
with their thin veneer of predictability,
under which bubbles storms
and droughts
and hailstorms
and pestilence
and floods
and fires.
There is adventure aplenty
for people who work the land,
adventures unrecognized
by those who are always fluttering through travels.

So in this metaphor of stalking the gaps in our lives,
please do not hear it as referring only to
extraordinary and heroic adventures.

In the very ordinary soil of our lives
there are opportunities
and challenges
to enter into the gaps where uncertainty reigns,
where we receive visions we had not looked for,
and where we encounter the holiness of God
we had not asked for.

So instead of warming our feet by the fire
just a little longer,
and getting rested up just a little bit more;
and instead of having just one more cup of coffee
and maybe a piece of blueberry pie;
we might instead,
get up
and move toward that thing in the yard
which we think we see from time to time
peeking at us through the window.

It may be one of those things,
like a stone in our shoe,
which has been bugging us for a long time.
It could be a long-lasting grief
that has never really healed.
It might be a friendship that soured
or one that simple lapsed into silence.
It could be a long buried tension
with someone we love
that we know we “should” address
but have preferred to let the dog lie.

The gaps we could
or should stalk,
are most likely inside of us as well.
It could be a fear that has walled us inside ourselves
in over time.
It might be a resentment
we have been nursing like mother’s milk.
It may be shame or guilt about something
we haven’t figured out how to let go of.

We do not really have to go looking for the gaps
that God invites us to stalk;
there are plenty of them all around
and within us,
as we live our ordinary old lives.

The point is to stalk them rather than hide from them,
or ignore them,
or deny them.
It seems to me that religion and spirituality
should encourage
and strengthen
and challenge us
to stalk the gaps.

To put it in the terms of Jesus parable we heard today,
we would prefer to feel like the Pharisee,
who after all,
was quite pleased and at peace with himself;
even grateful for his well-being.
That is what we seek:
to feel right with the world
and grateful for our blessings.

And yet, we need a good, loud tax collector inside
to rend us from within
and beg for mercy
because he or she knows
that our lives have tipped the scales of justice
against us in ways we do not even recognize.

We want to feel like the Pharisee
but we need the agitation of the tax collector.

It is just too easy for us to get lulled to sleep by the fire.
When we are satisfied like the Pharisee
it is nigh impossible
for us to leave the comfort zone
until tragedy or crisis kicks us out.
It seems like an obvious and reasonable choice
to pick the warmth of the fire
over the discomforts and hazards of stalking the gaps.
And in popular religion and spirituality these days
it seems more about warming ourselves by the hearth.

Even that word, “spirituality,”
which has surpassed “religion” as the preferred modality,
sounds like a warm bath.
And yet, if we poke around in the profiles of courage
of the religious super-heroes
in just about any religion,
they were all gap-stalkers.
It was by stalking the gaps in their lives
and in their worlds
that they discovered what it was
they then taught to others.
It can seem more idyllic than that
when we read the lyrical verses of mystics like
Rabia of Basra,
Rumi,
Francis of Assisi,
Julian of Norwich;
or the wise sayings and poignant stories
of Siddhartha,
Jesus, or
Mohammad.
But their words are more heat than warmth,
more fire than gentle glow.
Ignited by what they encountered
in the dark gaps of mystery in their lives,
they challenge us to enter into what we do not know.
They urge us to enter the spaces in our lives
we have steadfastly ignored.

Now I tell you this as a protest
as much as a proclamation.

I have a new house,
and I am in the critical stage
of polishing a new novel
so I can try to get it published.

All I want to do in the whole-wide world
is diddle around with the thousand of little projects
that make a house a home,
and sit in my big brown chair
(which is also right by the fire)
and tap away at the computer.
Really, that is all I want to do –
it would make me so happy.

But you know what happened?
The congregation I am pastoring
has decided to stalk the gap of its future
and embark on a new way of doing things –
an almost entirely uncharted territory for a church.

For those here today who don’t know it,
Trinity has just agreed to pursue a partnership
with a developer
to create a beautiful boutique hotel,
restaurant,
and event center
in this building and on these grounds.
But not simply to slip away into the night
as a memory of what was once here,
rather, to co-exist with the new enterprise
and even venture out and create new options
beyond this building
and probably beyond our comfort zone.

This courageous congregation
has just entered into an unknown space
and is stalking the gap of its future.
If you are just visiting, join us.
We need new friends
and what we are about to learn together,
if God is involved in this craziness,
is likely to change us in ways we never expected.
If you are new or visiting,
this place is a ripe fruit
and you might want to take a big bite.

We have become,
without really meaning to,
a big fat example
of stalking the gaps.

So a lot of my projects will have to wait;
and my novel can only creep to the finish line.
Without a doubt
what is happening here
will bump up against your desires and intentions too,
and change your agenda
and put you out of sorts.
That is what happens
when we get involved with God
and enter into unknown spaces
that have always been right here with us
but that we feared to penetrate.

The only thing left to do
is hold one another’s hands –
that’s the best thing to do when walking into
the unknown together!
No more raising tomatoes,
we’re raising Lazarus
and we’ll need a lot of God for that!
We’ll need a lot of each other too.

24 C 2016: Domesticated Christianity

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Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being?

Good morning.

You may not feel this way,
being the folks who are listening more than speaking,
but preaching is a relationship,
especially with a resident preacher
instead of supply clergy.
The more and deeper your knowledge of me
and the broader and more intimate my knowledge of you,
the better the preaching will become.

That is why the first year of preaching
is the most difficult for you and me.
You do not know how to take some of the things I say
and I don’t know how you will hear them;

I don’t know what matters most to you,
and you don’t understand what passions drive me.
So like fine wine,
if we are kind and nurturing of one another,
we will age well together
and the preaching relationship will too.

Allow me then, to share a small memory.
It is an image from my childhood
in Grace Episcopal Church, in Muncie, Indiana.

Grace is a small, dark, Tudor style building.

Very small, not like Trinity Geneva.
The wooden pews, wainscot, beams and accents,
are darker than the wood you see here –
it is almost black.

The whole of Grace Church,
sanctuary and parish house,
could probably fit in this nave and chancel.
Grace Church can probably seat 100 people,
maybe 125 cheek-to-jowl.

All the windows are stained glass
like the blue one up yonder;
only they are not massive, panoramic windows.

Instead, the windows of Grace Church are smaller,
more narrow,
and more intense.
Composed of smaller pieces
of ruby, cobalt, and autumn gold
their colors seem even more intense against
its darker interior
than in this great and airy space here.

Like many old Episcopal Church buildings,
Grace smelled musty, like old books.
Filled with decades of old 1928 prayer books,
it wasn’t unusual to sneeze as you opened them.
The people of Grace Church,
as I remember them anyway,
were as constant and predictable
as the droning cadence of the way priests used to recite Morning Prayer.

When I was five or six
I would slouch down in the pew
and engage my imagination
in elaborate pretend scenarios
to keep from going absolutely bonkers with boredom.
Sometimes, for example,
I was a spy hidden in the pew on a dangerous reconnaissance mission
and collecting information on the adults around me.

Certain families always sat in certain places,
just like some of you.
Particular families always sat up front on the left –
not in the very first or second pew,
but one or two removed.
They wore mink and long dark cashmere coats
with very clean shoes that shined
(the way mine were supposed to, my mom would scold).

Behind them were the professors and their families,
in coats and ties and dresses
but somehow not quite as crisp as the up front families.

My family sat in the middle on the right,
which provided an unobstructed view
of the front left section.
The minister’s family sat in the very front row,
his children in a stair-step formation
from oldest to youngest.
As you might imagine they were the most entertaining
because there was always veiled shoving and hitting going on.

This was the late Eisenhower/early Kennedy era,
a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting –
the perfect image of domesticated Christianity.

For some people, that is still the standard
to which Church should aspire to return –
1950’s and early 1960’s Church.
It was before the strife
of the Civil Rights and Anti-war movements
that drove asunder the establishment church.
It was the very picture of domesticated Christianity
that had happily taken its place as a pillar of the culture
through which assimilation and socialization took place.

Even so, and still,
there was a strained tendon of tension
pulsating the heat of a potential fire
underneath the veneer of proper order,
class, and segregation.
I was a witness to it,
and perhaps you were too.
It was Jesus.

Even a bored, restless five-year old boy
could feel the heat of Jesus.
It was only a feeling;
I could never have named it back then.
It was a wordless intuition generated
by the distance between
what our hero-prophet said,
as expressed through those odd
Elizabethan words each week,
and the crisp, clean, and well-mannered adults
sitting properly and noticeably inattentive
as the Gospel was read.

If there was a nasty, bulbous-nosed
and agitating widow,
like the one from Jesus’ story
demanding justice from one of those families
up front on the left,
I never saw it.

Granted, I was only five years old
so there were likely all kinds of things going on
in that Church that I never saw or knew anything about.
But I did know this much:
the dirty,
smelly,
illiterate peasant named Jesus,
who railed and rattled and aroused
was replaced
by a well-mannered,
aromatic
and serenely gentle young man…
a guy that any parent would have been happy
to have date their daughter,
(same sex dating was not mentioned in those days)

Even though the prince-and-pauper switch
of one Jesus for another,
was done completely and thoroughly
through art, music, language, and Sunday School lessons,
their mistake
was in continuing to read the Gospel stories.
Even though the King James’ version of the Bible,
which took the first century
Greek equivalent of pigeon English
and smoothed out its sharp edges and awkward syntax
in order for it to conform to the sensibilities
of educated European upper classes,
the real Jesus still bled through.

All of which is a warm childhood memory way
of saying that the Christianity we have been handed
is a highly domesticated version
of the rigorous and raucous one
that relentlessly rises up
from the pages of the Gospels
like some smacked-down superhero
returning to do battle with the bad guy.

There has always been a wrestling match
between that radical first century Judean peasant
and the well-educated upper class Euro-American culture
that has often used Christianity
as the sheath for enjoying and preserving
its artistic achievements
like architecture, music, and liturgy.

It is a basic and painful conflict
between the perspectives of Biblical people
who lived on the margins and experienced
powerlessness and violence at the hands of empires,
and imperial Roman and Colonialist European cultures
that read those stories about biblical people
as they raped other indigenous cultures
in the name of Christianity.

The language of worship and theology
that has been practiced in popular Christianity –
whether conservative Evangelical,
traditional Roman Catholic
or Mainline Protestant –
is a kind of domesticated religion.
But pasteurizing religion is nothing new.

Every civilization,
from the Roman Empire to the new China
to Nationalist India,
have engaged in the domestication of their religions
in order to incorporate and support
the values and idols
of culture and nationalism.
The heroes and prophets of the world’s religions,
if they were allowed to roam free through the centuries,
would wreak havoc on the social forces
of order and control.
Jesus, for example,
is highly subversive.
Biblical Christianity is subversive of imperial culture
no matter who the emperor is
or which brand of government runs the show.

Where we would prefer refinement
the Bible is course.
Where we would add gentleness
the Bible is militant.
Where we would use reason
the Bible is outrageous and miraculous.
Where we would prefer a high-toned culture
the Bible speaks in vernacular.

The heat of that tension
boils just below the surface
of everything we do as “church.”
It would be too much for us
to cut open a large hole
and let the lava pour forth,
but we should always be boring smaller channels
to allow the heat to escape
and remind us
that the façade we have constructed
is just a façade;
and the spiritual wisdom available to us
is always a barely restrained chaos
waiting to be released.

That is the ominous yet promising image
I would like us to have in mind
as we glance at the last promise
of the Baptismal Covenant.

This is the last week
of a five-part series on Christian spiritual practice
as described by the Baptismal Covenant
that is printed on the cover of your worship guide.
In describing Jesus and the Gospel as I just did
we already have a clue to the dangerous opportunity
evoked by the fifth promise:
Will you strive for justice and peace among all people,
and respect the dignity of every human being?

Will we?
Will we be part of a struggle
for a more equitable distribution of resources?
Will we?

Food,
health care,
housing,
education,
and employment –
will we be part of a struggle
to change the way we do things in this country and around the world
so that these basic resources are more equitably shared?

You see, there is a subversive tension in that promise
because it may go against our own self-interest
and it may interfere
with our political and economic values.

Will we be part of a movement
that struggles for peace?
Will we?

Domestic peace,
so that women and children and men too,
need not fear for their safety
because of abuse.

Gun violence peace,
so that no one need fear being shot
on the street or in their home,
at a concert or movie or school.

Political peace,
so that discourse between factions and candidates
is not violent, abusive, or aimed at stirring up
the darker angels of our natures.

Battlefield peace,
where violent coercion is the principle method
of doing business between nations
or resolving disputes between factions.

Will we practice peace-making?
Will we?

Will we respect the dignity
of every human being?
Will we?
Will we acknowledge our prejudices,
and look at our own bigotries,
and hold up our own hatred
and our suspicions
and our fears
so that we can move through them
on our way to treating everyone with dignity?
Will we?

So we see that this promise of our baptism
is grounded in the Jesus we never really knew,
the one that is undomesticated
and was considered dangerous enough
to be sentenced to death
by means of State terror
because he was subversive to empire.

These promises of our Baptismal Covenant
are a description of what it looks like
to be a partisan of that Jesus.
The Jesus who is a little scary
because he really and truly is a prophet
of the God of Abraham and Sarah.

In conclusion,
for the series as well as for today,
let us note one more thing about the Baptismal Covenant
that is not a promise.
To each question asked,
“Will you…?”
the response is,
“I will…with God’s help.”

“I will,” is the strongest affirmation
in the English language –
both present and future tense.
But “with God’s help”
is also an acknowledgment
that we are incapable by ourselves
to fulfill the promise.
We are insufficient;
we are incapable of fulfilling these promises.
As with anything truly important in our lives,
we are utterly insufficient unto ourselves,
to actually do what we say we intend to do.
We must have God’s help.

I also think that means
God’s help working through the community
not some supernatural zapping
that allows us to overcome
the limitations of our humanity.

“I will with God’s help,”
means that with other people
and in the fabric of spiritual community,
we will find a way to get it done.
We won’t be perfect,
we won’t always make it happen,
we won’t be able to meet
all the demands of each promise.

But with God’s help
in community,
we will.

Our baptism is not about heaven and hell;
we are not saved from anything in our baptism
other than a life of destructive and meaningless
self-orbit.

Instead, our baptism is about being ministers
sent by God
to serve the love of God
in community,
and so create life on earth
as it is in heaven.
That is our mission
should we choose accept it.

Proper 23C 2016

by

“We will seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves.”
Promise 4 of the Baptismal Covenant

With the naked eye,
on a clear night without too much extraneous light,
you and I can see about six thousand stars.
That may be the thing
I miss most about northern Vermont,
walking my dog beneath the twinkling whispers
of the lighted dome above.
The colder it got,
and sometimes it went down to 20 below,
the more spectacularly
the solar system rained down upon us.

But from wherever we look at the night sky,
whether Seneca Lake or Tahoe,
the light from the star closest to our sun
takes four years to get here.

Light from the most distant stars we see at night
has taken up to ten millennia to reach us.
So while we see those sparkling orbs up there
the light we are seeing from them was actually created
between four and ten thousand years ago!

In other words,
we are not actually seeing those stars
when we look up;
instead we are seeing the past.
Think about that, just hover on it for a moment.

What we see is not what it is, rather,
what we see is what was – years and years ago,
and in some cases thousands of years ago.
We think we are seeing those stars and that light
as they are in real time,
but we are only seeing what they once were.
In fact, some of that light
is emanating from sources that no longer exist.
Some of that light
is but the ghostly image of what was
but is no longer exists.

That fact about the stars at night
is a wonderful metaphor for what we say about God.

In other words,
everything we read about God in the Bible
or literature from sages and saints,
including everything we read about Jesus,
is the same kind of light mirage
as the stars we see at night.
What we say
and what we see
is not actually God and Jesus
but what we imagine are God and Jesus.

You already know that,
but I remind us of it
because we are walking through
the Baptismal Covenant,
and we need some humility in order to remember
we are dust
and to dust we shall return.

We need the humility of knowing
we only see into a mirror darkly
rather than pretending we know
all about God and Jesus
because the Bible
and the creeds
and the hymns and the Baptismal Covenant tells us so.

We are too small,
and our information is too limited
for us to truly know what we want to know.

So we begin with that serving of humble pie
as we move into promise four
of the five promises of our Baptismal Covenant.
(This is s sermon series

for those of you that just walked in,
but each week is coherent without the other weeks –
at least in my demented mind).
Promise four is about ministry.

Ministry is one of those churchy words
that, like light from the stars at night,
is a ghostly image of the distant past
that does not automatically shed much light today.
As a general rule,
I do not like to use churchy language.
I try to speak with words about spirituality
that could be understood by people that have never
walked into a church –
and so avoid theological jargon if possible.

But the word ministry,
at least for us and in this moment when
we are talking about the Baptismal Covenant,
is helpful to remember.
The word goes back to the grassroots of our beginning.
It is a word composed of two Greek words,
apostolos, and
diakonos.
Apostolos is, “one who is sent”
and diakonos, “one who serves.”

Ministry, quite literally, means we are sent to serve.

More specifically, in the act of baptism we are sent.
In the promises of the Baptismal Covenant
we share an understanding of how to serve.
That is why we are focusing on the Baptismal Covenant – it is our shared understanding
of how to serve.

So even though the popular culture calls me a minister
everyone who accepts the promises of their baptism
is a minister.
I am a professional minister
because I get paid for it,
but you are no less a minister than I am,
or any other ordained minister for that matter.
So understanding that we are all ministers
and that we share ministry
through the community of Trinity,
is what this thing we do
is all about.

It is not supposed to be about the building,
it is supposed to be about our ministry.

Promise four,
as you can read on the cover of your worship guide,
asks that we “seek and serve Christ in all persons,
loving our neighbor as ourselves?”

Promising to seek and serve Christ in all persons,
indicates that we are universalists.

We do not seek to serve God
in some people –
only those we happen to believe God loves
above and beyond all other people.
We do not seek to serve
in only baptized people;
or only people we think might be interested
in joining us;
or who believe the same things we do;
or who live the same way we live…
rather, we promise to seek and serve God
in all people.

There is no denying the existence
of an extreme version of Christianity
that believes only those who claim Jesus
as their personal Lord and Savior,
and only those who are baptized in a particular way,
are loved and accepted by God.
That does exist
and inn their version of spiritual reality
everyone else is on his or her way to Hell.

That is not our vision,
not our belief,
not our understanding of Christian spiritual wisdom.

This fourth promise of our spiritual practice
says that we both
seek
and serve
Christ in all persons:
Everyone,
everywhere.
If we wanted to be a little less
triumphal and sectarian
we could change that to say
we seek and serve GOD in all persons.

That way we can talk about
divine presence
with Muslims and Jews
or Hindus and Buddhists
without being Jesus-centric
and potentially offensive.
That is the way I prefer to talk about it
but for some people
the Jesus-language is really important.

But I should also point out
that clearly we are not merely humanist.

Instead, according to this promise,
we claim the presence of the holy in every person
and distinguish ourselves
from those who think that
the human spirit
and the human mind
is all there is.
We could be Christian humanists
that have a high regard for human potential
and still hold the divine presence
within the human mind and spirit,
but our Baptismal Covenant says we
seek
and serve
God in all persons.
That’s pretty clear.

So we are neither Christian exclusivist’s
who insist that we have the only game in town;
nor are we agnostic
about the presence of God in our midst
and within us.
Instead,
we seek
and serve
God in all persons.

Promise four is the expression of love as a verb.
It is not a HOW TO
that tells us exactly what love is,
but it is a DO
that tips us off to the knowledge that love is a verb.
If we wish to practice Christianity
rather than just believe some ideas about Christianity,
then we have something very specific to DO:
seek God in all persons
and serve God in all persons –
seeking and serving, by the way,
is exactly how we love our neighbor as ourselves.

Allow me to reach back to the star metaphor.
Holding the idea or belief that God is in all people
without actually putting that into practice
by seeking out
and serving others,
is like that light from a star ten thousand years ago:
it’s unattainable and ghostly.

Having the idea that God is in all people
is nice and fluffy and sounds lovely
but it is meaningless
until we start seeking God
in the people with whom we live and work and play,
and among the people who we don’t think
look, act, or smell like God.
We have to go looking for God
maybe, as the song says, “in all the wrong places.”
We need to go looking for God in other people
for this to become a practice
instead of just a nice idea.

Then…
we have to find ways
to actually serve those people
so we can experience the presence of God ourselves.
But I want to suggest it goes deeper than service.

The goal is to build relationships with people
that the economy and the culture keep us away from.
Just serving people
from whom we live segregated lives
allows us to be paternal and maternal
and one-sided in our actions.
We give-they receive.
Not so good.

But to build relationships of mutuality
across boundaries which others keep,
not only enables us to experience God
it also helps to subvert those boundaries.
Subverting boundaries
sounds a lot more like practicing Jesus.
And practicing Jesus
is what the Baptismal Covenant is about.

So seeking God
and seeking to serve God in others
happens best and most often
when we find ways
to be in relationship with other people,

Including relationships that cross boundaries.
Relationships puts legs on
what is otherwise a nice idea,
or allows the twinkle from a star of the distant past
to become actual light.

For those of you who volunteer
at the Linden Exchange,
if you have not already done so,
is there a way to form a relationship of mutuality
with some of your customers?
Can some of those customers be invited
to volunteer and work with you as peers instead of customer only?
Breaking down boundaries like that
is what promise number four is all about.

For those who have not volunteered
with the TAAP program yet,
is there a way for you to do so,
and interact with the children in such a way
that builds a relationship
in which you become a learner with them?

If you support Hillary, or Bernie was your guy,
is there a Trump supporter you can find a way
to be in relationship with,
and grow in understanding will one another?
That will be subversive.

Are you a “Blue Lives Matter” partisan?
How about building a relationship
with a “Black Lives Matter” advocate?
If you are too scared or angry to do so,
it is exactly what is needed in order to serve God
and love your neighbor.

If you do not know where to go
or how to begin crossing such boundaries
and forming such relationships,
the easiest and most accessible thing you can do
around here anyway, is go
to Mt. Olive Missionary Baptist Church
on Tuesday evenings at 6:30 PM for Tools of Change.
People of all ages, races, ethnicities, and genders
meet there to reach across boundaries
and form relationships.
If you don’t want to go alone,
then ask someone else here to go with you.
I will go with you.

Some of us form relationships across boundaries
every day of our lives
and do not need to go looking for new ways
to seek and serve God.

Some of us have done it in other stages of our lives
and are in a season that requires us emphasis
on one of the other promises of the covenant.

But whatever stage of life we are in,
whatever our work or challenge in life may be,
no matter what we do
or where we do it, we have been sent to serve.
If we were baptized
then we have been sent to serve.

If we take our baptism seriously,
or would like to take it more seriously,
then we know, we have been sent to serve.

If we are interested in the practice
of Christian spiritual wisdom,
then we need to embrace the fact
that we have been sent to serve.

Whether the circumference of our life
is a 20 by 20 foot room,
or we have unlimited mobility and means,
we have been sent to serve
and we can find more and better ways to do it.

That is the challenge and opportunity of Promise number four.

Next week,
which also coincides
with the conclusion of our parish retreat,
we will end with a focus on Promise Five.

Proper 22C: My Dad and Rachel Carson

by

Please forgive the indulgence
but I am going to tell you about my dad.
He would have been 100 years old
in a couple of weeks
but died from a fall about seven years ago.

My dad looked like the old Hollywood actor,
Gary Cooper;
tall, lanky, slow of movement.

It would be a gross understatement
to describe him as introverted.
My dad was a listener not a speaker,
and he was the kind of man that,
when he did speak up in a group,
everyone listened
because they knew
if my dad thought it was worth saying
it was worth hearing.
As I got older and ventured into our community
without my parents
and formed relationships as my own person,
I also began to recognize that my dad
had stature in our town.
Not because he ran for office
or held positions of influence or power
but because he was trusted.
People held him in esteem for his integrity –
his word was his bond, as the saying goes.

My dad was a Republican and quite conservative,
and started legal aid in our community
before there was such a thing as legal aid.
He was an attorney who had a solo practice
doing wills and estates.

But I discovered,
when I worked on the County Hi-way Crew
during my summers in college,
that many of the men I worked with also knew my dad.
He had a reputation among them too,
not just among his professional peers.
It seems that he was one of the few attorneys in town
that charged a very affordable flat fee for divorce
decades before that was even an idea.
When I asked him about it,
he told me he despised doing divorce cases
but that the men I worked with
couldn’t afford it otherwise
and he didn’t want them to suffer debt
when they were also suffering through divorce.

My dad was more libertarian than conservative, and he just did not want there to be much government.

So he did the kinds of things
people need to do for one another
if they don’t want the government
to provide the services.

Now my dad and I disagreed heartily on that principle
but he was a man who practiced what he preached,
even though he never preached.
Whatever someone knew about my dad,
it was because they dragged it out of him
or simply hung around in his presence over time
to watch what he did and how he lived.

One small memory is burned in my soul.
It was the second Earth Day.

Some of you may remember the first-ever Earth Day
that took place in the now crowded year
of cultural history, 1969.

Well this was 1970, the second one,
and it was bigger than the first.
“Silent Spring,” Rachel Carson’s small book
on the effects of indiscriminant use of pesticides
and the chemical industry’s misinformation about it,
had ignited the environmental movement.
My dad, I discovered,
was the President of the local Isaac Walton League,
and an officer in the local Audubon Society.
He was a bird watcher
and an environmentalist before it was a word,
even though he really was just a man
who believed in living simply.

I was in charge of organizing my high school’s
Earth Day symposium
and I begged him to be one of the speakers.
My dad was not a public speaker
but I didn’t know it at the time.
I was amazed then,
sitting on stage behind him as he spoke from the podium,
to see my dad’s knees shaking.
But I was proud
and the event went off with great success.

Then sometime not long after that event
my dad called me into my own bedroom
from wherever I had been.
He stood pointing at the light switch
and reminded me that I was to turn off the lights
when I was not in the room.
He told me in a quiet voice
about the coal required to generate electricity
and how that coal pollutes the air.
Now mind you, this was 1970.

But being the squirrely teenager I was,
I responded with some smart, defensive protest
and he stopped me short when he said,
“I guess you don’t really care about the environment.”

It was such a small incident, so small
it seems an unlikely thing to be seared into my memory.
And it would probably be the kind of thing
buried by the dust of forgetfulness
if not for the fact that my dad
was a man whose integrity was recognized as bedrock
by all who knew him.

The third promise of the Baptismal Covenant
is as singularly simple
as it is spectacularly powerful and difficult:
To live a narrow distance
between what we say we value
and what we do.
“Will you proclaim by word and example,
the Good News of God in Christ?”

Heck, that could be the whole covenant –
just that one promise:
“Will you proclaim by word and example,
the Good News of God in Christ?”

If you just walked in off the street
and haven’t been here for a couple of weeks, or ever,
then you should know you have stumbled into
a sermon series
and this is week number three.
We are focusing on the “Baptismal Covenant”
as articulated by The Episcopal Church,
which is our description of what it looks like
to practice Christian spirituality in 2016.

It is descriptive and not prescriptive.
It is about what we do
and how we do it
rather than what we believe
and how we say it.
All of these sermons are available online
from Trinity’s website or my personal website,
and there will be some hard copies here at the end
if you want to read them altogether.

Today I want to unpack
the dense knot of wisdom in Promise 3.

We are not a doctrinal church,
and that is very important to point out.
We do not have a Catechism
or a Confessional Statement,
or magical words of any kind
that bestow entrance into the love of God,
or heaven, or membership in the Church.

That is not us, that is not our tradition.

You do not have to take Jesus
as your “personal Lord and Savior”
to be a full and complete insider here.
You do not have to recite the Nicene Creed
or any Affirmation of Faith
as a litmus test of correct personal theology
in order to be a practicing “Episcopalian.”
In fact, you do not have to be an Episcopalian
to be a full member of this or any Episcopal congregation.

That is just who we are
and the kind of community we try to practice
in this brand of Christianity.

But on the other hand,
those who are baptized and wish to practice
Christian spirituality as we have come to understand it,
do need to take Jesus seriously
as representing or pointing to
the core of our spiritual wisdom.

We believe that God shown through Jesus
like sun through a prism,
and that what Jesus taught and lived
makes available to us profound wisdom
about God’s best dream for us.

Let’s just stop and think about that for a second.

If we could know what God thinks…
if we could see,
just for a nanosecond what God sees…
wouldn’t we want that?
No matter what you think God is
or what you think God does or doesn’t do,
wouldn’t we want,
if just for a fraction of a second,
a God’s-eye view
of living life in such a way as to promote more and greater life?

That is what we think Jesus offers:
a peek at God’s best dream for us.

Oh, and by the way,
we do not insist that it is the only peek
ever to be revealed,
before or after.
To embrace Jesus
does not require us to reject Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, Lao Tzu
or the pantheon of revelations Hinduism offers.
The wisdom revealed by God in Jesus
is neither enhanced nor discredited
by the claims or wisdom inherent
in other spiritual practices.

To hold and embrace the wisdom of Jesus
can and should be done
from a place of pluralism
not exclusivism or relativism.
This is who we are;
this is what we embrace;
this is the wisdom
that has been confirmed by our experience
and by the history of humankind.

We believe that through Jesus
God’s best dream for us
is made clearer
and more accessible.
That is the bedrock of our belief.

Now some of us, in the Episcopal tradition I mean,
want to add some stuff on top of that bedrock –
like Jesus is God
or was divine in a particular way –
but the bedrock is not about who Jesus was
it is about God.
The bedrock is about God
and God’s best dream for us,
and then getting our heads around that
so we can get on with living the dream.
We can argue about Jesus all day long,
and we probably will,
but it is living God’s best dream for us
that matters.
Our spiritual practice
is living God’s best dream for us.

I know that I am not going to be able
to convince anyone here
that God does indeed have “a best dream for us”
if you do not already know it or intuit it.
It is not even my job to convince you –
because contrary to popular belief
we are not in sales.
We are in construction.
We are builders, not sales representatives.

That has been the problem in Christianity.
We thought we were in sales
and our job was to convince people
to see the world
the way we wanted them to see it.
Wrong.

Our job is to be like my dad,
and live the life we imagine God dreams for us,
and hope that others around us
will find it compelling enough
that they then begin to see what we see
and do what we are trying to do.

So this third promise pinches us
between listening for God’s best dream for us
through the wisdom of Jesus,
and living that dream with our own lives.

Integrity can feel like a harsh requirement
when described as a narrow distance
between what we say we value
and how we live.
It’s just plain scary
because most of us know how wide that chasm
is for us in our lives – Yikes!

It ain’t just light switches we forget to turn off.

And please,
we’re not talking about punishment for failure
as if there is a special Hell
for people who don’t get it right.
The whole heaven and hell thing
is maybe the worst of Christian history
because in earlier times it promoted
so much violence and self-abuse.

The case for integrity
is not made with reward and punishment
but by understanding cause and effect.
If we do this,
then we can expect this outcome;
and if we do that
we can expect that outcome.
It is reasonable and based upon
the evidence of experience
not magical thinking about heaven and hell.

So finding our integrity
is like discovering our balance.

Remember learning to ride a bicycle?
I realize that was a pretty long time ago for some of us
but I suspect it is a memory that doesn’t fade too much.
Remember it?

There was the wobbling and teetering,
even the falling over and getting scraped knees?
But then you got back on your bike
and wobbled down the street
until, voila, you moved into that sweet spot
that was your balance upon those two wheels.
And what joy the freedom riding a bike brought you.

Integrity is the same.
We suddenly discover we are living what we cherish
and it feels awesome
and solid
and just plain good.
Then we do something that makes us fall down.
Or maybe it happens
but not because of something we do,
but because we didn’t recognize
things around us had changed.

But either way, we lose our balance
and we wobble
and teeter
and we violate our own principles.

But then we learn from it
and try again.
And that is how it goes if we are willing to learn.

So what do we need in our lives
to practice living a narrow distance
between what we say we value
and how we live?

Well, we need some wisdom…
wisdom that stands the test of time.
Jesus offers that, which is part of why we gather here.
But we also need other people around us
to challenge and support us
as we wobble and fall, and get back up.

What we need is to see ourselves
in a process of learning to live with integrity,
rather than perfectionism
that requires us to get it right all the time.

What we need is a community
that nurtures and challenges us
to get back on the bike and wobble forward
rather than condemns us for failure
and threatens us with punishment.

What we need is grit
so that when we finally realize that balance
is always only temporary,
we will keep trying to discover it again.

Wisdom,
community,
a temperament to enter into learning as trial and error,
and gritty perseverance
is what we need
in order to practice promise number three:
to see and hear God’s best dream for us
and to live it as best we can
one day at a time.

Proper 21C: Evil is not the opposite of good

by

THE BAPTISMAL COVENANT

“We will continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.”
Being: Lens
Doing: Staying in Relationship

“We will persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.”
Being: Openness
Doing: Making Amends

“We will proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ.”
Being:
Doing:

“We will seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves.”
Being:
Doing:

“We will strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.”
Being:
Doing:

“I will, with God’s help.”
Being:
Doing:

 

I made a discovery on the way to writing this sermon.
I’m in deep doo-doo, which means all of us are.

If you weren’t here last week,
or if the sermon was utterly forgettable,
here is a reminder that today
is the second of a multi-part sermon series
on the Baptismal Covenant,
which is our core description
of what it looks like to practice
Christian spirituality in 2016.

When I started last week,
I really thought it would just be two weeks.
But honestly, I felt compelled to dig into the covenant
in a way I have not done before in preaching.
I realize now
we are going to look at one promise at a time.

We are going to give each promise its due,
and there are five of them.
They are that important to us,
especially for us here at Trinity Geneva,
because we are at such a radical turning
point in the history of the congregation.

So I apologize for the fact
that the readings for each week
will likely not get any specific attention
while we are focusing on the promises of the covenant.

That is a pity too,
because that story from Jeremiah is as juicy
as the one from Luke is disturbing.
But they’ve been in front of us before
and they will come around again.

Now if you are unfamiliar
with the Baptismal Covenant
it is the hub
around which the wheel of our spirituality
is connected.
It is impossible for a wheel to work
without a hub
and it is impossible
for our notion of spiritual practice to work
without the five promises of this covenant.

The twentieth century turned out to be
a war of beliefs within Christianity
even as the world was going to war
for ideological, nationalistic, and economic reasons.
Christianity obsessed on what it believed
and who believed rightly
and who believed wrongly
and the rewards and consequences for each.
The Episcopal Church corrected its course
with the Baptismal Covenant,
focusing on Christian spiritual practice
rather than prescriptive doctrines and dogma.

So please remember as we go through the covenant
that it is not prescriptive but descriptive,
which is the norm in our faith tradition.

The Covenant is on the front of your Worship Guide
and last week I began with the first promise:
“Will you continue in the Apostle’s teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and the prayers?”

Now some people, like me,
are big picture,
focus-on-the-process kind of people;
we are touchy-feely, and a bit gooey.

Other people are into details
and task-oriented;
and they are tell-me-what-to-DO kind of people.

So in order to address both needs,
I am assigning a word or phrase to each promise:
one for Being
and one for Doing.
Think of it as something gushy and sticky
as well as something about task and procedure.

Last week the being word was “lens” –
referencing the fact
that all of us have one or more
interpretive lenses
through which we filter our experiences
and see the world around us.

The Baptismal Covenant is a lens
through which we can understand
Christian spirituality as a practice.

The doing word was “staying in relationship.”
Our spiritual practice requires us
to be in relationship with other people.

We stay in relationship to the community of the past,
whether that first generation following Jesus
or the latest generation.

Staying in relationship with the generations
means dealing with the discomfort
of relationship with people we do not agree with
and may not even like,
but who share our history and tradition
and seek to know God’s presence in this moment.

But that does not mean we must conform
to what earlier generations did and believed,
rather, that even as we diverge from the past
we make an effort to stay connected
in meaningful ways
because the core nature of our spirituality
is communal.
So whether the past generations
or the ones coming up,
our spiritual practice is to stay in relationship to them
as best we can
and in ways that are life-giving and meaningful.

Okay, that was last week.

This week we will look at
the second promise of the Baptismal Covenant.
As you can read on the bulletin cover it is:
“We will persevere in resisting evil, and, whenever we fall into sin, repent and return to the Lord.”

The being-word for this promise is, feedback.
The doing-word for this promise is, making amends.

Resisting evil requires us not only to be open to feedback
but to actually court it,
and then of course, to hear it when it is offered.

FYI: evil is not the opposite of good, and
it is not some nasty supernatural power like the Satan.
Evil is a very human phenomenon
that each and every one of us is capable of doing
and we have already fallen into and practiced it.

Evil is the result of fragmentation –
when people become dis-integrated
and lose sight of the connections that actually exist.
To place it in a non-human context,
think of an eco-system that is in balance
verses one that has fallen out of balance.

Human beings have a history of encountering
Natural environments and other human communities
with certain blinders
to the balance of relationships that existed before.
As we enter them they can become distorted and imbalanced
because of our presence and behavior.

An easy example is natural wetlands.
As we know, wetlands
form at the edge of waterways and deltas
but we discovered the hard way,
they both regulate the flow of water
and ease the destruction of flooding,
not to mention they also filter toxins
and help to maintain water quality.

But until recently we saw wetlands as swamps
and an enemy to our interest in land development.
So we drained them.
Low and behold
we witnessed more and worse flooding,
greater and more devastating pollution,
and the disappearance of animal species.
That is a perfect example of human evil in action.

When we are self-orbiting
we see everything and everyone
as objects of our desire and use.
We treat them like objects for us
rather than perceive the intricate relationships
that existed before we entered the scene.
We see only the relationship
between the object and our desire,
and ignore or deny the consequences
of disturbing and thwarting the other relationships.

So our self-orbit
usually leads to the fragmentation of relationships
and that inevitably causes what we associate with evil:
destruction, violence, and alienation.

This is true on a personal level,
in our one-on-one relationships,
as well as in communities
and in the natural environment.
When we pursue our self-interests
WITHOUT a deeper and more pervasive perspective
on how we are effecting and influencing our relationships
in the wider sphere, bad things happen.

Conversely, when we are fully awake
to the exquisite complexity of our relationships,
and keep present both our compassion and empathy,
it is much more difficult for us to knowingly
betray and abuse our commitments, values, and beliefs.

So this second promise
relates to our propensity to slavishly pursue
our own self-interests.

Resisting evil requires us to court feedback.

We actually need to set up feedback loops
so that we receive a steady flow
of other people’s perspectives.
Then we need to find ways to become open
to actually hear the feedback we are receiving.

Again, think of the natural environment.

Satellite images of changes in the polar ice caps,
and historical studies
gathered from core samples of rock and soil,
are feedback to us about climate change.

But the self-interests of some very wealthy and powerful
people and corporations
led to many people, for many years,
closing themselves to that feedback.
Denial of climate change
is the denial of obvious relationships that exist
and has led to further fragmentation.
That is evil.

Listening to feedback,
actually going out and asking for feedback,
and then listening to what it tell us
helps remediate against that kind of evil.

It is amazing how powerful feedback can be
because it is a kind of mirror.

When we can see and hear
how our behavior is affecting other people
and our empathy and compassion are plugged in,
it becomes harder and harder
to willingly abuse our relationships.
That is what it means to resist evil.

We must court feedback and then be open to it,
even when it makes us uncomfortable
and defensive and angry.

Now, having said that,
there are of course occasions
when the competing interests
of different communities and values,
leads to conflict that also fragments;
and sometimes fragmentation has to happen
before a beneficial reconciliation
or progress can be made.
Jeremiah,
Susan B. Anthony,
Frederick Douglas,
Dietrich Bonheoffer,
Rosa Parks,
Aung San Suu Kyi
are all examples of people who engaged in conflict
and sewed the seeds of fragmentation
on the way to a greater binding
of more and complete relationships.
Such people are obviously the source of feedback
that self-orbiting people in power
do not want to hear.
Still they create fragmentation
on the way to restoring balance.

But courting feedback
and finding ways to be open to it when it comes,
is a primary way to resist evil. It is a spiritual practice.
We need to do this as individuals
and as communities,
and as governments and corporations.

Resisting evil
is a core element of our Christian spiritual practice.
And it has a corollary:
Making amends when we fail.

We will fail,
we have failed,
we have and do engage in evil.
And we have gotten really bad at making amends.

Our legal system makes it excruciatingly difficult
and even hazardous to say, “I am sorry.”

But the process of acknowledging responsibility
for evil that ensues from our actions,
whether by intent or by accident,
whether we did it consciously or unconsciously,
is fundamental to healing
and reconciliation.
It is also just a very basic step
in how we learn to become better people.

When an alcoholic or drug user
decides to enter into the recovery process,
a fundamental moment in that process
is facing all of the harm he or she has done
and all the violations of relationship
he or she has engaged in.
THEN, he or she makes a list
of all the people
to which they need to make amends.

Amends are then made one by one
where to do so does not cause even greater harm.
How to make amends or reconciliation
is not prescriptive and will happen differently
with different people and different relationships.
But, and this is huge,
recovery is stunted right there
if personal acknowledgement of offense
and an intentional process of making amends
does not take place.

Recovery is in fact endangered
and will inevitably end
without the difficult and often brutal companions
of confession and reconciliation.

That element of recovery from addiction
is a metaphor for all of us
when it comes to dealing with the evil
we have participated in.

So when we engage in evil,
or when it is revealed to us that our actions
have caused and abetted in the fragmentation
of goodness and love and health –
our task,
our DO,
our practice…our Christian spirituality –
requires that we figure out the best way
to make amends and pursue reconciliation
in addition to ceasing the action that is causing harm.

So the second promise is resisting evil,
done most effectively by courting feedback;
and making amends,
which means changing our behavior and reconciling.

Next week we will focus on the practice of keeping a shorter distance between what we say we value
and how we live our lives. Stay tuned.

Trinity Place

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

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