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You are here: Home / Archives for Surrender

5 Epiphany 2022: Crying into the mouth of heaven

February 6, 2022 by Cam Miller

Preface
The references to 2013 are when I began at Trinity Geneva to help an historically dwindling congregation decide if they had a future, what it might be, and how to address the overwhelming needs of expensive historic buildings. Long story short, the buildings are in the process of being sold for development into a 29 room boutique inn, and the congregation moved into a former wine bar in downtown Geneva where it has been happily gathering for four years. In between there were law suits and all kinds of drama but the congregation stayed focused and strong.

We don’t get no respect —
clergy that is.
I won’t argue that we should
but you might be surprised to know
that what was once a respected profession
has slipped quite a bit.

In the health care industry
clergy are more often than not
treated as a nuisance
if not a hazard.
In the business world,
we are naive and we wouldn’t know the difference
between a bottom line and a bottom.
In public life and politics
we are professional pray-ers,
window-dressing meant to be seen but not heard.

So this little story about Jesus
telling the professionals how to fish,
and watching them flail in despair
from their sudden success,
is a lovely story
about pulling one over on the smug specialists.

None of which has anything to do with the story…

It does have to do with feeling in inadequate
in the face of a serious challenge.
2013 for example.

After having moved to Geneva
imagining Katy and I might find a home
in which to retire some day,
I met with Charlie Bauder — Trinity’s then treasurer.

It was the week of our first Annual Meeting together
and it was the first chance I had
to go over the books with Charlie.
He had sent me some reports before I moved
but honestly, I couldn’t decipher them.
When we finished that session
Charlie said, “You’ve got five years.”
Actually, I don’t remember how many years
he said, but I do remember it was finite.

I won’t lie to you.
I hurriedly calculated how many years
I needed to work before retiring.
That was the hospice chaplain in me
accepting there was no hope for the patients survival.

Then the creative problem-solver in me went to work.
What could we do?
I can get rather obsessive
when confronted with a challenge.

Mostly though, I just felt inadequate.
I didn’t know you.
I didn’t know Geneva.
I didn’t know the building.
I had been hired at half-time.
I was a writer now, and wanted that part
of my life to flourish not wither.

“In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw God!
Seraphs were all around – each one with six wings!
And they sang out to each other.
And the whole place shook at the sound of their voices,
and the temple was full of smoke.
And I said…
‘Woe is me!
I am a creature of unclean lips
standing here in the presence of GOD,
and I live among a people of unclean lips
and yet my eyes have just SEEN God!’

Then one of the Seraphs flew to me,
holding a live coal
that had been taken from the altar
with a pair of tongs.

The seraph touched my mouth with it
and cleansed my lips, so that,
when I heard the voice of God ask, “Whom shall I send?”

I felt my lips open
and my mouth form these words: ‘Here I am. Send me.’”

Now that is an amazing vision
or dream or hallucination,
but it boils down to the devastating knowledge
of just how puny
and imperfect
and pitiful
Isaiah felt in contrast
to the indescribable magnificence
of the Creator of the Universe.
And it was only then,
only in the presence of his own nothingness
before the astounding everythingess of God,
that he understood:
Even though we cannot,
God can
and sometimes does.
Suddenly he understood
God can,
and God will,
give us what it takes
to open our mouths and say “YES.”

Sometimes,
because of God,
not because of our own will or capacities,
the “Yes” comes out,
and things happen
that weren’t supposed to happen.

Sometimes, because of God,
and because of mystical seraph’s
unleashed in the world – not because of our own
highly sophisticated professional selves –
stuff happens
that wasn’t supposed to.

Stuff happens
that we have nothing to do with
and stuff that makes things
turns out to be okay…
at least for the moment.

Back in January 2013

Katy and I were living apart —
she was finishing up her job in Vermont
for six months while I set down roots here.
I tried to keep a positive spin on things
but the more she knew
the more skeptical she was.
And why not, deep down I was skeptical too.

You won’t be filled with confidence
when I tell you that my strategy was surrender.
When faced with the impossible,
like quitting drinking and drugs,
surrender isn’t a half-bad strategy.
I don’t do it very often
because I am lousy at it.
I like power and control a whole lot better.
But sometimes,
sometimes I recognize when to surrender.

Surrender is when we look up
and suddenly realize how enormously inadequate we are
before the task that is hovering before us.

It comes on suddenly,
almost in a flash,
and we see how monstrously enormous
God is.

Surrender
is when we cry “uncle”
into the mouth of heaven,
and then admit that we are powerless
before something that has defeated us.

Sometimes, and this is most terrifying,
we surrender to something that may even
have the capacity to kill us.

“Woe is me…Woe is me, we cannot succeed;
we cannot win;
we cannot even survive…without you, O God.”

That is surrender.

I suspect when we hear weird stuff
like that reading from Isaiah
it is hard not to dismiss it as a hallucination
or psychosis
or just plain fraud.
But truly, it is not all that weird.

In fact, there is not a doubt in my mind
that all of us have had such an experience –
a moment of utter and astounding powerlessness
before a task,
event,
or threat
and our response was some version
of “Woe is me.”

And I suspect that when we did surrender,
there appeared a seraph of some kind,
not as imaginative as Isaiah’s
but someone or something
put a hot coal on your lips —
a spark of light
that changed or turned it all around —
in some way
if only for a moment.

Come on, I know that has happened to you,
and I thank God
that it has happened for me.
You may never have thought about that experience
as an Isaiah moment,
but Isaiah is describing a moment
like you and I have had.

They are strange moments in our lives —
those moments of powerlessness
when a power greater than ourselves
reaches out to us
once we have surrendered.

The story of Jesus inviting Peter to join him
also sprang from a moment of powerlessness.
Peter does not ask Jesus for help with fishing.
He doesn’t need help with fishing,
not from some stinking rabbi.
Fishing is his business – he’s a professional.
He’s been fishing all his life.
He’s making a living at it.
He knows what to do and when to do it.
He commands respect among his peers.
He’s got pride.
He knows all about his thing
because it is his thing.
He doesn’t need some itinerant preacher telling
him how to do his thing.
His thing
has nothing to do with God,
it’s his thing.

It’s his business.
It IS business.
It’s economics.
It’s worldly.
It’s professional.
It’s personal.
It’s real.
It’s nitty-gritty.
It’s his thing…
in other words,

it is our thing not God’s thing.
Let’s just get that straight, Jesus.

Of course, Peter was wrong
and he was about to have a painful moment
of powerlessness
to remind him that he was wrong.
It was not his thing
and it never is just your thing or my thing.

Jesus steps into Peter’s thing,
and claims dominion for God over ALL things:
business
economics
professional endeavors
education
health care
politics — all the real things.

In one terrible moment of awakening,
Peter stands in the astounding presence of God
and experiences his own powerlessness.
In one awful moment
he realizes the way things really are,
and he is utterly devastated
to discover
that God is literally present in all things…
and nothing we do
is divorced from God.

The shear enormity of God
slams Peter on his butt
and he begs Jesus to get away from him
because he is a man of unclean lips
among a people of unclean lips.

In other words,
Peter realizes the enormity of the distance
between himself and Jesus,
and he feels as if he doesn’t even belong
on the same planet with the guy.

“Get away from me Jesus,” Peter says,
“for I am a man of unclean lips!”
Jesus is a Seraph
flying toward him with hot coal in hand.

Well, 2013 turned into 2022.
The story we began together is still not done.
In the meantime we had to learn to surrender
to a pandemic.

This is not a fairy tale.

We all know there were many hard things about 2013
and subsequently leaving 520 S. Main Street.

Since the Inn project hasn’t taken ownership yet
and we are still in limbo,
we know what it is to wait…and wait…and wait.

But in my experience,
surrender creates possibility.

Surrender activates opportunity.

Surrender to our powerlessness,
makes room for a power greater than ourselves
to empower us.

I am going to go out on a limb right now
and predict
there is a Seraph
circling your life right now…right now.

There is a Seraph,
just waiting to place a burning coal
on your lips,
and when it does
it will consume the distance
between you and God
for just one moment.

For just one moment, one moment long enough
for you to say, “I surrender.”
Maybe it will even be an, “I-surrender-send-me” moment.

Well…
I realize these are just crazy old stories
and I may sound crazy talking about them.
Surely nothing like a Seraph could really happen.
Not in the real world,
because in the real world
we are in charge. Right?

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2 Epiphany 2020: The Fish

January 26, 2020 by Cam Miller

by Diliff

TEXTS For SERMON: Isaiah 9:2-4; “The Fish” by Mary Oliver; Matthew 4:12-23

There are so many times
a poem is better than a story
and this morning, I would prefer
to riff on Mary Oliver’s fish poem.

It is elegant and wise:
“…Out of pain
and pain, and more pain,
we feed this feverish plot, we are nourished
by the mystery.”

She is writing there, I think,
about eating the fish
and how then, the sea is in her
with the fish glittering inside her,
and she is now the fish
just as fish is her – “tangled,” she writes,
and both of them, “certain to fall back into the sea.”

It is an idea about the mystery of life,
and poetry gets to play with ideas
the way Lisa gets to play notes
on her way to music.

But someone who does not like to play with ideas
will come along, look at the dead fish
in that poem, and say,
“right, it was good for her
but bad for the fish.”
Without the poetry it is just a murder and a meal.

Without the poetry
Andrew and Peter were out of their minds
to drop everything and follow Jesus –
like impressionable children
falling under the spell of a cult leader
who we would go after
and bring home.

So let’s not tell this,
or any of these stories,
as if reading a newspaper account
or history textbook.

Let’s read this story like the story we are in –
a story without a script.
We don’t get to know everything in advance,
do we? Do we?

Sometimes we are able to sense
what kind of a down payment we will have to make
when embarking on an adventure
or continuing our way into a story.

Take Peter and Andrew for example.
Their adventure begins when Andrew
hears Rabbi Jesus talking to someone,
and suddenly…
he feels as if he has never,
ever in all his years,
heard anyone
make such utterly clear-and-certain sense.

That is the moment that Andrew can choose
to walk away with a nice experience;

He can go home with a short story
instead of an adventure.
He can make the whole incident
just an afternoon tale
he tells his family and friends,
OR he can run home,
get his brothersand insist on sharing
a spectacular experience with them.
We know that tension.

We can tell someone about a gorgeous sunset
that has just thrilled us, or we can drag them
outside or to the window to experience it with us.

From Peter’s place in the story,
he can listen to his brother
and enjoy the moment vicariously,
OR he can go and crawl into the story himself –
actually, become part of the story.
For reasons we will never know –
and let’s not pretend we do –

Andrew and Peter enter the adventure at that moment
and it changes their lives.
That is how it is with us, or how it isn’t.

That snippet of Isaiah’s poetry
has the same story behind it –
one that those listening to him can climb into
or just hear about with mild interest.

You see, for fifty years
the remnant of Israel
that had been carted off into exile, languished.
Exile hurts.
That is a grotesque understatement
for something akin to slavery,
imprisonment,
and economic bondage.
Those of us who have been listening
to the 1619 podcast about slavery in America
are sensing again the brutality of exile.

For Israel, exile
amounted to religious
and cultural disintegration.
Prior to exile
every hope and promise
of their relationship with God
was rooted in land.
A place.

On Mount Zion,
upon which Jerusalem was built.
In Judah, the Promise Land
bordered by the Jordan River.
Take away that place –
the temple
the city
the land
the river –
and there was no religion.
Exile brought with it the terrifying question
of whether there had ever been a God named Yahweh.
In short,
to live in exile
was brutal and painful and hazardous,
but to live without hope
in the midst of exile,
was an intolerable suffering.
That is when the prophet Isaiah’s poetry
was most brilliant.

He was a poet of hope.
Isaiah’s poetry kept hope alive
during Israel’s exile in Babylon –
and it kept the religion and culture alive too.
In the same way African tribal cultures
were nursed and nurtured secretly
throughout American slavery,
the religion and culture of Israel
was kept burning in exile by poets like Isaiah.
When there is no hope for a conquered people,
total assimilation into the foreign culture
and the beliefs of their captors,
is a hazard.
But Isaiah just kept telling people
that God could
and God would
do a new thing.
After fifty years, God did.
Persia defeated Babylon
and the King of Persia
not only allowed people to go home to Judah,
he actually gave them money
to help rebuild the temple on Mount Zion.

That was the point at which the exiles
had to decide if their story was an armchair story
or an adventure they would enter into –
were they living the last chapter of Israel
or writing a new chapter?

The 2ndSunday of Epiphany
is my fourth anniversary at Trinity,
and the Sunday I first preached up there
at 520 S. Main Street.
So this sermon is as much about what we have done
these last four years, as it is some fine theological point.

I want to do something I don’t think
I have ever done before –
read you part of the sermon I preached that day.
Now, please do not think it is because I THINK
that sermon was so fine
that it merits quoting myself.
I re-read it this week
and I found it tremendously helpful
as a kind of poem
with which to see the last four years –
to remember where we were that day
and to see where we are this day.
For those who entered into the adventure
with your own bizarre and crazy reasons
somewhere between then and now,
it may also offer a useful snapshot.
Since this is our Annual Meeting, it seemed right to do.
So here is a lengthy quote from January 2016.

“At this particular time in your history,
when you are uncertain as to what your future is,
I am, for reasons still not totally clear to me,
a priest embarked on a future with no script…
or at least none that I’ve seen.

Here is what I have come to know
as a result of where I have been the last thirty-six years
and from the people I have been with in that time.
If you and I walk into our future together
with an openness of heart and mind,
having the courage to affirm what we hear,
and respond with acceptance and courage
to what we see – whether or not we like it –
then we will be transformed.
That transformation won’t be like water turned into wine – that’s down right magic,
something that takes one thing
and turns it into something altogether different.
The kind of transformation I can imagine,
the kind of transformation I have seen and experienced,
is more like health where there was illness;
hope where there was despair;
resilience where there was rigidity;
and the nascent spirit of a community
becoming its defining presence.

I come to you with no pre-disposed ideas
about what Trinity’s future should be or look like;
and I come asking, and maybe even agitating,
for your bare-chested openness too.
I liken our situation
to that of the exiles who returned to Jerusalem
after captivity in Babylon,
and to whom Isaiah was cooing
in that reading we heard this morning.

Their situation was grim.

Actually, according to Isaiah,
it wasn’t grim at all
but they could NOT see or imagine the future
because what was happening all around them
was not what they had expected.
Their situation was not what they had wanted
and even though God had an amazing transformation
in mind, and already in play,
they could not see it
or participate in it
because it wasn’t what they expected or wanted.

In my personal experience, in my own life and work,
whenever I know what is supposed to happen
and I have the barrels of my intention
loaded with ideas and plans,
that is exactly when I cannot see or hear or sense
the presence of God
that is surrounding and infusing us.
In my experience of Church,
every time we know exactly what the problem is
and have a sure-fired solution to it –
one we declare comes with the blessings
from the Kingdom of God –
we are about to fall on our collective face.
There is never, and I emphasize never,
one solution,
one source of blame,
one answer,
one hero,
one action,
one direction,
one person,
one path,
not even one vision
to bring forth God’s best dream for us.
It is never so easy and never so simple
and never so direct.

I do not know why it couldn’t be easier
to uncover and pursue God’s best dream for us,
but I know it isn’t.

And what is worse,
I don’t think we really get to know how we did
or if we followed God’s best dream
until afterward,
and we look back
and things pop out of our experience
that confirm we did or did not.

All of which is to say
we need to be courageous
in our openness to God’s best dream for us.
We need to be radically brave
as we open ourselves
not knowing whether it will be a hernia operation
or a heart transplant.

Along with that bravery
must come trust so radical
that we are willing to free-fall with our eyes closed
into the arms of God.
Really, it is just that radical.
And believe me,
at my size and weight,
I have never liked trust falls!

But that is where we are,
you and me,
together. (I am still quoting from that sermon).
We do not get to hedge our bets.
We do not get to second-guess ourselves.
We do not get to hem and haw.
Once we have a strong inkling about God’s best dream
for Trinity Church Geneva,
we probably only get one chance to live into it.
So this is our time – yours and mine together.
I know some of you have imagined the future,
have pieces of a scenario that might make sense
and that you wish would come true.
Let it go. Give it up.
Stop imagining. Stop wishing.
Stop pretending to know the way
and open yourselves to any and all possibilities
as God leads us into that best dream.
If (what I am saying)
does not sound like what you expected me to say,
then we are already defying expectations!”

END OF OLD SERMON, and here is the end of this one:

We are still in that story,
the last chapter has not been written – that we know of.
Re-reading that sermon
helped me look back and say, “Hell yes.
I think we done good together.”

 

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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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