Sermons

5 Easter: Preaching, Trust, and Death

May 15, 2022 by Cam Miller

A video version follows the text

Can I just say that preaching
isn’t as easy as it looks.
I know it is not really a job for a grown man or woman,
but it’s all I know.
And once in awhile I just need to vent.

You see, we have hit a rough patch
along the Lectionary Road.
The Lectionary, as you know,
is a three-year cycle of readings

Episcopal, mainline Protestant, and Roman Catholic
congregations read on Sunday morning.
They are similar to one another
though not exactly the same.
I pick and choose to be honest,
but sometimes the choices are narrow.

You may have forgotten
that there are actually four readings appointed
for each Sunday
because we only read two.

Then we add a contemporary liturgical reading.
And before I disrespect the current cache of readings,
let me acknowledge
that it is a good thing to have a lectionary.

The Lectionary is a practice
rooted in our Jewish ancestry, and it extends far into our past.

It is also a good discipline to keep the preacher
from hopping like a crow, to pick over
his or her own favorite topics
again and again.

But having said all that,
I feel like we are hydroplaning on a nasty slick
of crude proclamations.
The readings since Easter
have been repetitious first century claims
about Jesus and the young Christian movement
that are either irrelevant in our world
or simply not very credible.

Now maybe it is just me,
but it is hard to find a fist in these readings
that reaches up
and grabs my shirt
and yells into my face:
“Listen up you, there is something
you need to hear!”

I confess to liking it
when Scripture is rough with me like that.

But there IS something here
in most of these Easter Lectionary readings.
It is a nag.
It isn’t a fist grabbing us by the shirt,
it is a little nagging nit
that is poking through them.

In all these excerpts from the Bible —
the ones we’ve read on Sundays
and even the ones we didn’t use —
there is an echoing complaint
behind the veil of words:
death.

I have heard, and read
many times
and in many places,
that the spark that ignited the flame
that became Christianity,
was its promise of life after death.

Apparently the culture of Roman society
in the first century
was rotting away like a fallen sequoia:
solid and immovable
but eaten alive by the parasites of cynicism,
seductive fantasy
and near total corruption.
Huh…sounds like another culture I know.

Anyway, Roman society
was starved
for a good religion,
and like hollow Hollywood celebrities
in their frantic search for perpetual youth and beauty,
Roman citizens
snapped up nearly every exotic idea
that came along.

They weren’t much interested in Jesus,
at least not the one
who left footprints with parables
and his ideas of an egalitarian community

gathered around an open table.
Those spiritually and intellectually starved Romans
were more enamored with the Jesus
who escaped like a canary from the cold, dark tomb.

That turned out to be
a delectable idea
with oodles
of first century traction.

The idea of life after death
and a sure and certain path to it,
was an idea whose time had come
and it caused a seismic shift
in all subsequent human history.

It is understandable: we hate death.
Death is like a raspberry seed stuck in our teeth.
It doesn’t matter how magnificent
and beautiful the day,
the month,
the year,
the life…just the idea that death is inevitable
has the potential to make us miserable.

So it’s not just those old Roman’s
in search of life beyond empire.
And it is not just you and me
who long for meaning
in a life of too much affluence.
It goes way back — way, way back.
We could go as far back
to those iconic cave paintings
from prehistoric France,
and talk about how they rage against the machine,
and how they express hope
for something more from life.
That was long before the advent of words.
But I am not a student of that extended tribe
of our elongated human community.

So instead of 10,000 years back
I’ll point to a mere two-thousand,
six-hundred years backward…
to that poem
from which the Book of Revelation
snagged
its poetic imagery.

Almost six-hundred years
before Jesus was born,
the poet Isaiah
envisioned a new heaven and a new earth.
But it was on a mountaintop
rather than a city where Revelation put it.

In Isaiah 25:6 Isaiah wrote:

“On this mountain
the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
a feast of fat things,
a feast of wine on the lees,
of fat things full of marrow,
of wine on the lees well refined.
And God will destroy on this mountain
the covering that is cast over all peoples…
the veil that is spread over all nations.

God will swallow up death for ever,
and the Lord God will wipe away tears from all faces,
and the reproach of God’s people
will be taken away from all the earth…”

Seven hundred years later, someone named John —
not the same John as the one who wrote the Gospel —
echoed Isaiah
from a Roman prison island on Patmos:
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth;
…And I saw the holy city of Jerusalem coming down…
…(and there) God will dwell with (God’s) people,
and God will be with them,
(and) wipe away every tear from their eyes,
and death shall be no more,
neither shall there be mourning nor crying
nor pain any more,
for the former things have passed away.”

When we humans
get enough cushion
between ourselves and starvation,
and then a little hint of stability and security,
we start asking questions about life and death.
No matter how fat and sassy we get
as a society,
it never feels like enough
when it comes to the reality of death.

We want some assurance that this is not all there is
and that, in fact,
what lies ahead is good.
Heaven,
Moksha,
Jannah,
Salvation,
Nirvana…
all the ideas
about what happens after we die
reflect what the culture they derive from
believe would be an improvement
on what is now.

In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition
a very human sounding
system of distributive justice
is exacted upon the good guys and the bad guys alike,
with rewards and punishments
meted out
at the end of life,
all to even out the scales of justice.

Likewise, in Hinduism, the scales of justice
measured somewhat differently,
are balanced through reincarnation.

Hinduism explodes the mind
with an openness to a withering array of gods
and levels of the universes,
and succession of lives
that make possible
any and all conceptions of fairness.

Buddhism,
of which there are as many brand names
as there are Christian denominations,
reckons that all lives, good and bad,
are spokes stuck on a wheel of suffering.

The only hope hinges,
not upon balancing a scale,
but upon release into nothingness;
in the absolute going out of existence
instead of the relentless cycles of lives.

But modern science has also given us a new vision:
an odd kind of afterlife
knit within the confines of molecules and atoms.

Science has declared
that no energy is ever lost
but simply changes form.
We live,
we die,
we become part of the soil
and that in turn feeds
and becomes a part of the on-going
cosmic cycle of energy.
Even the dust of once distant stars
resides in us,
a kind of resurrection beyond our imagination.

But is that all there is?
Are those our only choices?
Heaven, Reincarnation, Nirvana, Thermodynamics?

I think there is another choice: Trust.

Put our hand in the hand of God
and simply trust.
Trust that, because God loves us,
that whatever happens
it will be okay.

To me, that is what Jesus demonstrated
and we do not need to say more.

If in fact, we trust the love of God,
we do not need any theories
about what happens next.

Rather, we need good and better methodologies
for preparing and expanding
our open table.

We need
good and better methodologies
for creating and nurturing
the kingdom on earth
as it is in heaven.

Trust God about what happens next
and get on with the kingdom.
That’s all.
I think that’s a gospel that will preach, as they say.

Trust God about what happens next
and get on with the kingdom.

4 Easter: Your Work

May 8, 2022 by Cam Miller

A video version follows the text

The Messenger
by Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Sometimes a sermon is about nothing.
You know, like Seinfeld
was a television show about nothing.
Like today’s readings are about nothing,
at least nothing
in any concrete sense
that you can collect or build or decorate with.

The something that this sermon
and these readings are about
is gone
the very moment we recognize it.
It is more like air
than water.

The psalm, the poem, the gospel
are all about merger.

“The Father and I are one,” says Jesus.

The world and I are one,
and you too — Mary Oliver’s metaphors proclaim.

The green pasture, death’s shadow,
and the table God spreads
even in the presence of our enemies,
are all enfolded
within the goodness
of God, says the psalmist.
Merger, melding, oneness…
it is all about the momentary collapse of boundaries.

This is William James’ famous definition of religion:
“the feelings, acts, and experiences
of individual (people) in their solitude,
so far as they apprehend themselves
to stand in relation to whatever
they may consider the divine.”

It is that moment of oneness
or being in the presence of
something or someone
that melts the boundary
between them and us
or it and us.

It can be nature,
as Mary Oliver describes
in so many of her poems.

It can be another person
when we fall in love —
that intensely romantic phase
in which the boundaries between us
feel as though they fall into one another
and we are consumed
in that unique moment of intimacy.

It can be a different intimacy
when a conversation between friends,
or even an encounter between a professional
with client or patient,
suddenly distills into a joint recognition
of an experience and its meaning.

And I dare say, with God,
when we enter the moment with
the Holy Spirit or Jesus or Krishna or Mary
or whoever the perceived agent might be,
and there we are for an instant,
as William James explained,
”standing in our solitude” and yet
with something that is no longer “other”
but we in it and it in us.

I know darn well
that everyone in hearing of my words
knows this experience I am trying to describe.
It is the collapse of boundaries
between us and someone or something else.
Religious and non-religious people
will ascribe different causes and meanings
to the experience,
but it is a universal human experience.
At least I think it is.

But what I am most interested in
is not the moment of merger
but what happens
after that moment.
After the boundaries have collapsed
and we have merged
through a powerful suspension of individuality —
what happens next?

If we do not re-collect ourselves
and re-assert the boundaries
that were momentarily
penetrated,
we will loose connectivity
with the other people and elements
of the world around us.

We will loose perspective and forget
who we are
and what we are
and the full extend of to whom we belong.

We will get pulled like taffy
and the middle of us, which is our core, will sag
as we are stretched further and further
beyond our boundaries.
Eventually,
whether temporary of permanent,
we will go mad
because we are a Self
and Selfness lives within a particular body and soul.

Pull the Self away too far and too long
and we loose our minds
one way or another.

That happens sometimes
to some people
with religious experience,
just as it does
between individuals through
unsustainable intimacy.

Neither religion nor meaningful relationships
are for the feint of heart.
Both begin with a bang
and then,
well then, our boundaries
are supposed to snap back
and return to their original shape —
accommodating of course,
the new experience
or wisdom
or person.

It really is a wild and crazy ride —
religious experience,
falling in love,
or any kind of momentary intimacy.
So much so,
most of us live on-guard against it.
We would rather have predictability
and a semblance of control
than having our boundaries bent out of shape.

But here is the thing.

Religious experience
is like near-death experience.
It causes us to consider changing our lives
but in the aftermath,
as the experience recedes
in the rear view mirror,
we go on just as we were.
Our excited resolutions to be different
are like a balloon with the air
rushing out as it
snakes around the room.

So three dollars
and a mystical experience —
whether it is falling into God,
or “the phoebe and the delphinium,”
or the eyes of a lover —
is just enough
to buy us a large coffee
at Dunk’n Donuts.
But itself it won’t change us,
except in the moment.

And maybe that is okay —
just the experience.
Maybe just the moment of merger is enough
in and of itself?
But honestly, I think there is something else.

I want to go back to the Mary Oliver poem
because, of the three readings,
I relate to it best.

“My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect?
Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished…”

Can you,
with such simple clarity,
say what your work is?
I do not mean
what makes or made you money.
Most of us do not get paid
for the work of our soul,
or if there is a blending
of our job and our work
our work is never contained
by the limits of our job.

What, my friends,
is your work — the work of your soul?
I am not the judge of your experience
but I will say
that any time
I have had the experience of merger —
when my boundaries melted
and I slipped into a bigger reality —
it has always brought clarity
to my work.

That fact causes me to imagine
that experiences of merger —
what William James
called religious experience —
is for a purpose
more than it is for a pleasure.

It is not only Jesus and God who are one,
it is also you and I
who are one with the Creator of all that is.

We are one
and the green pastures we lie down in are one,
and so are the right pathways
and the shadow of death
and the cup running over.
All of it — all of us within it — are one.

We have all had glimpses of our oneness
and those glimpses,
those fractions of a second of recognition
are given to us as gifts
to bring clarity to us
about what our work is.

I would so love —
at least in my head —
for my work to be what Mary Oliver’s work was:
loving the world
and learning to be astonished.
I would — I would love that job.
But it is not mine.

I have other work,
and sometimes God grants me glimpses
of my oneness with all that is
so that I can receive greater clarity
about my work.

I hope that maybe
this rings true for you too.

3 Easter: A Season of Grief

May 1, 2022 by Cam Miller

“When he trawled so wide he should’ve trawled
deeper.”

~From “Fishermen” by Francis Harvey

Oh, heck yes!
Jesus trawled way too wide
and would have done better
with fewer, less
ambivalent and feckless disciples, like…
us.

Jesus is such a good dude
in this story from John.

Here he was, a dead man
who had just endure unimaginable
pain and suffering from torture and execution
by nasty Roman overlords.
Despite all of that,
he cooks breakfast for his friends.
Who does that?

The only other thing I want to note
about this odd little ghost story
is what a sweet thing Jesus also does for Peter.
He leads poor hapless Peter by the nose
through a three-peat, “I love you.”
This gave Peter the opportunity
to make up for his three-time repudiation of Jesus
on the eve of the execution.
Jesus is essentially
reconciling with and restoring Peter
with a fail-proof public process
that even Peter couldn’t screw up.
And the command, “Feed my Sheep”
then bestows leadership upon Peter
that no one can later deny.

This breakfast on the beach story
ties up an uncomfortable loose end
leftover from a bad night
that left Peter a coward and turncoat.

But after breakfast on the beach,
everything is okay
and all the parties are rejoined and renewed
in community
around a campfire and a fish fry.

“Ichthys,” the Greek word for fish,
quickly became the primary symbol
for early Christians.
As we know, they turned it into an acronym
because each letter was the first letter
of their proclamation:
i for Jesus
c for Christ
h for “of God”
y for Son
s for Savior
So ichthys was an acronym for:
”Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.”

I found this quote in Christianity Today,
from the second-century theologian, Tertullian:
“we, little fishes, after the image of our Ichthys,
Jesus Christ, are (also) born in the water.”

Today we have the chalice
and the cross
and the crucified Jesus
and the silhouette of a steeple
as familiar symbols of Christianity.
But in those first generations is was a fish.

Fish were part of the feeding of the 5000.
Fish were the livelihood of the disciples before Jesus
and afterwards as well.
Fish were the sign of a first simple, ordinary
miracle
when Jesus first encountered
Peter, James, and John.
Just like in today’s story,
in that first encounter they had been fishing all night
and gotten skunked.

Jesus tells them where and how
to fish
and their nets are so full
it causes the boats
to capsize from so much abundance.

Get it — capsized from abundance?
He was going to turn their lives upside down
with more abundance than they had ever known
or could stand.

Fishing is what Jesus promised to the disciples
they would be doing from now on,
only it was fishing for people.

So fish, not the cross,
began as the primary symbol for Christians.
As you know, it was both a secret symbol
to help one them avoid discovery
and persecution,
and a public one found on rings and seals
and other archaeological evidence.

It makes perfect sense
that it would take well over a century
for the cross to become distant enough
from the crucifixion
not to be a terrible trigger
of a severe historic wound.
Plus, they were evangelizing the Romans
for whom the cross
was a positive symbol of geographic their dominance.

But also, what was it that made someone
a Christian? Baptism — immersion in water.
“We, little fishes, after the image of our Ichthys…”

So that’s all I want to say about fish for now.
Aren’t you glad?

I want to talk about grief instead.
On some level,
whether subliminally or not,
the breakfast on the beach story
is a grief story.

It is the kind of story
that anyone who has ever lost
someone they love
has dreams about.

You know those dreams, right?
In the aftermath of a death
in which we see or speak to the dead
in a mixed up,
highly symbolic,
weird dream.

You wake up
and suddenly remember
you were having breakfast or something
with your mom
or your dad
or your spouse or friend
who is dead — and maybe has been for a long time.

You shake your head
and go on about your day,
and maybe never even tell anyone about it.
That kind of dream.

I dare say, these days we all
are carrying around a lot of grief —
extra grief even.
We’ve recently lost a good friend, Joanne.
But many of us have lost others
during this pandemic,
whether from the virus
or things related to the virus.

Other deaths too, that just came
like a thief in the night
when we were shut away from each other.
We haven’t even had a chance
to grieve together.

These past two years
are a very weird season indeed.
So much has been stacked up,
pancaked into a pile
we have kept in the shed.

Dreams have died,
things we had once hoped to do
but now seem unlikely.

Hopes have died,
beliefs and expectations
that have disappeared unexpectedly
and really, without warning.

The war in Ukraine
is not only grievous
for the bodies that lie spread out and akimbo
across hundreds of miles,
it is also a war in Europe
that is pulling countries around the world into it
in a way we thought would never happen again.

And also, whatever our politics are,
I am guessing they haven’t been satisfied lately,
and that whatever we think is ahead
doesn’t appear as a bright and shinning city on the hill.

I don’t really need to tick down the list
of familial,
relational,
social,
institutional,
and environmental losses
that feel grievous to us.
All I need to do
is point in that direction
and it will likely evoke the shadow of loss.

Whether for a family member or friend,
or our confidence and pride in someone or something,
or hope for the future
or casualties from the past..
losses have stacked up like cord wood.

As you know, I was in Ohio last week
officiating a memorial service for friends
who died during the shutdown,
and this was the first best opportunity
to say good bye — at least in person and together.

As I said on Holy Thursday about Joanne,
grief and thanksgiving for a life
is something we simply have to do
with other people.
Doing it alone
simply heightens our sense of loss
and helps grief to burrow a wormhole inside of us.

I have some personal experience with this
that I may even have mentioned before.
In my fifties,
I hit a real tough grease slick of depression
and took a pretty good emotional fall.

While it was in the aftermath of my dad’s death,
I discovered it was about much more than him.
Like any priest or caring professional,
I had been pastoring
and caring for people
who were dying
or losing their loved ones,
for almost thirty years.

I came to realize, thanks to therapy
and a bunch of grieving,
that I had not been processing my own grief
along the way.

I don’t think it was an inflated sense
of my own strength
or that I didn’t think I needed to grieve.

My job was to care for other people
and I hadn’t learned to step aside when appropriate
and process my own grief.

Honestly, it was just a simple lack
of self-awareness
and a very ordinary proclivity
for denial.

Unprocessed grief
can distort reality
and turn the world inside out,
and ourselves inside out too.

When we do not get to share our grief with others,
for whatever reason
and for whatever loss,
it buries itself in us
and comes out later
in unhealthy
and even self-destructive ways.

Grieving together,
sharing the pain of our losses
and working toward recovery with others,
is just how we get better —
and how we keep from being injured
by our grief.

Because, you know,
grief is not the enemy —
isolation and undue privacy are.
Grieving our losses is good,
is natural,
is healing.
We just need to do it fully and out loud,
with others.

The Rev. David Heffling and I
re-interred four people from the Trinity columbarium
this pasat week, in the columbarium
at St. John’s, Canandagua.

I did not know them
so I wasn’t grieving for them.
But removing all those ashes
from our columbarium last summer and fall,
with the much appreciated help
from John Gibbon and Dan Pletcher,

was a kind of grievous experience.
It was a kind of grieving for the generations
of Trinity members
who rubbed their prayers
into the hard wood of the pews,
and whose prayers lifted up into the rafters
and are still there.
Some of you here now, here in Trinity Place,
are those people.

Interring those ashes
reminded me of all the what might have been,
what could have been,
what was hoped for but never happened…
all the regrets too,
the sorrows and songs — all of it,
a loss. A grief.
Not mine so much as yours,
some of you anyway.

There is no deep theological point
I am trying to make here.
No moral of John’s story,
at least not exactly.

What I am doing is inviting us
to be more mindful
of what we are going through
alone and together,
and that we need one another
and a sense of community
to work through it.
We have no idea
how the next few years will shake out,
economically,
politically,
institutionally —
in Geneva,
for Trinity Place,
the nation, internationally…we just don’t know.
But when facing that kind of uncertainty,
and trying to heal from the losses
we have already had,
holding hands
and touching hearts is awfully healing.

So let’s not downplay or forget about
our grief,
for all kinds of losses
these last many years.
And instead, let us touch our grief
as we hold hands in community,
and give thanks for the abundance we have had
and continue to share.

2 Easter: Practicing Resurrection

April 24, 2022 by Cam Miller

Here is what I know about this gospel story:
John was terrified of doubt.

And here is what I know about us:
We live in an era of doubt.
No, not an era, a miasma of doubt…a body bag of doubt.

Let’s start with us.
We are living through an extraordinary
tunnel of doubt
from which we cannot yet see
the light at the end.

It is a bit strange for us too,
because we have just been through
such a prolonged sense of abundance
and prosperity without a fearful external enemy
and very low interest rates to boot!

But since at least 2016
we just haven’t known what to expect
and when it will end —
the “it” being whatever existential threats
seem most threatening to us.

Of course, on one level
that is a real white, cis-male, liberal point of view
since there are a whole lot of people
who have been living on the margins
for a whole lot of time.
But there is this envelope we entered together
in 2016 and it got even grayer
and foggier
with COVID-19.
And now there is even a war in Europe again.

Our institutions seem to be crumbling
under the weight of it all.
School classrooms and administrations are imploding.
Banking, courts, governments, law enforcement,
publishing, health care, religion…

It is hard to think of an institution
that is not fraying at the edges
if not crumbling from the foundation.

We don’t know how it will end
or where our place in it is,
and what, if anything, we can do about it.

That is why I say it is an era of doubt,
existential doubt
about what is enduring
and what is passing away in the night.

I’ll give you a very graphic example
from my own current experience.

I am the part-time rector of a congregation
that I have helped transition
from a huge historic neo-gothic building
and campus of buildings,
to a storefront church
located in a former wine bar.

It is a great story,
and too long for this sermon.
But the part I am thinking about
has to do with the congregation’s columbarium.
You see, the congregation had built a wall in its chapel
as a place for people to intern the ashes
of their loved ones.
Well, I spent much of last summer
and early fall
contacting family members
from all parts of the country
to let them know we were closing
the columbarium.

Now whoever would expect
that a two-hundred year old church
and its columbarium
would close?
That is just not a thought
most of us would have had
before the last few years.
Big old churches were here forever,
and that was the way we treated them.
But as we know now,
those big old buildings are closing
all over the country.

That example is amplified and echoed
with other stories from schools
and offices
and hospitals
and businesses.
That is what I mean
about an era of doubt.

We just don’t know,
and when we just don’t know
it is hard to put our trust
in anything or anyone
that says they do.

Now back to John’s gospel for a moment.

John’s Jesus was not just a messiah.
John’s Jesus was in the beginning…the Word…
and the word that was with God.

John’s Jesus was cosmic
as well as enfleshed.
John’s Jesus was a really really big deal,
and I would say,
an even bigger deal
than Mark, Luke, and Mathew’s Jesus.

After all,
Mark’s gospel begins
with a full grown Jesus
who almost seems to stumble into
a radical new relationship with God,
and it ends with an empty tomb
and no ghost stories.

John has an awful lot riding on Jesus
and he is terrified of doubt.
He makes a point of saying
that everything he, John, says is absolutely true
and he knows, because he witnessed it.
Which, by the way,
inspires doubt in all kinds of New Testament scholars.

So John narrates this really weird and cool encounter
between Jesus and Thomas
in such a way as to alienate
an awful lot of 21^st century folks.
You might even be one of them.
I mean, he basically says,
those of us who cannot put our fingers
in the spear-hole in Jesus’ waist
or the nail holes in his hands,
have to believe what John tells us
or we’re spiritual chopped liver.
Now that ain’t right.

John sets up a terrible dichotomy
between those who believe
what the editors of those long ago stories
want us to believe
and those of us who believe our own experience.

Most of us, I am guessing,
have not had the kind of experience
John is describing.
So he is afraid that if we doubt the stories
we will doubt his Christology
and the whole thing will unravel.

He is not wrong,
at least not from my experience anyway.
Once we start de-mythologizing
and de-constructing
the Biblical narrative,
the way we have and are doing
with our own national history
around slavery,
we are left to then
re-mythologize
and re-construct
a NEW narrative
that is more consistent
with our own experiences.

Those who are deeply invested
in our believing them,
and believing the way they
want us to see Jesus — or slavery for that matter —
are fearful of that process.

But I say, faith has almost nothing
to do with theology —
certainly not an institutional theology.

You see, what we often think of as faith,
is actually belief.
Beliefs are things we “believe in” or not,
but faith, faith is an experience.

I am going to try to describe
the experience of faith
but like trying to describe being in love,
I will not be able
to meet the challenge.
But I am a preacher, so
I have to try anyway.

Think of an athlete
or dancer or musician,
who enters into the grace
of the thing she or he does best.
For me it is someone like NBA star Steph Curry
when he can’t miss a three-point shot
no matter where it is on the court
or how off balance he is.
He gets into that zone and
what happens is just amazing
and appears to be totally natural.

Well faith is likewise a kind of zone we enter
in which everything just clicks and fits —
and the love
and relationships
and work
and the commitments of our lives
all feel as if they’re floating together
in a single current.

It is not a sensation that lasts very long
but when we feel it we are deeply grateful.

And I don’t mean to say
that we are suddenly without pain
or challenge
or that somehow all of our difficulties
are removed. Not at all.

It is just that we know,
even for only a moment,
that we are part of something much bigger
and more magnificent,
and as small
and as insignificant
and as imperfect
as our own little life is,
we are part of this bigger flow, and wow…
all is well.

Do you know that experience?

It may be evoked by awe, as in the Natural world
or music
or love —
but whatever instigates or inspires it
we suddenly feel the current
within which our life flows
and for a just second
we know…we know the ordinary presence of the sacred.

That is the experience,
and trusting it when it has passed —
holding onto it
when we do not feel it any more — that is faith.

So you see, faith
is not about intellectual beliefs
or doctrinal formulas.
That is religion.
The institutions of religion
seek to get the rest of us
to go along with a prescribed
set of beliefs and ideas about God.
That is what religion does.

But faith is a flesh and blood,
real time
encounter
with the holy.
Whether it is a wee small voice
whispering to us in the dark of the night,
or a blistering dream
that shatters our previous plans,
or the warm depth of God in community
making itself known in the bread and the wine…
it is an experience
that we hold onto
and trust
even as it passes.

What I would say about faith
is that it is an actual encounter
with the presence of God in our midst —
an experience we engage in or not
rather than an idea or doctrine
we believe in or not.

If I had to boil down
this Christianity thing we do
to some manageable and digestible chew,
it would be that resurrection
is a thing we practice…or not.

I have no idea what resurrection is,
at least not in the way we talk about it in our songs
and theological pronouncements.
Really, I just don’t know about all of that.
But I do know how to practice resurrection
because Jesus told us.

“Thy kingdom come,
thy will be done…
on earth as it is in heaven.”
On earth, as it is in heaven.

To practice resurrection
is to bring forth the kingdom of God
on earth
as it is in heaven.

Now I come from Upstate New York
and I don’t mean to say
we have created heaven on earth up there.
We are as much in the body bag of doubt as you are,
and so I am not talking about utopia.

Again, let me use an ordinary personal experience.

I am happy to say it has happened more than once
but I am thinking about the recent privilege
of being trusted by a colleague
who came to see me to discuss a family matter.

But honestly, the conversation that ensued
was one in which we shared our experiences
of family and work and loss.

It was one of those moments
that I walked away from feeling
absolutely whole
and well
and refreshed.
Why?
Because it was the confluence
of my calling
and my life
and a friendship
that felt like grace.
In it a little bit of the kingdom
arrived on earth
as it is in heaven.

How do I know that?
Experience. I experienced such grace before.
The experience of faith
which I trust and hold onto.
It isn’t science —
it does not require measurement
or replication in the laboratory.

It is the experience of faith
that says “Yes!” in that moment
and is able to trust it
as it recedes in the rear view mirror.

While the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven
is also brought about with justice work
and peace work
and equity work,
it also happens interpersonally
and in community,
and wherever two or more of God’s creatures
find the currents of their lives intersecting
and moving within the love of God.

Those are faith experiences
and whenever and wherever we engage them
or allow them to happen,
we are practicing resurrection.

And by the way, we need not fear doubt
because doubt is part of faith, not the opposite of it.
Doubt is a tendon within the network
of spiritual bone and muscle
that empower us to see and feel and know
the experience of faith.

Doubt is perfectly natural
and a kind of resistance training
that helps us build spiritual muscle.

We doubt ourselves
and our experiences all of the time,
and there is a utility to doubt —
it causes us to pause and take stock of the moment.

But then we take a deep breath
and recollect the wisdom of our experience
and move on.
We need not fear doubt
or give it too much power to discomfort us.

So…that’s it.
Faith is an experience
of the ordinary presence of God in our midst,
and doubt is a normal and natural part of the flow.

Personally, I have no doubt
that we will get through this tunnel of doubt we are in
and find ourselves in the midst of some kind of renewal.
In the mean time,
we can keep practicing resurrection daily
and build the kingdom on earth
as it is in heaven.

Easter Day 2022: Hearing the music with touch, feeling the word with memory

April 17, 2022 by Cam Miller

Scroll down to below the text for a video version

Letter to the New York Symphony Orchestra
By Helen Keller, March 24, 1924

“Dear friends:

I have the joy of being able to tell you that, though deaf and blind, I spent a glorious hour last night listening over the radio to Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphony.” I do not mean to say that I “heard” the music in the sense that other people heard it; and I do not know whether I can make you understand how it was possible for me to derive pleasure from the symphony. It was a great surprise to myself. I had been reading in my magazine for the blind of the happiness that the radio was bringing to the sightless everywhere. I was delighted to know that the blind had gained a new source of enjoyment; but I did not dream that I could have any part in their joy.

Last night, when the family was listening to your wonderful rendering of the immortal symphony someone suggested that I put my hand on the receiver and see if I could get any of the vibrations. He unscrewed the cap, and I lightly touched the sensitive diaphragm. What was my amazement to discover that I could feel, not only the vibration, but also the impassioned rhythm, the throb and the urge of the music! The intertwined and intermingling vibrations from different instruments enchanted me. I could actually distinguish the cornets, the roil of the drums, deep-toned violas and violins singing in exquisite unison. How the lovely speech of the violins flowed and plowed over the deepest tones of the other instruments! When the human voices leaped up thrilling from the surge of harmony, i recognized them instantly as voices more ecstatic, upcurving swift and flame-like, until my heart almost stood still. The women’s voices seemed an embodiment of all the angelic voices rushing in a harmonious flood of beautiful and inspiring sound. The great chorus throbbed against my fingers with poignant pause and flow. Then all the instruments and voices together burst forth – an ocean of heavenly vibration – and died away like winds when the atom is spent, ending in a delicate shower of sweet notes…

As I listened, with darkness and melody, shadow and sound filling all the room, I could not help remembering that the great composer who poured forth such a flood of sweetness into the world was deaf like myself. I marveled at the power of his quenchless spirit by which out of his pain he wrought such joy for others – and there I sat, feeling with my hand the magnificent symphony which broke like a sea upon the silent shores of his soul and mine.”

“…and there I sat, feeling with my hand
the magnificent symphony
which broke like a sea upon the silent shores
of his soul and mine.”

If you are like me,
you got chills with that sentence
describing Helen Keller’s sense
that she was touching Beethoven’s finger across time like God and Adam
on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Can’t you just close your eyes
and imagine it,
the music an invisible arch
from Beethoven to Keller,
the unspeakable beauty
of notes rendered so fortunately
that tongues and lips and breath
can travel through time and distance
and connect two deaf people?

Well what about Jesus…and us?

I know, there is no radio or vibration
or notes or symphony
to connect the first century and
the twenty-first century.

It’s only a story told so many times
it’s like the newspaper in the recycling bin
waiting to be taken out.
But if Beethoven and Keller
can connect like that,
and you and I can see it with our imaginations,
then it must be possible

for the sublime wisdom
and the painfully tender sacrifice
to reach like a long finger of love
to touch us,
you and me,
even here in a storefront worship space
in Geneva, New York.

I do not know what resurrection is. I just don’t.
I am not even sure the legions of Christians
and piles of Christian doctrines
know what resurrection is.

But we do know
that from out of the darkness of that grave,
and from underneath the pall of grief
and rattling of fear,
some light of love
named Jesus
pierced the emptiness
and jolted those who walked near his tomb.

We also know that light
has touched
enraptured
surged
and arched
through the deafness of history
and the blindness of geographical distance
and the closed door of science
to touch people in an ocean of different ways
ever since Jesus died.
Most of us here
are not Pentecostal
or Born Again
or raised to imagine we have
a personal relationship with Jesus Christ
as if Jimminy Cricket sitting on our shoulder.

Those are not core bits of our tradition.

But you know what we are?
We are a people of words.
We are word-people.
Words in a Prayer Book.
Words in the Bible.
Words in poems.
Words in song.
Words from mystics.
Words from teachers and prophets.
Words that blow our minds.
Words that touch our hearts.
Words that rattle us.
Words that shake us.
Words that relieve and comfort us.
Words that have changed our lives.
Words that inspire belief.
Words that provoke doubt.
Words that open our minds to possibility.
Words that turn us around.
Words that subvert us.
Words that heal us.
Words that wrap, inspire,
and call
and lead us.
Words DO that to us
just as surely as vibrations
brought the New York Symphony Orchestra
to a blind, deaf woman.

Words.
Words sung upon notes,
and words seeping between the silences
as we read them,
and words spoken in our ears.
We are a people of words
and I am here to tell you
that words
are every bit as spiritual
as any mystical vision
or ecstatic Pentecostal bollyhoo.
Words are as spiritual as any Zen Koan
or Hindu mantra.

Words connect us to Jesus.
Words connect us to that moment
when light pierced darkness
and transformed a brutal State-sponsored torture and execution
into the experience of resurrection.
And in that experience,
somehow and in some way,
Jesus lives.

In the same way that Ludwig van Beethoven
touched Helen Keller
in real time
through a radio she could not see
or hear,
Jesus can touch us
through words he left behind.
Words fly on the wings of time
and sing on the tongues of men and women
and are etched on the delicate leafs of paper
whether handwritten
or spit out with technology.

I am not dismissing other mediums
of connection, but raising up
the homely “Word” as OUR communal medium.
What I am inviting us into here
is an understanding.
It is about our mind
and how to open it
and allow words
to unleash their power.

Words that tell stories
and words that tell secrets.
Words that offer morals
and words that point to sublime truths.
Words of parables and sayings and poems.

Allow them to enter our minds
the way Helen Keller allowed vibrations
to enter her body and heart and imagination.
Allow Jesus to live even though he died.
Allow Jesus to come alive
like the ancient notes we sing,
and play, and listen to.

Think of all the other people
and ideas and places
we have allowed to come alive
on the wings of words.

Our hearts pound
when we hear certain notes strung together
on a score of music
passed down through centuries.

Our thoughts stutter
when we hear certain phrases of oratory
captured in writing or recording
that never seem to fade or turn brown.
Our memories bring to life again
feelings, images, colors, and textures
of particular moments in our lives.

The only thing stopping us
from experiencing the full power of words
is the difference in our attitude toward them.

But if we free words
to become the vehicles
upon which Jesus comes alive,
we will suddenly understand
that Easter
is not an occasion that insists
the Bible is Fake News
or Literal Truth.
Easter is a moment in which we are invited —

invited free of charge
and without coercion —
to let the power of words
be the bridge we have needed
for a dead man
to come alive
like Ludwig touched Helen.

Helen said she could “hear” through
what she could “feel.”
Well we can feel
through the words we hear.

Listen to this.
Even close your eyes and feel what you hear:

“Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna,
Mary the mother of James,
and the other women with them
who told this to the apostles.
But these words seemed to (the apostles)
an idle tale, and they did not believe them.”

You feel that, right?
You feel the burn in that, right?
If you are a woman, and even some men,
you know that experience, don’t you,
of sharing the wisdom of your heart
and have it considered
an idle feeling or thought?

You have stood there yourself —
know that exact experience
of standing between those women
who have had a life-changing experience,
and a bunch of men who think they are
the arbiters of truth and wisdom
who deny that experience.

That is the arch of this story,
the one that offers to transport us
across time and distance and belief
to allow the word to connect us
with the Easter moment.

Standing in between those woman and men,
standing there in that hot tension —
a tense distance
among human beings who know and care
about one another…
yet is roiling with rejection,
belittlement,
arrogance,
fear,
grief,
anger,
confusion,
and hope.

Can you feel that with your memory?

Or this.
I bet you can feel
a time that your own personal darkness
was pierced by a light
that came from out of nowhere
with unexpected agency.
Let the words of this story
reconnect with that experience —
feel YOUR moment in those words.

We bring to these words
the wrong ideas.
When we ask if it is true
or did it really happen —
or did it really happen “that way” —
we are thinking ourselves into a dead end.

Can you imagine if Helen Keller
had put her hand on the radio diaphragm
and thought, “I bet this isn’t real?”
The vibrations would have delivered nothing.
She would not have allowed herself
the sensation of feeling Beethoven.

We are a people of words
when we allow the power of words
to touch us and connect us
to moments we haven’t experienced yet.

Easter Day, not just the words of Luke’s story
or Helen Keller’s story,
but ALL the words of this day —
the prayer words
and that flower,
being together to sing words,
and share Jesus’ on-going
open table words,
and all the “Alleluia” words —
those are the Words of Easter Day.
They have power if we allow them,
to connect us to something
strange and wonderful.
Something far more than an idle tale.

Happy Easter to you,
and may you feel the words. Amen.

5 Easter: Preaching, Trust, and Death

A video version follows the text

4 Easter: Your Work

A video version follows the text

3 Easter: A Season of Grief

2 Easter: Practicing Resurrection

Easter Day 2022: Hearing the music with touch, feeling the word with memory

Scroll down to below the text for a video version

Letter to the New York Symphony Orchestra
By Helen Keller, March 24, 1924

Trinity Place

Visit “savetrinity.org” which tells the exciting story of historic re-use striving to be born. You can help us save this magnificent building by visiting savetrinity.org and signing a letter of support! Thank you.

Like us on Facebook

Staff and Vestry

Newsletter

Links

Site Navigation

A video version follows the text

Share this:

A video version follows the text

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Scroll down to below the text for a video version

Letter to the New York Symphony Orchestra By Helen Keller, March 24, 1924

Share this:

Visit “savetrinity.org” which tells the exciting story of historic re-use striving to be born. You can help us save this magnificent building by visiting savetrinity.org and signing a letter of support! Thank you.

Newsletter

Links

Site Navigation

Letter to the New York Symphony Orchestra
By Helen Keller, March 24, 1924