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1 Epiphany: A little something about spiritual practice…

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The five promises of the Baptismal Covenant

  1. With God’s help, we will continue in the apostle’s teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers.
  2. With God’s help, we will persevere in resisting evil, and, when we fall into sin, repent, and return to the Lord.
  3. With God’s help, we will proclaim by word and example the Good News of Christ.
  4. With God’s help, we will seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbor as ourselves.
  5. With God’s help, we will strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.

I prefer to write poetic sermons,
at times even sacrificing the “So What?” at the end
for the joy of sharing and hearing it.
It is more fun and challenging
to ring the melody and notes from something like,
a descending dove
with a message that you are my beloved,
than it is to examine if it has any meaning for us.

This is not one of those poetic sermons.

An esoteric conversation with Michael Hartney
about Epiphany, the Magi, and
our Revised Common Lectionary
caused me to read about the evolution of Epiphany
from its absence before 361 CE
and its current use in both Eastern and Western
Christianity.

Having read these tomes of Church history
about the conflicts and controversies
that shaped the modern-day liturgical
observance of Epiphany,
I am left
with the same feeling
as I had when reading about such things
in seminary.
It is the same feeling
that the great lay theologian Verna Dosier
must have felt when she said to young Cam Miller,
after I had delivered
what I thought was a spanky, fresh sermon
at the College of Preachers.
She looked at me and said, “So what?”

Even though I am interested in history
there is something about the history of the Church
that leaves me cold, as in, “So what?”
I think it is because it is so rarely
about things that matter.

So much of church history
seems to me to be like the argument
between Sadducees, Pharisees
and scribes
about whose wife
will a widow be in heaven
because she has outlived five husbands.

First, like so much of church history,
it is an argument about something
we do not know and never will;
two, it is about nothing
that matters here on earth;
and three, it does nothing
to change the social
and economic status of the woman,
and instead preserves an unjust patriarchy.

The reason I mention all of this,
is because baptism itself
gets buried
and neutered in church history.

I mean, it is such a painful irony
that Jesus never looked under the table
to make sure those he was eating with
were circumcised or not,
yet the first thing the church did
was to turn baptism into circumcision —
you’re either in or your out.

Today, and I think all season of Epiphany,
is a wonderful time to focus on baptism —
our baptisms
and the relevancy of baptism to us.

Actually, even to make the claim
that baptism is relevant,
might seem startling these days.

Here is a little living history.
The Baptismal Covenant in the 1979
Book of Common Prayer
is the answer to “So what?”
To my mind, the five promises
of the Baptismal Covenant
that we will be sharing each week of Epiphany,
matter.

They put flesh on the bones
of our beliefs.
The covenant says, “this is what it looks like
to practice Christianity.”
It says, “we believe
the ‘So what?’ of our faith
is these five commitments
that will make us different.”
The Covenant asks, “this is what I do,
will you join me in doing it?”

The five promises of the Baptismal Covenant
are not an argument
about angels on the head of a pin,
or the nature of Jesus,
or three-in-one or one-in-three.
Instead, our covenant is a DEscription
of how to practice Christianity.
It is a DEscription
of the “So what?” of our practice.
It is a DEscription
of the plumb line we use
to measure how we are doing.

Unlike so much of Christianity yesterday and today,
it is not about espousing beliefs
and shoving them down other people’s throats.

It is descriptive not prescriptive.

Our covenant is not a PREscription
because The Episcopal Church
does not understand its authority
as prescriptive.
Any authority we have
rests in the integrity of our practice:
the distance between our five promises
and how we actually live our lives.

Scrubbing clean our soul or heart
from original sin
so that we can enter heaven,
is not what baptism is about.
If you want to know how baptism got
so terribly corrupted
and turned into a ticket out of hell,
then read some church history.
It is not a pretty story.

Rather, baptism is about how we practice Christianity.

For those of us who were baptized as infants,
it started with a promise from our parents
that we would be raised in the community of faith
so that we could come to understand
the Baptismal Covenant
and to learn the wisdom of Jesus.

But baptism became ours
when we were Confirmed,
or if not Confirmed,
when we embraced Christianity as our own
rather than a club we just grew up in.

If I can keep from getting distracted,
I am going to continuously bring us back
to the five promises throughout Epiphany,
using them as a meditative focus.
So to begin that,
please notice two things.

The first thing to note
is that our own congregational mission statement
is based upon and rooted in
one of those promises —
“to respect the dignity of every human being.”

And actually, so is the second sentence,
”and treat each person entering our doors
as if that person is Christ.”
That reflects the promise to “seek and serve Christ
in all persons…” — as opposed to only some persons.

And that mission statement wisely connects
all of this to both our personal lives
and our life together in community —
as if they are the same,
as if it is a practice
we are engaged in
no matter where we are.

Finally, I want to draw our focus
to the statement, “With God’s help…”
Without that caveat
these promises would be an arrogant
and soul-less list of test questions —
as in, are you good enough
or have you been successful enough.

”With God’s help…”
acknowledges that we are incapable
of a meaningful practice without God’s help.
We are dependent.
The covenant
is not the promise of a personal achievement
or New Year’s resolution
we fulfill or not.
It is not a Scout’s Promise
or Pledge of Allegiance,
or any other kind of loyalty oath
or standard of perfection.

”With God’s help…”
means that our spiritual practice,
from the very beginning,
is an act of surrender.
Just like the first step of Alcoholic’s Anonymous
that acknowledges powerlessness over alcohol,
”With God’s help…”
acknowledges our powerlessness
to engage in a meaningful spiritual practice
without openness to the presence of God in our midst.

So even before we begin the practice
of the Baptismal Covenant,
we acknowledge our powerlessness
and then welcome God’s help —
the first steps
in our spiritual path.

It is a tough and challenging place to begin:
acknowledging our dependence
and opening ourselves to God’s participation.

You and I have this spiritual practice,
or craft, as young Amanda Gordon calls it.
She may not have had the Baptismal Covenant
in mind when she wrote that poem, but it works:

“Every day we are learning
how to live with essence, not ease.
How to move with haste, never hate.
How to leave this pain that is beyond us,
behind us.
Just like a skill or any art,
We cannot possess hope without practicing it…”

We have a concrete and doable practice of hope
we call Christianity,
and it is described with five promises —
each with a powerful
and sometimes radical, “So what?”

More next time.

Presentation of Jesus at the Temple: Encoded Language

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TEXTS FOR SERMON:
Malachi 3:1-4
Luke 2:22-40
“Pondering These Things” by Gay Hadley

“Neighbors said it first.
Surely this child
belongs to someone else.
Mary, too, when she held him,
sang him to sleep,
watched his deep, brooding eyes,
wondered where he came from.

We ponder our children,
blessed or not, depending
on your point of view.
We are afraid for the ones
who talk early, speak
with a shivering wisdom.

We fear the world
will be afraid.
And we know we may lose
them, not understanding
why, except to think
they must belong
to someone else.”

SERMON

This sweet story of mom and dad
so pleased to present their new son at the temple,
has a shadow side
whispering in a language
only some listeners can recognize.

It is very phenomenon as American slaves
singing spirituals in the field
that spoke of their suffering and hope
in a language the task-masters could hear
but simply not understand.

Oppressed people everywhere
create metaphoric language
with a literal meaning heard by persecutors
and an actual meaning loud and clear to the tyrannized.

As 21st century readers,
we need to see the split-screen in which this story.
Luke is writing to his audience
fifteen or twenty years AFTER
the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem.

To non-Romans,
and even to Romans of a certain class,
the backdrop is a poignant reminder
of the imperial massacre
of Jews in Judah and Galilee.
It seems like a normal story
about a normal activity
but it would immediately trigger
grief and anger
and a molten cocktail of emotions.

Secondly, to go to the historic context of Luke’s story,
the hearers would also
travel much farther back in time – to the Exodus.
In the Exodus liberation story
set in the Egypt of Ramses II,
every Hebrew first-born son
was to be dedicated to God –
even though they belonged to Pharaoh.
That’s one of those public metaphors
that speak one thing to the oppressor
and another to the oppressed.

So, zooming forward
to the time of Tiberius Caesar and Herod Antipas,
Joseph and Mary bring their new-born
to the one-and-only house on earth
where God lives.
Once there, they do what the Egyptian Hebrews did,
dedicate their child to God –
not to Tiberius who was claimed as a god,
but to Yahweh who they know to be God.

Suddenly Luke has transported
Joseph & Mary back to Egypt
with a literary collapse of generations,
painting them into solidarity
with centuries of ancestors.

But wait, this story as told by Luke,
is being told at a time when all semblance of the Temple
and Israel, were gone – as in,
no more.

The two primary actors in this story,
other than the parents who presented their baby,
are two old people
who are dead by the time Luke writes his tale.

The first is Simeon, a man who can’t die
until he recognizes the seed of deliverance and restoration
in a prophesized newborn.
Cleverly, Luke echoes the past
with oblique reference to the children of Israel
who were delivered from their oppression under Egypt,
and by doing so, references the future
which somehow is connected to the baby –
and he does all that without naming any names.

We might ask, what in the world is Simeon is talking about
when he says that God will reveal something to the Gentiles?

Well, it’s the same thing that God revealed to Pharaoh –
“You ain’t in charge, dogface.”

And what then, does it mean for God to bring about
“the glory of the people Israel?”

It means restoration of the land, rebuilding of the temple,
and there, the defeat of Roman domination.
All said of that is said without saying so.

Then there is Anna, a prophet.
She has been fasting for eighty-four years,
a ritual act of grieving.
Suddenly, she grieves no more –
because, why?
Because Jerusalem is about to be redeemed.
Well, what is involved with the redemption of Jerusalem?
Just this: the Roman scum are destroyed,
kicked out, and demolished.
The Temple is rebuilt on Zion.

All of that is proclaimed without ever saying so.

Joseph and Mary were just doing
what was required by law –
presenting their child at the Temple.
What could be more innocent.

To the oppressor hearing the tale,
it is about a couple miscreant peasants
performing their pathetic religion.
But Luke doing something here,
other than telling a sweet tale
about the holy family performing their duty
under the Law of Moses?

“…We are afraid for the ones
who talk early, speak
with a shivering wisdom.

We fear the world
will be afraid.
And we know we may lose
them, not understanding
why, except to think
they must belong
to someone else.”

Gay Hadley’s poem
utters eloquently
the hope and fear
of every parent, aunt, uncle, and
grandparent
who every loved a newborn
addition to the family.
It isn’t the fear of the emperor
or the hope of national independence,
but the recognition
that one so small is up against
enormous hazards
and random events
beyond anyone’s control.
It is the fraught recognition
of the world we are all born into
and the one we live through –
until eventually, don’t.

That is the nexus
of where people like us –
Roman’s after all –
truly share the perspective
of those we oppress,
even if we do not intend to be oppressors.
WE and THEY are US
when it comes to our vulnerability
before the vastness of the cosmos,
and the limitless array of dangers
that surround us in every moment.

The Romans had temples and gods
to which they prayed and sacrificed
for the safety of their newborns,
just like Joseph and Mary.

Oppressed and oppressor are connected by our love,
by our vulnerability, by our hope,
and by our fears.

There is a criticism pious people make
about those
who reach out for God
only when they are in need.
But I totally get that.
Why would we even think about God
when we feel in control,
content and satiated,
and as if death and deprivation
were nowhere to be found?

When we feel like that, we are on top of the world
and we do not NEED God.
Sometimes we imagine we are
the masters of our own destiny,
and we can get taken up in the goodness of life
and not even think about how we got there –
or who we have to thank for an assist.
We’re just happy to be there.
This is the bind
that we post-moderns are in.
I am guessing that most of us here
are not in Malachi’s camp
that sees the world through the bi-focal
of purity and evil.
I could be wrong,
but I am guessing that most of us here
do not think that misfortune is punishment
for our sins
and good fortune
a recompense for our purity.

We know all too well
there are jerks, and ogres, and
grotesquely self-interested hedonists
who have all the power and money
and it will never be shared
with the great majority
who suffer, are disrespected, and wrongly arrested.
There are enormous fortunes out there
that the millions and billions of just plain good folks
will never see or benefit from.
Surely that is not an arrangement
instigated and authorized by God.

So purity and evil
are probably not the cause and effect
of happiness and good fortune
in the way that much of ancient religion
had imagined or hoped.
And, without that scheme,
we are left more vulnerable than ever –
naked before the universe
and praying
that that any huge comet careening through space
will miss the earth.

As 21st century moderns,
we know too much
and yet, so much less
than we need to know.

What are we to do?

I hope you didn’t think I had an answer to that question.
On the other hand, I have been working on it
since I was about eight or ten years old,
and here is where it’s led me.

The difference between spiritual and religious
in my mind,
is that being spiritual
accepts the truth of the situation we are in
and frames it in a way
that empowers us to live well anyway.

Religiosity on the other hand,
begins with a denial of our situation
and claims truths
that have no basis in our experience.

Let’s take baptism as an easy example,
since it is vaguely or thematically related
to what Mary and Joseph
were up to in Luke’s story.

Religiosity would see baptism
as protection from Hell,
a kind of ritual magic rooted in the idea of purity –
that our soul is stained
and this is how we get the stain removed.

A more spiritual understanding of baptism
is that we welcome the newborn
into a communal practice.

That practice is one in which
we share some common values
and commend some common ways of treating
one another, and even
those we do not know.
Rather than an act of purification,
baptism seen spiritually
is a recognition that we have the potential
to live badly – in ways that are both self-destructive
and hurtful to others.
At the same time, baptism offers a vision
for how to live well in community
and resist
our more destructive propensities.

In the “Episcopal Baptismal Covenant,”
it is an explicit understanding
that God doesn’t do anything FOR us
BUT we can do amazing things
with God’s help.

How God helps
is another one of those mysteries
we do not get to know the answer to,
and it is better to acknowledged it
than deny it or fantasized about it.
Proclaiming what God does
or doesn’t do, seems to me
to be foolhardy and arrogant.

So, in a few moments,
when we reaffirm our own baptismal covenant,
I invite us to think about it as a description (not a prescription) of our spiritual practice.

It is not prescriptive
because it can be practiced in an infinite
number of ways,
and depends mightily on our context
and our capacity.
It is DESCRIPTIVE
because spirituality is evocative,
intuitive,
and highly contextual
rather than fixed and precise.
Spiritual practice
is not like flying a plane or driving a car,
because it is not that precise.
In short, the baptismal covenant
is a way of framing the life we live
in this ocean of randomness,
fraught with hazards
and opportunities,
and framing it all
in a way that empowers us.

When we read the Baptismal Covenant,
there is no sense of fear and anxiety,
no denial of our baser proclivities,
and no wishful thinking of divine quid pro quo.

It is instead,
an empowerment
that invites us to build a community
that more nearly reflects
what we imagine
is God’s best dream for us –
the kingdom of God on earth
as it is in heaven.

So I hope we will see how baptism
frames and re-frames life in the world
as we actually experience it,
when we reaffirm that covenant in a moment.
Oh, and one more thing,
even though it doesn’t say so explicitly:
It is always…
just one step at a time.

The Episcopal Baptismal Covenant

“With God’s help, we will continue in the apostle’s teaching and fellowship,
in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers.

With God’s help, we will persevere in resisting evil, and,
when we fall into sin, repent, and return to the Lord.

With God’s help, we will proclaim by word and example
the Good News of Christ.

With God’s help, we will seek and serve Christ in all persons,
loving our neighbor as ourselves.

With God’s help, we will strive for justice and peace among all people,
and respect the dignity of every human being.”

1 Epiphany C 2019: The Presumption of Solitude

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I am going to do two things
I normally do not do in a sermon.

The first is to read an extended bit of prose,
and the second is to “proclaim.”

I know preachers are supposed to proclaim,
but I do not like to – at least not explicitly.
To talk about anything is to proclaim something,
of course, but we all know
I have no more right
to stand up here and tell you what to believe
than you have to tell me the gospel truth.

Rather, I hope, what I do
is poke and prod and ponder
and share the results of that with you
for your own consideration.

I know that in 2019,
just because I went to seminary
and got zapped by a bishop,
does not make my words any more
authoritative than anyone else’s.

But today, because of the subject,
is a little different,
I am going to do some proclaiming –
but I feel safe knowing you will disregard anything
that you need to.

Okay, here is an extended excerpt from “Prodigal Summer,” by Barbara Kingsolver.

“She (the coyote) stopped to listen, briefly, for the sound of anything here that might be unexpected.  Nothing.  It was a still, good night full of customary things.  Flying squirrels in every oak within hearing distance; a skunk halfway down the mountainside; a group of turkeys roosting closer by, in the tangled branches of a huge oak that had fallen in the storm; and up ahead somewhere, one of the little owls that barked when the moon was half dark.  She trotted quickly on up the ridge, leaving behind the delicate, sinuous trail of her footprints and her own particular scent.

If someone in this forest had been watching the coyote – a man with a gun, for instance, hiding inside a copse of leafy beech trees – he would have noticed how quickly she moved up the path, attending the ground ahead of her feet, so preoccupied with her solitary search that she appeared unaware of his presence.  He might have watched her for a long time, until he believed himself and this other restless life in the (sight of his rifle) to be the only two creatures left here in this forest of dripping leaves, breathing in some separate atmosphere that was somehow more rarefied and important than the world of air silently exhaled by the leaves all around them.

But he would have been wrong. Solitude is a human presumption. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot, a tug of impalpable thread on the web pulling mate to mate and predator to prey, a beginning or an end.  Every choice is a world made new for the chosen.”

Well, that is a beautiful piece of writing
but the gemstone I want to extract
is her observation that, “solitude”
is a human presumption.
To say it another way,
our standard operating procedure
that God is absent,
or at the very least quite distant,
results from a human preoccupation with itself.
But the apparent distance
between God and us
is a function of our lack of depth perception…
and simple self-preoccupation.

I mention it
because we are staring into baptism today –
the baptism of Jesus in particular,
but that is a mirrored image
in the gospel pond
in which we are invited to see
our own reflection.

Here comes the proclaiming.

Because Christianity became an empire,
and because for two hundred years
it has been the establishment religion of our nation,
baptism became a cultural nicety –
something one did for their kid,
like piano lessons.

There has also been some superstition
that collected on baptism
like barnacles on the hull of a ship.

Let me hack away at both of these.

No one hasto be baptized.
Baptism is not some powerful magic or voodoo
that opens the pearly gates like an ATM card
accesses a bank account.
Baptism is not about gaining the love
and acceptance of God that is only available to those
with a watery cross on the forehead.

Baptism is about relationship with God. Period.
It is about disabusing ourselves
of the presumption of human solitude.

No one needs to be baptized
to be loved and accepted by God.
No one hasto be a Christian to know God
or be loved by God.

This universalism is not just Cam
barking his proclamation either.

Even our own Episcopal Baptismal Covenant
says as much, when we say that we promise to
“seek and serve God in all persons.”
God in all persons –not some persons,
but all persons.

Surely, we have gained that much perspective
after all the wars and internecine hatred
of the past centuries.
So, baptism is about what kind of relationship
we are going to have with God.
It presumes the presence of another
within,
around
and among us,
rather than solitude.
It even presumes we are, from the beginning
and to the end,
already in relationship with God.
The question is what kind,
how deep
how broad
how intimate
how meaningful?

Now for the exclamation mark at the end of the proclamation.

The relationship that God invites us into,
at least if the prophets and gospels are right,
can be characterized by one word:
Mishpat.
We translate it, justice.

But let’s be careful here.
Mishpat is neither ideological or legal
in its substance.
It is neither Marxist or Jeffersonian.
Mishpat is not an idea around which
we can form a legal system
or create a plan for redistributing wealth.
Rather, it is a highly nuanced ancient Hebrew word
that points to the relational nature of the universe –
and always, with the knowledge
that it is a universe created by God in the first place.

So, Mishpat is the idea
that justice is always shaped
and determined
by what is expected
and needed
and promised
within a particular relationship.

In other words, justice
is always contextual
because it depends upon
the specifics of the relationship:
God and prophet
God and nation
God and gentiles
God and Israel
God and Jesus
Parents and children
Domestic partners and their extended families
Employer and employees
Trinity Place and Geneva…
Mishpat, justice, is not the same thing
in each relationship, but rather,
the fulfillment of the promises
that creates and are created
within each relationship.

Mishpat has to do with doing the things
we have promised to do
in order to meet the rights and needs
inherent in a given relationship.
It is not necessarily egalitarian or universal
but relationship-bound and specific.

This notion of justice
also includes what it takes to restore relationships
that have been violated
by neglect or betrayal of our commitments.
So, whenever the justice in a relationship
has been lost, an opportunity
needs to be created for those in the relationship
to restore the justice.
This is true for societal relationships
as well as interpersonal ones.

The relationship God desire with us
is one in which we do justice
to the promises we have made,
and when we fail to do those promises justice,
that we restore them.

Baptism is that kind of a relationship.
It has promises based upon
what we as Christians in general,
and Episcopalians in particular,
understand God wants from us.
So, your baptism and mine,
are about doing justice to those promises,
restoring the failures when they happen –
and of course they will happen –
and trusting in God’s presence rather than
presuming Solitude.
Like love itself,
Baptism is way more than we bargained for.

Our baptismal covenant
offers a description
of what the promises are
that create and sustain
our relationship with God.
It is not a prescriptionbut a description.

They are five rounded and simplified
guides for spiritual practice
that, if pursued, do justice
to our relationship with God.

1)The first promise is that we stay in community with one another,
and nurture our community with the wisdom of Jesus,
and the sacred meal, and prayers together.

So, our relationship with God is, at its core,
a communal relationship. It requires partners, not solitude.

2) Secondly, we promise to resist evil as best we can,
and when we do not, that we honestly acknowledge it,
and then find a way to turn around and not continue to do it.

So, our relationship with God requires an ongoing and fearless moral inventory
that leads to change.

3) Third, we promise to strive for integrity, keeping a close distance
between what we say we cherish and believe, and how we live our lives.

So, our relationship with God is rooted in how we act rather than what we believe.

4) Fourth, we promise to seek and serve God in all persons,
loving our neighbor as ourselves.

So, our relationship with God leans on compassion and service to others,
and a generous acceptance of ourselves.

5) Finally, we promise to strive for Mishpat and peace among all people,
and respect the dignity of every human being.

So, our relationship with God is interconnected
with our relationships to friends and strangers alike.
This last promise is the most challenging of the five
because it means we cannot do justice to our relationship with God
when we are not doing justice to our relationships with others.

Notice please, in all of this,
that there is very little promised
about what we will believe,
and a great deal promised about what we will do.

Doing justice to our relationship with God,
like fidelity to any human relationship,
does not happen because of beliefs we hold
so much as because of how we act.

Although presuming God’s presence
is a kind of belief,
and a kind of belief that changes things.

We probably do not always feel
the presence of God,
and in fact, feelingGod’s presence
may be an exception rather than the norm.
But presuming that presence
rather than solitude,
will make all the difference in the world.

To me, that is the best reason to pray.

Keeping God in my thoughts,
presuming that presence in my routine,
verbalizing even,
what I make of a given situation
because I presume God’s presence
instead of my solitude –
all of that is in fact, a spiritual practice
that keeps us mindful that we are not
in solitude;
that we are in the presence
of a power greater than ourselves.

It is in such small, ordinary actions
that we do justice to our promises –
small actions,
accumulating over time
are what deepen
and strengthen the relationship.

So, the season of Epiphany
is a great opportunity to be mindful
of the promises of our relationship
and ways we can do justice to those promises.
And most specifically,
to actively presume the presence
of a power greater than ourselves.

 

 

7 Easter A: Catching Fire!

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Texts for Preaching

Acts 1:6-14 

When they were together for the last time they asked, “Master, are you going to restore the kingdom of Israel now? Is this the time?”

He told them, “You don’t get to know the time. Timing is God’s business. What you’ll get is the Holy Spirit. And when theHoly Spirit comes on you, you will be able to be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all overJudea and Samaria, even to the ends of the world.”

These were his last words. As they watched, he was taken up and disappeared in a cloud. They stood there, staring into the empty sky. Suddenly two men appeared – in white robes! They said, “You Galileans! – why do you just stand here looking up at an empty sky? This very Jesus who was taken up from among you to heaven will come as certainly – and mysteriously – as he left.”

So they left the mountain called Olives and returned to Jerusalem. It was a little over half a mile. They went to the upper room they had been using as a meeting place: Peter, John, James, Andrew, Philip, Thomas, Bartholomew, Matthew, James, son of Alphaeus, Simon the Zealot, Judas, son of James.

They agreed they were in this for good, completely together in prayer, the women included. Also Jesus’ mother, Mary, and his brothers. 

Liturgical Reading
Excerpt from “Holy the Firm” by Annie Dillard

One night a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled and fried in a second. Her moving wings ignited like tissue paper, enlarging the circle of light in the clearing and creating out of the darkness the sudden blue sleeves of my sweater, the green leaves of jewelweed by my side, the ragged red trunk of a pine. At once the light contracted again and the moth’s wings vanished in affine, foul smoke. At the same time her six legs clawed, curled, blackened, and ceased, disappearing utterly. And her head jerked in spasms, making a splattering noise; her antennae crisped and burned away and her heaving mouth parts crackled like pistol fire. When it was all over, her head was, so far a I could determine, gone, gone the long way of her wings and legs. Had she been new, or old? Had she mated and laid her eggs, had she done her work? All that was left was the glowing horn shell of her abdomen and thorax – a fraying, partially collapsed gold tube jammed upright in the candle’s round pool.

And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning – only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

Good morning.

I want to begin with something
that may be obvious to some
and startling to others,
but needs to be said now and again.

On the Church calendar
this is not Memorial Day weekend.
Today, this year anyway,
it is the last Sunday of Easter season,
and on that Sunday we always hear a piece
of Jesus’ farewell in the Gospel of John.

The bigger point is,
in the Church, on Sunday,
we do not celebrate national holidays.

Whether it is Columbus Day
or Veterans Day,
Memorial Day
or Mother’s Day,

Independence Day
or Presidents Day,
on Sundays we do not mix
the celebration of Holy Eucharist
with any nationalistic holiday or cause.

That is because Christianity
and the Gospel of Jesus Christ,
has no nation.
Christianity has no national loyalty.
Christianity,
and our vows as baptized Christians,
does not recognize nationalism, internationalism,
partisanship, or any other secular ideology that exists.

In fact, every time in history a church or religion
has aligned itself with a national ideology
it created ugliness and spawned bitter violence.

Now all of us live with divided loyalties
and divided minds, and multiple commitments.
That is normal, expected, and understood.
But in this space, in this sanctuary,
there is no flag of nation
and no pledge of allegiance to party or constitution.

Therefore, while all of us
may well have loved ones on our minds
and in our prayers today,
and especially those who may have died
in the service of their country –
whether on a battlefield,
or in the line of duty,
or as a servant and advocate for justice –
we are celebrating Eucharist today.

So I hope no one is surprised
or disappointed
if they arrive on Mother’s Day
or Memorial Day
or 4th of July weekend,
and the theme of the Eucharist on such days
does not even mention the holiday.
Instead, our focus will always be
on the theme of that liturgical season,
or the sacred moment itself,
or on the open table we offer,
or the spiritual practice of our baptism.
It does not mean we do not care about
other cultural and civic events,
but simply that we let those be celebrated
elsewhere and on other grounds,
while on this holy ground
we gather for this sacred meal.

(Even that most special of all days
will not be observed here in a few weeks:
Father’s Day).

Now for the real sermon.

The editors of the Gospels had a problem.
It is one routinely faced in Hollywood and on television.
What were those Gospel editors supposed to do
for the last episode
after the amazing surprise ending
created by the resurrection?
How were they going to have Jesus exit
a second time?

It’s not unlike the dilemma faced
by television serials,
in which the season ends
with a main character getting killed.
What we often discover
at the beginning of the Fall Season
is that the character wasn’t actually killed as we thought,
and we are shown how he or she was saved.

Jesus is executed on the cross,
dies, and is buried.
The level of physical abuse
from the flogging alone was enough to kill him,
let alone the grueling physical torture on the cross.
His bloody body was laid in the tomb
and a big rock rolled over the doorway.
The tomb was sealed.

It was over.
It was finished.
But wait!
Unexpectedly, the stone is mysteriously dislodged
and the tomb is shown empty.

Jesus’ three-year ministry
is act one;
the betrayal, arrest, trial, and execution
act two;
the resurrection is act three.

But the author of the Book of Acts,
who is also the author of Luke’s gospel,
has a dilemma.
The Book of Acts
is the story of the earliest followers of Jesus,
and it has to figure out an exit for Jesus
before the next chapter can be written.
So the author of Luke-Acts creates an epilogue,
and has Jesus exit
the way other great prophets of Israel exited:
into the clouds.
Elijah did it
and so did Moses.

It is such a natural way
for a holy man or woman to exit
that Buddhism is full of ascending mystics too.
And in Islam, Jesus disappears like that as well.
In fact, the Quran tells us
Jesus did not really die on the cross.
It suggests that in fact,
he may have passed death altogether
when he was lifted up and taken directly to God.
That is because it is inconceivable in the Quran,
that a prophet chosen by God for such purpose
would ever be allowed to be tortured and executed
at the hands of enemies.
So of course he was taken up.

Figuring out a fitting exit for such godly humans
is a difficult challenge
because, let’s face it,
death is messy.
A torturous death is the messiest,
not to mention the most shocking and scandalous.

It strikes me that Jesus’ death is like that moth
in Annie Dillard’s pericope of illumination.
Jesus’ messy, torturous
and grotesque death
is a wick of holiness…for us.
His death continues to illuminates the darkness
long after,
as does a star that burned out
a hundred million years ago
yet flicker in the night sky tonight.

To appropriate Annie Dillard’s
exquisite description and apply it to Jesus:
The spectacular skeleton on the cross
acts as a wick.
Jesus keeps burning.
The holiness that fuels this fire
rises in the dead Messiah’s body
from his pierced and soaking abdomen
to his thorax
to the jagged holes in his hands,
and he widens into a flame –
a saffron-yellow flame
that opens a bud of light in our darkness
as if a bloom into the light of spring.

I love that image
because it reminds us of a hard
but spectacular truth
residing at the core of our spiritual wisdom.
It is a wisdom that may be so obvious,
so brilliantly radiant,
that we live in its light
but forget about its presence.

We are reminded of it
in our baptismal promises
every time we recite them,
and Jesus burning luminously upon the cross
reminds us of it as well.
In fact, anyone who has ever loved
has been reminded of it
with each painful sacrifice exacted by loving.

The wick of holiness
siphoning God into our hearts
like an artisan well draws water to Earth’s surface, is this:
a willingness to disappear
so that someone else may live.

Think on that for a moment.
…a willingness to disappear
so that someone else may live.

The first-responder that enters a burning building
to save the life of an utter stranger –
what is that?

The human rights advocate
who lives precariously on the margin
of deprivation and violence,
and who may even get murdered while trying to
non-violently defend those even more vulnerable –
what is that?

The health professional
that enters the quarantined zone to care for dying victims
or to help figure out what is killing them –
what is that?

Enlisting to serve in combat, knowingly going to war
to defend one’s country and preserve a way of life,
even for people never known. What is that?
Risking one’s life
in a particular moment
in order that a stranger may live,
is to illuminate the darkness
with an idea about life
that is greater than oneself.

To disappear
that someone else may have life,
is a powerful idea
greater than any single self.

It is an idea as well as an act
that defies the logic of survival
and self-preservation.

To willingly, perhaps even unnecessarily,
risk one’s life on behalf of others
or even on behalf of an idea, is stunning.
More than stunning.
it is confounding and astounding.

And yet, there it is
at the very heart of our spiritual wisdom.
Right there at the bull’s-eye
is an invitation to give it all up.

It is not a demand –
even God could not make such a demand.
It is an invitation.

It is an invitation to live life on behalf of others,
and it is the encouragement
to live life in such as way
as to create a more abundant life for all people.

At the heart of what we say and do
as Christians –
as people baptized into a particular
spiritual practice –
is the invitation to become a wick,
a conduit for holiness
between God and others.

It is an invitation to be willing
to give it all up if need be –
the ‘it’ being everything from life choices to life itself.

To get specific,
the baptismal covenant we have been saying
throughout Easter season,
is an insistent contradiction
of what most of us were raised to think and believe.
We were taught to be individuals and individualistic;
encouraged to be consumers in fact,
with insatiable appetites.
We were taught to care more about our own people,
and our own neighbors,
and our own nation,
and our economy
more than any other people or nations or economies
anywhere else, as if we are an island
that could survive without an ocean.

We have been taught to look out for #1
and that those with the most toys at the end win.
We have been nurtured to believe that success
and achievement is measured in dollars,
and power, and fame.

But in baptism,
yours and mine,
we are invited to reject those ideas as rotten
even at the cost of our own lives if necessary.

We are invited to
use our lives –
to use them up if need be –
in defeat of those rotten ideas.

We are invited to
use our lives –
to use them up if need be –
to supplant those rotten ideas
with new ideas that are not self-centered at the core.

We are invited to use up our own life,
if need be,
to illuminate the darkness
created by rotten ideas
as a moth burning brightly against the night.

Anyone who has even briefly strolled through Christianity
as it is articulated in the gospels,
knows this invitation.
If Jesus is about anything
it is about this invitation to use our lives
to illuminate the darkness.

And yet we take it for granted.
Jesus burning at the center,
wicking the love of God up his own mutilated body,
is so right there at the center of it all
we can easily forget,
and ignore, and deny it.
But when we juxtapose the baptismal invitation
to use our lives to illuminate the darkness,
up against our economic and cultural
measurements and standards for goodness,
it is startling –
crazy even.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
once challenged us, ironically as it turned out,
that the question is not
what are we willing to die for,
but what are we willing to live for?
Our baptism,
yours and mine,
challenges us with the same question:
“What are we willing to live for?”
What, in fact, are we living for?

In economics,
we would measure what we are living for
by what it costs us,
and its value would be determined
by the cost-benefit ratio.
That is not the baptismal standard,
and in fact,
that kind of economic standard
actually diminishes our lives.

What are we living for?
Once we know,
we can go out and spend our lives on it.
And it doesn’t matter how much life we have lived already, whether we are twenty or ninety,
the challenge is still the same.

In our baptism
we have been called to reject
rotten ideas about what our life is for
and instead, to use our life
on behalf of ideas bigger than us,
and for people beyond us.

It is a one-day at a time kind of thing,
and sometimes,
a one-moment-at-a-time kind of act.
Our spiritual practice,
described in our baptismal covenant,
invites us to become a wick of God’s love
that we may illuminate the darkness with our very own lives.

2 Epiphany 2017: Did you hear it?

by

Did you hear it?
I did.
Some of you did too.

This is our second anniversary, you and I.
I began at Trinity last year
on the second Sunday of Epiphany,
Martin Luther King weekend.

Whether you think that was a good thing
or rue the day –
and I know that it is always true
both perspectives are represented –
it happened because we heard it.

What we hear
isn’t always the beautiful music we like,
and it surely isn’t always what we want to hear.
That makes listening for it risky.
It’s pretty obvious
that all three readings this morning
are about hearing it.

Isaiah, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Andrew and Peter…
each one listening,
each one hearing,
each one changed.

This sermon today,
these words over the next few minutes,
are about…hearing it.
I want to suggest that it is just possible
there is a word tucked in here today
with your name on it.
It may not be embedded in my words, just now.
It may be in the music,
or one of the prayers,
or in a moment of silence between the prayers…
even on the lips of someone else.
But I would not be at all surprised
if you were to hear a word with your name on it
somewhere within this thing we do today.

We’ve heard it before, you and I –
a word with our name on it.

Walking the dog along the lake,
in the field,
the cemetery,
or even on the sidewalk.

Walking to our favorite little spot,
on our favorite trail,
on one of those spectacularly cloudless days
when the vault above
is bluer than the water below.

But it can also be heard
while hunkered down
under an umbrella,
stung by tiny pelts of water or ice.

We’ve heard it before
just sitting on the back deck thinking about nothing,
or on the dock looking out at the pure horizon.
But we’ve also heard it
doing something so humble as
looking down while cutting the grass!

We have all heard it.

Ironing clothes,
scraping cookie dough into dollops,
vacuuming dust bunnies and grit off the floor,
punching the calculator and scribbling numerals,
sorting papers and putting our house in order –
in the midst of mind-numbing little things we do
over the course of a day
that are ordinary, routine, humdrum things –
even in this we can hear it.

In fact, we have all heard it.

It arrives a scrap of thought
landing from out of nowhere
apropos of nothing
we are doing or thinking.

A random spec of thought
floats by on its way to being lost
in the layers of silt
settled in the creases of our brain.
We see it
or hear it
or think it
or feel it – and then…well then,
nine times out of ten
we pay no attention to it.
Heck, we’ve been known to intentionally deflect it.
If you close your eyes,
I bet you can see yourself
knocking it away as just some stray,
random,
stupid,
dumb,
absurd thought.
It didn’t belong to the reasonable world
of ordered and conforming notions
that have been pre-approved for appearance in our thoughts.
So we swatted it
and off it drifted like a dust fairy in sunlight.

Still, I know in my bones,
we have all heard it.

Our problem, of course, is we don’t believe it.
We do not welcome it.
We are not open to it.
We don’t really even want to think about it.

But still, we have all heard it.

It may have called us by name.
It may have stabbed like a shard of glass.
It may have felt so foreign
we spit it out even before we could taste it.
And it’s likely that more than once,
it struck us as so absurd we laughed it away.

It could have whispered to us;
cooed into the fold of our heart
a loving little affirmation
at the very moment
we felt most ashamed,
empty,
or worthless.

We have all heard it.

You may be a hardened old skeptic about this,
and doubt it has ever come close to you,
but giggling in some back corner of your thoughts
is an impish little quirk that knows
a word with your name on it
has come close.

I dare say most of us,
regardless of our level of faith and doubt,
disbelieve its presence most of the time.
We do not imagine we have heard it
and the reason we have such difficulty embracing it,
is that it has not been pre-approved
by the gatekeeper in our brain.
In fact, the very idea that we could hear
a word with our name on it,
even if it existed,
has less approval than those credit card offers
we receive almost daily in the mail.

But without pre-approval from the cranial gatekeeper,
the word with out name on it
will remain a dust mite of thought;
a mere random
and bizarre miss-fire in our brain
that could never be real,
never be authentic,
never be a word for us.

The sad truth is,
that not only must we pre-approve it
to truly hear it
and take it in
and resonate with it;
but when we hear it
we must also, eventually, talk out loud about it
before we can actually confirm it.

It is a double-whammy.

Before it arrives we have to pre-approve it
and once it does arrive,
we have to take the risk to articulate it
out loud to someone else.

That is why hearing it is so rare:
No one
in his or her right mind
talks out loud
about what we cannot even accept
in the privacy of our own brain.

Still,
a word with our name on it
has an exceedingly long shelf life.

It can be something we ponder in our heart
for many years,
but if it is something to be actualized
in the hardened and dirty soil of daily routine,
then we have to talk out loud about it
with other people
who can help us decipher it
and confirm its meaning.

That is the nature of IT –
the word with our name on it.
It is how we come to hear it
and then how,
with the help of others,
it gets opened up.

It may begin as a word we receive
in the privacy of our own heart,
but it will not become incarnate –
embodied in our body or anyone else’s –
until and unless
others hear it from us,
recognize it,
and then confirm it.
That is the nature of a spirituality,
which is, at its core, communal.

And this thing we do,
that we are a part of by virtue of baptism,
is communal.
Christianity, like our mother Judaism and cousin Islam,
is communal at its core and not individualistic.

The other thing about the word with our name on it:
it has a mission.
It is not just for us,
or for our own little purpose and pleasure.

It is aimed like a missile outward
into the messy mall of people living around us.

There is a word given to you and me
that needs to be said and done
among the people we live with,
and among the folks we work with,
and even with those people we play with.
There is something
WE have been given
that we need to embody by word and deed,
that we have not already done.

But the word we have been given
is not just a simple sound,
or utterance,
or formation of letters;
it is something that needs to be done.

The word with our name on it
has a mission
in this church,
in this neighborhood,
in this town,
in this area,
and you and I are the ones
who know it
because it has been give to us.

But most likely,
we have also resisted working towards it.

The word with your name on it
is agitating like a stone in your shoe
about something we need to do
or change
or make
or develop
if we are going to be what we need to be.
We have all heard it.
A word
a whisper
a thought
an insight
that comes to us from beyond –
from a power greater than ourselves
even if it seems to come
from within ourselves.

And for whatever reasons
we do not want to believe it
or accept it
or hear it
or even acknowledge it.

It is such a twisted contradiction,
this word with our name on it;
an attraction-repulsion without end.

As attractive
as the idea of a word with our name on it is,
we resist for a reason.

For example, I heard it
standing right here in this sanctuary one day,
on a hot August afternoon,
with no one from the church
even knowing I was here,
walking around aimlessly with my son
on our way to Ohio.
I didn’t expect to hear it,
I wasn’t listening for it,
and actually, I didn’t want to hear it.

The last thing I wanted to do
was be part of a congregation with a hulking,
deteriorating historic building.
Been there, done that, so over it.
In fact, I went out and found myself
a very attractive alternative job
before anything could get serious about this one.

And there is the problem
with pre-approval
and listening.
We do not want to hear
these words with our names on them
because we know they will get us in trouble.
We know up front,
without even thinking much about it,
it’s going to be trouble
or painful
or include a risk
without any clear pay-off.

These words with our names on them
look for the whole world
to be harebrained,
stupid,
and not something
we want to even think about for ourselves
let alone talk out loud about with other people.
So you see,
we have very good reasons
for not hearing it
and not engaging it
and not doing it.
Don’t feel bad about any resistance you put up
because it is much better not to pre-approve the word
in advance of its arrival.
If we don’t believe it
we don’t have to go near it.
And that is a very good strategy
we should all remember; I employ myself all the time.
It works:
Require that dang word
to be signed for on delivery,
but disbelieve it’s coming
and therefore never get it.
Hah!

Whatever you do,
DO NOT pre-approve the sender
or the offer
or the idea
or the message.
If we do not pre-approve it
we can keep it at bay
and not take it seriously.

But there is a fly in the ointment of that strategy.

For some ridiculous reason,
we come to a place like this
and week after week,
the knock is on the door.
We hear it in Isaiah and the prophets
over and over and over again.
We hear it in the gospels
over and over and over again.
Mostly we hear it in absurd,
distant, long-ago stories
that don’t seem to have much to do with us.
But they do,
and those stories agitate us.

These things we listen to week after week,
or the rituals we do again and again,
soften us up,
weaken our resistance,
and worst of all,
become a brain-worm
that wriggles through our sleep,
drills beneath our random thoughts,
and while we are fishing
or ironing
or relaxing with a cup of tea
in the late afternoon,
they surface when we least expect.

Doggone that word with our name on it.
Listen at your own risk.

 

 

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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