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4 Advent C, 2018: Bite into Hope

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Oh, Anne Sexton, I do love you so:

“…The trees poke out of sheets
and each branch wears the sock of God.

There is hope.
There is hope everywhere.
I bite it…

There is hope…Today God gives milk
and I have the pail.” (Anne Sexton, “Snow”)

It’s all about hope.

Micah was a prophetic oracle
of both judgment and hope,
and he announced the coming destruction of Israel –
which would have seemed obvious
for those not in denial.

But then Micah locates hope for the future
in someone to come from Bethlehem –
which would have seemed a likely choice
to his contemporaries also.

The Matriarch Rachel,
died in Bethlehem and
her grave was a place of pilgrimage.

Bethlehem was the setting for the Book of Ruth,
itself an eloquent oracle of hope.
King David was born in Bethlehem.
So it was an auspicious location to posit the future of hope.

Then in Luke, two pregnant women connect
and a gusher of hope rushes out
like a heart pumping blood.

So, just to put a fine point on it,
Anne Sexton bites into a snow cone of hope.

Standing on the 4th Sunday of Advent,
Christmas Eve a day away,
many people with several days off of work,
families coming together for the first time in a long while,
special rituals, meals, gift-giving
and maybe even some quiet time,
hope seems palpable –
ready to bite into.
Just as in Micah’s day,
the bigger picture might not seem so hopeful at the moment,
but within that grainy image
there is a thumbnail vision
with a clear aura of hope around it.

There are always beacons of hope.

I think of the Bielski brothers
and the twelve-hundred elderly men and women,
and hundreds young children,
they helped survive the Jewish Holocaust in Poland.
With only about a hundred and fifty armed fighters,
the brothers found ways to live in the wilderness forest
of what is now Belarus,
for two years – which was long enough
to survive the Nazis.

In the end, in addition to those who lived
and died in freedom in the wilderness,
they saved more than twelve hundred fellow-Jews
from certain cremation in Auschwitz
and other extermination camps.

What made any of them have hope
they could make it into the wilderness,
let alone survive there, escaping Nazi pursuit
and creating sustainable community?
It should have seemed an impossible hope.

I think of a ninety-something year old grandmother I met,
who in 1980 witnessed several generations of her family
gunned down at the Sumpul River on the border
between Honduras and El Salvador.
Three to six-hundred unarmed refugees,
many children among them,
fleeing the Salvadoran civil war,
were murdered by government troops and militia.
Yet, in the new millennium,
she was an active participant in an agricultural
cooperative creating a new future,
and she was eloquent in her hopefulness
for the new generation that surrounded her.

I think about what happened in Bonn, Germany this fall,
after our current administration
opted out of the international emissions goals
set by the global community in Paris in 2015.
15 states,
455 cities,
1,747 businesses
and 325 colleges and universities
formed an alternative national delegation to represent
the United States, and committed
to the Paris emission standards anyway.
All those states and organizations represent
fifty-percent of the U.S. economy and much of the pollution.

Biting into hope is a choice we make,
or refuse to make.

There is always, always, war
famine
genocide
environmental degradation
human cruelty
and tragedy
to witness. Always.

If we give them the last word –
if the lasting image in our brain
is of the horrendous
and the painful
and the dark –
we will dissolve into lives of meaninglessness.

Despair and cynicism
enervate the human soul.
They cut the throat of our vitality
and make our lives limp with irrelevancy.
We are unable to see ourselves
or anything we do
as meaningful
in the face of all that is stacked against us.

But hope is a choice
to bite into something different.

Hope is a choice
to resist the dark and painful forces we recognize
are everywhere in the world alongside of us.
Hope is a choice
to DO something,
and to keep DOING something
that creates the possibility of joy…not only sorrow;
of kindness…not only cruelty;
of light…not only darkness;
of healing…not only injury;
of opportunity…not only demise.

These are things we choose,
not because we make them up
in a fantasy world within our mind,
but because hope lives
as a parallel universe
right alongside all that shadows it.

If we write-off hope of as wishful thinking
then we will be cutting off
an entire universe of possibilities.
To do that is a severe
and cruel deprivation
to the fullness of human life.

My friends, hope is a choice
just as cynicism is a choice.

The message on the 4thSunday of Advent –
just like it is on Christmas day
and just like it is every day
in a Christian spiritual community, is: hope is a choice.
If we wish to be powerful in the world,
it is the choice we will continue to make.

It is not a choice that feels natural all the time.

Some days it is a choice that eludes us,
but the next day when we wake up
we have another choice to make.

Some days it is a hard and painful choice
to bite into hope
in spite of all we have known
or been through.
Other days it is a joy
and we can bite into that fruit
with abandon.

But ultimately, spiritually,
it doesn’t really matter
whether or not it feels good to make that choice,
it is the choice we need to make anyway.

So, standing here a day away from Christmas Eve
and doing everything we can to keep-in-waiting
as is our Advent discipline,
let’s remind ourselves
that hope is a choice,
and that it is a core element of our spiritual practice
to make that choice…
to bite into hope.

 

 

 

 

All Saints’ Day 2018: The Bellybutton of the Galaxy

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In the year 2002, a young blue star
at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way,
made a sharp and unexpected turn.

That star was among a group of stars moving so fast
only something massive
could have changed its orbit.
How fast was it moving?
One-third the speed of light.
How fast is that?
Well, the Earth moves at about 43,000 mph
and the speed of light is over 670,000,000 mph.
So that little blue star
was moving at about 225,000,000 mph,
give or take a few million.

What has the sheer gravitational force
to coerce a star moving that fast,
to abruptly change course?
Turns out, because it is speed and mass,
we can figure that out with computers.

It is a black hole:
a monstrously powerful black hole –
and it is the bellybutton of our galaxy.

How powerful is this black hole?
Don’t ask me how they know this,
but the black hole at the center of the Milky Way
has already swallowed four million suns
and condensed all of it into a tiny space.

Now there are between 200 and 400 BILLION stars
and other stuff floating around in the galaxy,
so swallowing 4 million stars is a very small beginning.

But digesting 4 million stars
gives that black hole enough gravitational pull
to bend the orbit of a star
hurling through space at 225,000,000 mph.

All this came from a NYT article titled,
“Trolling the Monster in the Heart of the Milky Way.”

I understand very little of astrophysics but I love to read about it,
just like I love to look into the night sky
and wonder.
What is clear though,
is that there is a hungry black hole
hiding behind space dust and stars we call Sagittarius.
One day the Earth, or remnants of it,
will get swallowed up too.

If the fact that Earth will someday disappear
renders human life meaningless to us,
it is because we have pulled
a gelatinous mask of ego
over our eyes
and are unable to see
beyond our own feelings.

When existence gets boiled down
to being all about us, then
hope and meaning
are soon swallowed up
by the black hole of ego.

But if instead, we can lift our heads
and our hearts
above death, grief, and sorrow
then we can touch hope
and reach out and grab meaning.
That is what Isaiah did.
He imagined God
preparing a gourmet feast for us
on the holy mountain.
Isaiah somehow touched hope
as he looked at the apocalypse
and destruction around him,
in which the ancient empires smashed into one another
in war on every side like comets in space.

My suspicion is that he was able to do that
because he was able to rise up
above his own grief,
and peer out over the field of current suffering
and make out the images of life
that would return in the future.

In other words, like an ever-widening camera lens,
he enlarged his field of vision,
moving outward in concentric circles
until he could behold a vision beyond
his own self-interest…
behold a vision beyond his own self-interest.

When he did that,
he was able to imagine how the present moment
could be redeemed, and how new life
could grow in places it never grew before.
Isaiah was a master at it –
able to name meaning
and touch hope even while standing in dark times
with those otherwise
broken by despair.

It was not wishful thinking or fantasy either,
but poetic imagination
that opened up the dark hole of the moment
to explore the possibilities
of what might, and could happen.

It is comical how, not so many years ago,
if you thought there could be life on other planets
out there in the universe,
you were considered a crackpot.

Now there are teams of highly trained scientists
looking and listening for it –
imagining and theorizing which sectors
of the vast expanse
might be looking back at us.

As our telescopes and computer models improved
they widened our perspective
and now the discovery of other life out there
seems an inevitability rather than a laughable eccentricity.

So Christian faith must move from human beings
as the center of the universe
and the apple of God’s eye,
to something smaller
and something more a part
of something bigger
than ourselves.

Meaning and hope reside,
not in how you and I are feeling about
what is happening in our own lives,
but in a bigger picture.
Imagining what that bigger picture is,
is an act of stewardship.

Oh, now you knew I was going to go there, didn’t you?

Fear not,
I have never directly asked for money or pledges
in a sermon (at least that I can remember) –
and try to avoid it in worship altogether.

But we do have some lovely charts
and a nice story to share
with our pie today.

While we will talk about the role of money
in determining our future,
we won’t be asking you for a pledge today.

Stewardship is not about money.
Money is a toolof stewardship, not stewardship.

Stewardship
is the word that describes
the quality of our foster care
for that which has been given to us
to care for and nurture.
Stewardship is ourrelationship
to the matrix of life and resources
we value and use,
but do not own.
The Earth of course;
our children, nieces and nephews, grandchildren;
our neighborhood, town, city, and land;
our wealth and power,
if indeed we do believe that we do not really own
such things, but have use of them
to further the work of God’s love.
That is a big “if.”

Meaning and hope
are the core elements of life and faith,
and we have been made stewards of them
by virtue of our baptisms.

Let me repeat that please,
because it is about as important a declaration
as anything I have ever declared.

Meaning and hope
are the core elements of life and faith, and
we have been made stewards of them
by virtue of our baptisms.

Meaning and hope
are not fostered or nurtured
by how we happen to be feeling about the world around us,
they are cared for by what we DO.

So allow me to remind us
of what we have promised to do
as stewards of Meaning and Hope.

There are many more eloquent ways to describe it
but the language of our baptismal covenant
is utilitarian and specific, so I will use it.

Here is what we say we will DO
in order to be good stewards of Meaning and Hope:

  1. Continue sharing our ancient spiritual wisdom.
  2. Continue sharing community, communion, and prayers with one another.
  3. Persevere in resisting evil, which includes the acknowledgement and repentance of our own.
  4. Pointing to and sharing the presence of God in our midst, including where we discover it in the Gospel.
  5. Seek God in all people.
  6. Serve God in all people.
  7. Love our neighbors.
  8. Love ourselves.
  9. Be activists for justice and peace.
  10. Be respectful of the dignity of every human being.

I am going to repeat those again too.
They do not need any real explanation
because we all know how to do each one,
and we have all done each one
with varying degrees of success.
We have all neglected each on too,
with varying degrees of denial.

Here they are again:

  1. Continue sharing our ancient spiritual wisdom.
  2. Continue sharing community, communion, and prayers with one another.
  3. Persevere in resisting evil, which includes the acknowledgement and repentance of our own.
  4. Pointing to and sharing the presence of God in our midst, including where we discover it in the Gospel.
  5. Seek God in all people.
  6. Serve God in all people.
  7. Love our neighbors.
  8. Love ourselves.
  9. Be activists for justice and peace.
  10. Be respectful of the dignity of every human being.

If we do those things,
even some of those things,
and we do them on a regular basis
to the best of our abilities,
then we will be good stewards of Meaning and Hope.

Doing those things
allows us to widen the lens
upon which we see life,
and move out beyond our own ego-driven
excitement or despair.
Meaning and Hopewill never be discovered
in the range of human emotions
that react like electricity
to the events all around us.
They are uncovered and touched
when we move outside ourselves,
to the outer rings of perspective
where desire and grief
or pleasure and pain
are but some of the millions of molecules
in the atmosphere.
You and I, as Christians,
as baptized people of faith,
are the stewards of Meaning and Hope.

By doing those things
we say we are going to do
in the Baptismal Covenant, we enhance
our relationship to Meaning and Hope
and we become its stewards.

So now we know what this place is, Trinity Place –
Trinity Church.
It is not programs.
It is not outreach.
It is not worship.
It is not classes.
It is not food and fellowship.
Those are tools.
It is a place from which you and I
get the perspective we need
to be better stewards of Meaning and Hope
so that we can share it
among those with whom we live, and work, and play.
Whatever activities or programs we do here
is spice and gravy
on top of the real meat and potatoes,
which is what we do ‘out there’
in our daily, routine, and ordinary lives.

The power of Trinity Place
is what it fosters for those of us who come here,
so that we are empowered to go into our lives
with strength and renewal
to practice the elements of our baptismal covenant.
We are supposed to get strength,
and courage,
and wisdom,
and nurture here
so that we can go out there
and do what it is we have been given to do.

The things we do here
should also strengthen and renew us
for our lives, which after all
we live in fullness ‘out there.’

So I am hoping
that we can affirm this place,
and one another,
as a powerful resource for our stewardship
of Meaning and Hope –
our stewardship of naming meaning
and touching hope.

They may sound like big ideas
that live in the clouds above our heads,
but the ability to name Meaning
and touch Hope
is the difference
between God and a black hole.

Can I get an “Amen?”

 

Proper 13, Year C, 2016

by

Aimless Love, Wishful Thinking, and Pursuit of Happiness

We are about to wade into very dangerous water
and all I can ask is that you don’t blame the river guide.
I tried to add a little levity by marrying
Ecclesiastes to Luke
with that poem by Billy Collins
(“Aimless Love” – Google it),
but humor can only soften it just so much.

In case you missed it
among all the images and metaphors,
the character narrating the poem
which is not always the poet remember,
loves to love;
yearns to love more and more;
loves aimlessly
whatever and wherever his fancy is stimulated to love.

The character narrating the poem
is contrasting this current unanchored love
that flits from thing to thing
like a sparrow picking bread off the sidewalk,
with the ghost of a different kind of love
that has within it
the jagged memory of a slammed door,
a puffed up huffiness,
a rancid rancor,
a hi-way of gifts tracing offenses with paybacks,
unkind words,
suspicion, and
silence on the other end of the telephone.

In other words,
the contrast is between shiftless fancy
and infatuation
with the reality that when two people love one another
within the earthen mud of a real relationship,
they hurt each other
and fail one another
and do not live up to their best selves
or the promises of their better angels.

True love is not cotton candy.
Specifically, authentic love
is just like every other thing in our lives:
full of seasons that pluck up and plant,
build up and destroy,
dance and mourn,
laugh and weep.
All else is vanity.

I want to dig deep here
for it is the burial ground of hope,
and the landfill of cast-off love,
and the plugged up drain that backs up the option for joy.

But let me open the envelope wider.

Love is easily mistaken for lust.
Hope is often confused with wishful thinking.
And joy too often made synonymous with happiness.

I want us to think about all three today
because when we get them wrong
it is inevitably because of vanity,
and the end result is our bewilderment
and even despair.

As already noted by Billy Collins,
aimless love is actually lust –
the hunger to fill that black hole at our center
that can never be filled.
Lust is bigger than sexual desire,
it is an insatiable hunger
that gnaws at us from the inside out
and that we so often imagine we can staunch
with something we hunger for.
But nothing, absolutely nothing
satiates that hunger.
It is a black hole that will not be filled, ever.

It is something we learn to live with,
grant a presence to,
and observe with an appropriate detachment.
When we trick ourselves into trying to fill it
with whatever thing we most want at the moment,
we fall into it
and get lost.
But true love learns to live with lust
and does not try to satiate it.

True love learns to traverse the seasons
without longing for the good old days
or dreaming about the Promised Land.

True love lives in the presence
of whatever season it is
and walks one step at a time through it.

True love is not aimless
but is intentional
as it walks forward
from wherever it stands in the moment
and is fully present to whoever and whatever
shares the moment with it.

Knowing the difference
between true love and aimless love
is the difference between vanity
and meaning, and
don’t we all long for lives of meaning –
lives underwritten by authentic love
rather than an aimless imposter?

Likewise, we need to know the difference
between hope and wishful thinking
if we want to avoid an early death of hope in our lives.
Hope finds an early grave
as wishful thinking inevitably turns to cynicism.

We often confuse hope with wishful thinking,
which is almost always based upon our own vanity.
When it turns out we hung our hat
on the wrong thing,
we get mad and turn cynical.
How many times have we not gotten our own way,
believing that what is in our best interest
is what should be the public interest?
Then when the thing we put our hope in
turns our to be just another dead end
or bad policy decision
or awful politician,
we fold our arms across our chest and
stomp our feet
and give up on hope.

But the problem is
our hope was wishful thinking
based upon our personal preference and self-interest;
rooted in our vanity.
I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

How many times have we placed
an inordinate amount of faith in a leader
an idea
a system
a program
or an organization
only to discover it wasn’t what we imagined,
or couldn’t deliver what we expected,
or fell far short of what it or they promised?

When that happens,
and happens often enough,
we recoil into a sheath of cynicism
in which we say to ourselves
that nothing works,
and no one has the answer,
and it will all end badly regardless
of what we do or don’t do.

It becomes a rolling ocean of Either/Or –
either what I expected and wanted comes to pass
OR “It’s no good and I told you so.”

We do not like being hurt
or disappointed
or let down
and we protect ourselves
by not allowing anything to hurt us like that ever again.
We turn off the hope-faucet
and live instead in the cocoon of cynicism.
What we neglect to realize
is that what hurts
is that it didn’t turn out the way WE wanted,
and OUR team didn’t win
and what WE expected was disappointed or spurned.
It really is, when we live in the kingdom of wishful thinking,
all about us.

But authentic hope does not live
with our self-interest coursing through its veins.
Authentic hope is painted on a canvass
we cannot fully see
no matter how much perspective we try to gain.
It is bigger than us,
bigger than us here and now
and beyond us even tomorrow.

That kind of hope is found in a gods-eye view
we are only given when the veil is lifted for a nanosecond
and we take it in.
We only get a few of those views across
an entire life-time,
so we have to hold onto them
and use them to comprehend how much bigger it is
than us – any of us.

“Father, not my will but your will”
and, “Into thy hands I commend my spirit”
are statements of authentic hope
garnered from a peek at the bigger canvass
and without having seen the entire painting.

That kind of hope never leads to cynicism
and it has no bitterness whatsoever.
And isn’t that the hope we all want to taste?

And joy.
Ah joy.
So often confused with its scrawnier, lesser cousin:
happiness.
The root of “happy” is hap, meaning chance;
literally, a reaction to chance events
that we consider fortunate.
Happiness, as my friend Peter points out,
is reactive to what is happening.
So we know how to make ourselves happy.
It is a manufactured state of mind
in which we give ourselves a thrill
or a spike or a jolt
because we know how we will react to certain things.

Particular food or drink or drug
makes us happy.
Specific activities make us happy.
Seeing certain people makes us happy.
Getting something we wanted makes us happy.
If we are UNhappy
we know what to do to make ourselves happy
because happiness is reactive.

Joy is a gift.
We cannot make ourselves joyful no matter what we do.
Joy is not reactive;
it rises up from within
or is bestowed upon us from above or beyond.
Joy, from Old French (gaudere) means to “rejoice;”
it is evoked or given – caused to rise up within us.

No matter how much
we may have enjoyed something previously
we cannot DO anything to bring the joy back.
At best we will give ourselves momentary happiness
and if not, great disappointment.

All we can do for joy
is open ourselves to receive it when it arrives.

Becoming a person
who lives their life more open to joy
is better than all forms of happiness, is it not?

So love, hope, and joy
are often mistaken for lust, wishful thinking,
and happiness.
Love, hope, and joy
give substance and meaning to our lives

while aimless love,
wishful thinking,
and an obsession with happiness
lead only to vanity.

It seems to me
that what we do here,
in this place,
in our worship
and in our program
and in our relationships,
ought to give us a clear-eyed lens
with which to know the difference,
and both the nurture and courage
to live the difference.

 

Our Vision

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

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

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

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

 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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