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4 Easter: A voice without self-interest

May 7, 2017 by Cam Miller

Text for Preaching This Week: John 10:1-10 and “Flock” by Billy Collins

I knew a bishop once
who would proudly announce,
every time there was a procession
of diocesan clergy
bedecked in their liturgical finery and splendor, and lined up waiting for the opening hymn
so they could enter the church,
that the reason he, the bishop,
was the last one in procession
was because the shepherd
always walked behind his flock.
His job was to prod and guide them,”
he would add.

Then, at one such event, unexpectedly,
the voice of a new young priest piped up:
“But Bishop,” he said,
“just think about what those shepherds
had to walk through following those sheep.”

Time is the sleeve
and memory the arm slipping through it.
So reach back now into your childhood.
Was there a voice,
an innate companion
that called you by name?

Was there ever,
in any time of your life,
a voice that called you by name?
Somewhere,
sometime,
in a dream;
when you were all alone,
in a crowd,
when you were lost –
was there a voice
that called you by name?

It may not have been an actual voice you heard.
It may simply have been that somehow,
you didn’t know how,
but you knew what you needed to know
when you needed to know it;
and that was enough
to make a difference,
or make a necessary change,
or maybe even save a life –
maybe even your own.

Or maybe, if you are like me,
there were times you did not listen
to what you heard
or what you knew
or what you should have done.
Maybe you didn’t listen
because you didn’t believe it.
Or maybe because you thought is was something
other than it was
even though it knew your name.
We may not be able to retrieve
an actual memory of God from childhood.

If ever we talked out loud about that voice,
or that something we couldn’t name,
to another person,
or mentioned the dream
or the vision
or the whisper,
we soon discovered such talk
is not taken seriously.

Hearing the still small voice within,
let alone a voice that knows us by name,
is not something that rational,
mature, sensible adults
talk out loud about in our world.
If we ever did talk about such things as a child,
we were told it was something
other than what it was.

It would have been dismissed
as a child’s “pretend”
or simply ignored like a bad smell
as children’s insights and visions often are.

We learned from the way adults responded to us,
that the holy is like Santa Claus:
talked about by adults
in that voice we use for children,
but never heard in the voice
adults use with one another.

We learned
that anyone who talks out loud
about hearing the voice of God is crazy.

We learned
through the modeling of adults around us,
to turn off our sensitivity to the holy
in the same way boys are taught not to cry.

We learned
from listening to the adults around us,
and watching their reactions
to those considered too religious,
that an encounter with God
is not something normal people talk about.

So we learned
to close off those faculties,
the ones that allow us to tune-in
to that dimension of life
around us
and within us
that some of us call the holy.

We learned
to ignore the voice of the holy
within and around us
until we stopped hearing it at all together.

We put that part of ourselves,
and those memories,
to sleep.

The holy is not a voice we hear,
or a language we speak,
or a sound we know,
except through memories that call to us
from the other end of that long sleeve of time.

That’s a problem,
and right now in this stage of human history,
it is an acute problem.

Human beings are in crisis.
Especially in the Global West,
which is now saturated with,
and dominated by, economic culture –
by which I mean the social matrix binding us together is predominantly ruled by
the values and ideas of economics.
We are in crisis, you and I,
because we have mostly lost the ability to hear
the voice of the one who knows us each by name.

At the same time, the voices we can hear,
the ones cooing or shouting or hawking at us
to follow them and trust them,
are not trustworthy voices at all.

Here is just one easy example.

We know that our atmosphere
and the environmental balance
of Earth’s ecosystems
are in grave danger.
But we also know that even as our shepherds
talk-the-talk of environmentalism,
or proclaim it is not a problem of our own making,
they nevertheless walk-the-walk of corporations
that bestow wealth upon those who continue
to degrade the environment.

We hear the voices of our cultural shepherds,
and we see in their actions
they cannot be trusted.

That is just one low-hanging example
that points to the crisis of trust
that is eating away
at the fabric of communal hope.

Who can we trust?

What happens when
no matter how hard we listen,
we cannot hear a voice we can trust?

In religion,
in war,
in health care,
in education,
in technology

we know we cannot trust the shepherds
because their first interest
is their own self-interest.

If ever we meet someone
who is not guided primarily
by his or her own self-interest,

it is enormously compelling
and we want to know them
and have them know us.
I hope you know someone like that;
someone who,
when it comes to your relationship,
you can sense is not guided exclusively,
or even primarily by their own self-interest.

But we are in crisis
because the voices we can hear
cannot be trusted,
while the voice we can trust
cannot be heard.
We are in crisis
because we walk
through the valley of the shadow of death
but we cannot hear the voice
of the one who knows us each by name.
In the valley of death
we are surrounded by the voices
we know are guided by their own self-interest.

There is no easy answer to this crisis,
no single, silver bullet.
But I have an idea about what to do.
It is not THE answer, only one small idea.

Our deafness to the holy
has been learned over many years
and is not easily reversed.
And when it comes to being shaped over time,
in unnatural ways,
I often go back to an important lesson
I had to unlearn as an adult.
I have mentioned it to you before.

In our culture, as in many cultures,
we teach boys not to cry.
Teaching boys not to cry
is of course a horrendous disservice to men –
and therefore to women.
It makes us emotionally crippled.
Its negative impact on the culture at large
can be observed and encountered everywhere.

Children know how to cry
and most of them cry easily,
so we teach them to cry appropriately
in order to manage their tears.
That makes a certain amount of sense,
so long as we are not teaching one another
to shut down the capacity to cry altogether.
But that is what boys are instructed to do
under the bludgeon of humiliation.

I learned how to cry again as an adult,
in an acting class in college.
I didn’t know at the time
that was what I was doing,
nor how important it would be to me later,
but that is where I learned it.

It came about because I had a role in a play
that called for me to break down in tears
and my professor would not allow me to act –
he insisted that I learn to cry.
No fake crying, but real sobs and tears –
that, he said, is the difference between drama
and acting.

I had to learn to make myself cry,
first by acting as if I was crying.
Then I had to put myself in touch
with the memories of what hurt inside
until the tears I evoked
were real tears.
I had to act as if
I was crying
until I learned to allow myself to cry.
You see the methodology?

What I want to suggest
is that learning to hear the voice of the holy
begins with acting as if we can hear it.
Even before we actually can hear it,
we need to act as if we can hear it.

Then we need to do something

that is counter-intuitive:
We need to practice listening for the holy
in the midst of our fears and our hurts
because that is where
we feel the greatest need for God.

One of the glaring perversities of human nature
is that we learn and change
in the midst of dissatisfaction and need,
while under the spell of satiation and balance
we put ourselves to sleep.

It is walking through the valley
of the shadow of death
where we are most acutely aware
of both the crisis
and our need
for a power greater than ourselves.

So listening within,
listening within to our fears and to our wounds,
is where we begin to hear the voice
of the one who knows us each by name.

What is it we fear?
Which of our hurts is most enduring?

If we will listen hard
and listen well
to that chamber of our heart,
we will begin to hear a new voice –
one we instinctively know
we can trust.

In that innermost chamber of our heart,

where few if any have ever been allowed to peek,
only the presence of someone or something
we know is not guided by self-interest,
can be tolerated.

Because we could only allow
such a trustworthy presence as that,
into our place of tenderness deep inside,
it feels like a lonely place
and we are hesitant to go there.

And yet, that is where our gold is stored.

There are treasures
in the very place we fear to look
just waiting for us to behold.
Among those treasures,
in that place,
is a memory so tender,
so sacred, and so dear,
we hold it like fragile glass.

Going there,
and listening for the one without self-interest –
acting as if it knows us by name,
acting as if it cared for us personally,
and acting as if we were able to hear its voice –
will allow us to re-gain our hearing.

That which resides
in the inner most chamber of our heart,
among the tenderness of our
fears and hurts and wounds,
is also God’s voice echoing our name.
Listen.
Even if we fear it, listen.
Listen quietly and intently,
and hear the voice of the holy
where it is freshest.

It is possible to hear the voice of God again
even as we heard it all those years ago
at the other end of the long sleeve of time.

The voice of the one who knows us each by name,
calls to us
out of the innermost chamber of our heart,
also whispers to us
in the midst of what is both
precious and fearsome.

If we will practice listening
we will hear it again.

In a time of crisis
is when we most need to hone our listening skill,
to recover our ability to hear
the voice of the one we can trust;
the one that will lead us and guide us
without self-interest.

So the punch line is: keep listening.
Practice-listen,
practice-listen as if there is
a power greater than yourself
who speaks to you without self-interest.

Practice-listen
in that place at the center of your being,
where resides both fear and hurt.
Go there, expecting loneliness
but discovering a presence
both healing and trustworthy.

Practice, as if you will hear.

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2 Epiphany 2017: Did you hear it?

January 15, 2017 by Cam Miller

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.

 

 

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 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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