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2 Pentecost B, 2021: From the inside out

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“The Family” sculpture by Robert Thomas Cardiff, photo by Aberdare Blog and is licensed for reuse under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
Texts for Preaching: “Courage” by Anne Sexton and Mark 3:2–35
Scroll to the end for the link to a YouTube video of this sermon

This may seem like a strange sermon
to preach to a bunch of old people —
and by old, I mean over 40.

Churches are more often than not,
composed of older folks these days.
And older folks tend to think of themselves
as beyond
a lot of the psychological and emotional
skirmishes of youth.
But that is more the delusion
of people who control their own households
than it is factual.

Many, if not all of the issues
we were born with
are the ones we are going to die with.
In between
we get to learn some things —
and if we are lucky, we learn
how to manage those issues
in such a way that we control them
more than they control us.
But they are life-long issues
and never solved. Never just go away forever.
At least that is my take on the human dilemma.

I start there
because the story we just hear from Mark
is so dang human.
I mean really, the pain of family conflict
between Jesus and his mother, brothers, and sisters
is so present and available to us in this story.

There is nothing high highfalutin
or supernatural
in this story,
it is down in the mud of human experience. I love it.

And if it was not stinging enough
in its immediacy,
Anne Sexton codifies
those childhood moments
in her poem, “Courage” —
which by the way, is as much about dying
as it is about living:

”…It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien…”

Jesus’ mother and brothers and sisters,
the story says,
think Jesus is out of his freak’n mind.

They call him crazy.

Sit with that for a moment.
Let it backwash with all the Mariology
and sentimentalized folk theology
that has been told to you.

The family shows up
at the door of Jesus’ house
the story says.
Did you know Jesus had a house?
I’m betting it was solar powered too!
But the fact that Jesus had a house,
in the same way that you and I have a place
we call home,
also strays from the usual story-line.

As Mark tells it,
they arrive in force —
his brothers, sisters, and mother.
Oh, wait, Mary wasn’t a perpetual virgin?

I don’t know about you,
but if my mother, three sisters, and brother
had all showed up on my doorstep unannounced
with something, but I didn’t know what, in mind,
I would have been deeply concerned.

It turns out, Mark tells us,
they were there because they thought
he was “beside himself.”
Jesus’ own family thinks he is not in his right mind

and so they arrive to take him home.
Not to HIS home, he is already there,
but to the family compound.
You know, get him out of the public eye.

This little story from Mark
puts a hurt on several planks of the party-line.
First, it abuses the notion
that Jesus didn’t have and brothers and sisters.
Then it undercuts the romanticized relationship
between Jesus’ and his mom.

If nothing else,
Mark’s story reminds us that Jesus is not
a mathematical equation
or chemical formula
we can prove in the laboratory.
He is not a fact
we can reconstruct with historical certainty.
When one Gospel contradicts another Gospel
or argues with later Church theology and doctrine
we should take it as an indication
of our freedom.

This story is juicy for us because
every one of us knows what it is like
to have our family think we are nuts,
or mixed up, or confused.
You know, at the very moment
we feel utterly clear in our thinking
our family dismisses or rejects our judgment.

When that happens
we have to decide
whether to trust ourselves
or remain in the confines of our family’s approval.

It is an open secret
that members of the helping professions —
social workers, teachers, ministers, counselors, nurses, psychologists, politicians –
are often big approval-seekers.
We have a deep need or desire
for love and approval.
But the truth is, all of us
yearn and may even be desperate
for love and approval.

Many of us feel as if we did not get enough
love and approval
from family and authority figures
when we were children.
And that may be true,
but there is another aspect to love and approval
we often don’t think about:
love and approval
is both a giving and a receiving.

The fact we feel as though
we didn’t get enough as children
may say as much about our ability to receive
as it does about our parent’s and family’s ability to give.

Our families may have heaped approval upon us
but maybe we had a chink in our receptor
that kept us from absorbing it.
OR maybe we just wanted more
than is humanly possible to absorb.
Whatever the reason,
many of us either
don’t know how
or don’t know where
to fill up the tank
when it comes to love and approval.

And here is the larger point: we do not lose our thirst.

I am not telling you anything you don’t know,
or at least, I hope not.
The yearning for love and approval is like fear.
Only a certain kind of psychopath does not have fear.

The question is not how to get rid of fear,
but how to live with
and act, in spite of it.
Likewise,
when it comes to love and approval
we never stop wanting
or hoping for it.
The question is not
how to jettison our need
but how to stay true to ourselves
even at the risk
of losing those things
we thirst for
and fear
we cannot live without?

In other words, it is a management issue.

We will never live without desiring the love
and appreciation of others who we care about,
any more than we will be able to live without fear.
But we can manage it, like pain.
Can we get down to a 4 instead of an 8,
a 2 instead of a 6?
When circumstances cause our yearning
to shoot sky high like blood-pressure,
we can learn to do things
that gradually lowers it — manages it.

If we allow ourselves to be led
by a desperate desire that is impossible to satiate,
we will self-medicate our pain,
become depressed,
and fall into all manner of tragic unhappiness.
But when we can live within such moments
while standing clearly within ourselves;
and remain clear that the veil between humans
cannot truly be breached —
any more than the veil between us and God —
then we can reside more fully within our own skin.

And whether our skin is fresh and smooth
or wrinkled and sagging,
the yearning lives within us,
and the challenge to know peace and centeredness
is ongoing.

Here is the great paradox about us humans:
Love and approval
actually derives from the inside out
rather than the outside in.

We want it from others so badly
but it comes first and foremost,
from within ourselves.

We never get to know
how Jesus dealt with the hurt of family rejection.
As the story goes,
he seems kind of dismissive,
maybe even a little vengeful,
when he asks his friends,
“Who is my mother, and brothers, and sisters?”

But I like to think he figured out
how to move beyond any initial hurt
and defensiveness
from his family thinking he was crazy.

I like to imagine
that as he went on to endure
people showering him with love on the one hand,
and angry, rageful blame on the other,
he was able to live
from the inside out.

Being in a spiritual community
is not unlike being in a family.
Those needs and conflicts and yearnings
swirl around and within us
as much as our prayers and songs do.
Living within ourselves
with a kind of centeredness and peace —
so that we can live among others
with the same equanimity —
is a learning curve.
A learning that you and I
are still learning — and one will be learning
until we put on those carpet slippers
and stride out.

Trinity Sunday B, 2021: A Fool’s Errand

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Texts: ”Change” by Ellen Bass and John 3:1-17\
Video version follows text

If you are a liturgical church sort,
you know this is “Trinity Sunday” —
the week after Pentecost
earmarked to celebrate the so-called Trinity.
You know I can’t do that, right?

The idea of the Trinity,
as good of an idea about God as any,
is a product similar to Peter’s idea
of building three booths
when standing beneath the image of the transfiguration —
you know, when Moses, Elijah, and Jesus
hang out and talk with God on the clouds.
Poor old Peter sees that and immediately
his thoughts go to building a shrine
to hold the supernatural mysticality
of something beyond any form or idea.

The church built the idea of the Trinity
to hold something it didn’t understand
and couldn’t really describe.

So the Trinity is an attempt
to hold and codify awe — which is a fool’s errand.

This sermon is about awe
but it starts by noticing the relationship
between the ability to enter change
and our openness to awe.

I love that poem by Ellen Bass.

“This is where I yank the old roots
from my chest, like tomatoes
we let grow until December, stalks
thick as saplings…”

And then, as she writes about
the arduousness of it all,
the last line that bangs it home:
”I change.”

This is where I yank the old roots
from my chest…I change.

When the angels of our better nature
are guiding us, we manage to change
as change ushers us forward
— an army of unseen specters forming the chute
down which we trod.
We stumble and resist
and whine and yell
but we are able to walk forward
one step at a time, until
we enter the change and adjust — finally acknowledging
it wasn’t that big of a deal after all.

But often, if you are like me,
change is fearsome
and full of angst
and so a process fraught with pain and struggle
mostly of our own making.
Like Nicodemus,
I so often wander life’s hallways
in search of solid railings to hold onto,
and definitive answers to guide me,
and clear manifestos to frame the uncertain edges.
But God knocks me silly,
concusses my penchant for orderliness
and planning,
and creates shock and awe
like Isaiah stunned
and cauterized
by spiritual hallucinations crowding his dreams.
It can also be like the proverbial farmer
who scatters seed everywhere —
in the soil,
on the path,
and in the weeds —
God’s zealous abundance and sloppy love
weeping beyond
and through any sense of boundaries.

We want it tidy and precise,
and measured out
to those who deserve it
but inevitably God slaps our frugality in the face
with total abundance.

We think we are well and balanced
and open to the spirit and love of God,
but we all have a Nicodemus living inside,
and sometimes he or she gets control.
You see, our inner-Nicodemus is smart,
probably pretty well read, and nobody’s fool.
He or she is the successful one,
maybe a little grandiose and a good steward
of his or her own reputation.
You know, always concerned about
what others will think and say about us.

The Nicodemus inside is quite concerned
about staying within the lines
and operating by the right beliefs
sanctioned by the right people.
Nicodemus is always shocked to discover
that he or she has been following
the wrong person,
or believing the wrong things,
and that even though he or she
has oodles of information,
critical pieces of data are still missing.

In short,
our inner-Nicodemus
is cautious
with what he or she has,
with what he or she is willing to let go of,
and about surrendering
to mystery or awe.

Nicodemus lives in our head
with a slight-to-severe disconnect
from our body,
and a little too awkward toward
the stunning sensual splendor
of the world all around us.

We all have a Nicodemus inside
and sometimes
he or she gets control.
When that happens
we have great difficulty
encountering God –
difficulty actually experiencing God
in our world of small things.
The bigger Nicodemus gets inside of us
the smaller our sense of God’s presence
among us becomes.

The reason, of course,
is that Nicodemus
wants and needs control,
and God will not be controlled.

All of us, every single one of us,
seeks to control God.
An undomesticated God
is simply too unpredictable
and too dangerous
for our comfort.
And so we do things
like bargain
and define
and pigeonhole
and become overly scrupulous.
It is a universal human tendency
so there is no reason to deny it
or feel badly about it.
It is who we are and what we do.

So the task is
to shrink our inner-Nicodemus
to a manageable size –
so that we oversee him or her
instead of Nicodemus managing us.

On Trinity Sunday
it is good for us to return to the beginning
and remind ourselves
of the first principle
of our religion
because it is also how we manage Nicodemus.
It can also be an example of when
Nicodemus manages us.
The first principle of our religion –
of our spiritual wisdom –
is revealed in Exodus:
the first story and first book of the Bible,
at least if we go by history instead of editing.

It is where Moses encounters the burning bush.
I think I have drawn upon this biblical moment
three times just since Lent.

That should serve to underscore
how fundamental it is.

It is not unlike Nicodemus
encountering Jesus’ strange mysticism
when what Nicodemus really wanted
was a few simple, concrete answers;
or Isaiah encountering the six-winged creature
waving a hot coal
when all he wanted was to worship
in the temple.
That first encounter between God and Moses
sets the pattern for all future encounters
and establishes the protocol
between God and humankind.
It is stunning in its simplicity and spectacularity.

Moses is told in no uncertain terms
that he is encountering
THE god
who WAS
and IS
and WILL be.
It is, he is told, the God named,
“I will be who I will be.”

In short,
God will not be defined
by any doctrine,
dogma, or pronouncement.
That is the first principle
revealed on a secluded mountain
in the presence of a burning bush:

God is not manageable,
not knowable in any human sense,
not definable
or measurable or predictable.
“Go on,” God says to Moses,
“you don’t get to know who I am
other than what little I give you from time to time.
Deal with it.”

But of course, the history of Israel and Christianity,
is the history of trying to put God into a box
and domesticate God for our own purposes.
The Nicodemus inside religion,
and the Nicodemus inside all of us,
sure doesn’t want to hear
that God will be who God will be.
It wants to define,
manage,
predict,
and explain God.

We know that is not how it works.

So if WE want to manage our inner-Nicodemus
or the really big one inside religion itself,
what we need to do
is find ways to feast on awe.

Feast on awe.
Feast on awe.

Our daily, spiritual diet
if we can do it,
needs to include stuttering
over God’s wasteful abundance.
It needs to include starring into confounding mystery.
It needs to ponder over grace
that seems too good to be true.

We need to ingest awe over the big things
and little things too.
Awe over simple ordinary things
we usually take for granted, like memory —
the very fact that we have memory.
Awe over big stuff too,
like the moon — 239,000 miles away —
pulls on the oceans so hard
the tides roll in and out.

Stuttering over amazing things
like humming birds;
and over mundane things
like the planet Saturn
blazing low in the night sky.

Awe over outrageously wasteful abundance
like the existence of
wombats and Shetland ponies;
and over every day things
like two-hundred and thirty-seven shades of green
in the pastures, vineyards, and hills.

If we can ingest a steady diet of awe
over things big and small,
then we can shrink the Nicodemus inside
and grow our heart a size bigger.

We do that
and our hands will unclench,
our minds will roll open,
the door to our heart will creak ajar,
and that will lead to an encounter with God —
the one that is actually present
in our midst
even here, even now.

There’s something awesome to chew on.

 

 

 

Pentecost B, 2021

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Texts for Preaching: Ezekiel 37:1-14

Since it is Pentecost
I am going to preach my core theology —
my bedrock.
You have heard it before,
one way or another,
because I like to think it is biblical bedrock too.

I spend a lot of airtime
pointing to where the Bible is metaphorical
and even mythological,
but today,
with that reading from Ezekiel
we can actually stand on a fixed date –
even a fixed day.

Ezekiel begins his book of prophecy
by telling us:

“In the thirtieth year,
in the fourth month,
on the fifth day,
while I was among the exiles
by the Kebar River,
the heavens were opened
and I saw visions of God.”

That would be July 31, 593 BCE.

But now that we know where we are starting,
I want to jump
twenty-seven centuries later,
to the 1800’s,
in The United States.

Imagine yourself as a 19th century slave-owner
in the Southern United States,
and you want your African slaves
to have religion.

As a pious, church-going Christian,
probably an Episcopalian in those days,
you feel an obligation to proselytize your slaves
and give them a chance at Salvation.
I know, the irony and hypocrisy
is mind-boggling,
but it was a dominant concern.

So, you read Bible stories to your slaves,
and one of your favorite stories
is Ezekiel and the Valley of the Dry Bones.
Then, sometime after you read them the story,
you hear your slaves singing
about “those bones…”
and how those bones will live.

And you feel all warm inside,
and proud of yourself
for having taught your slaves faith.

Or just to add breadth to this imaginative escapade,
lets say you are a European Colonialist in Africa
and you own thousands of acres
on which you farm and mine,
and you use local labor
to extract the resources of the land,
to send back home to
Britain or Germany or Belgium.

And let’s say part of your personal ethos
is to support the local missionaries
whose job it is
to make good Christians of the natives,
which of course means to “civilize” them.
You hear the minister preach to your workers
from Bibles stories like Dry Bones,
and you think it is quaint.

Okay, that is Ezekiel as viewed from the box seats
at the symphony or opera.
Now, let’s hear Dry Bones
from the point of view of slaves,
and those whose land has been stolen from them,
even as they are forced to work the land
for those who stole it.

Slave owners and Colonialist are deaf
to certain notes
in the Biblical score.

They hear a good cinematic story,
and see a Disney-like animation
of scattered and dusty dry bones
miraculously bouncing up
and being woven back to life.

Like a scene from Fantasia,
piece by piece,
organ by organ,
ligament by ligament,
the bodies re-integrate until suddenly
the wind infuses
the dead with Life.
It is CPR
from the lips of God
to the dry bones.

But the slaves hear something else.
The slave who is planting cotton,
or the Chinese railroad worker in South Africa,
or the Indian miner in Congo
all hear something different
from what the slave-owners
and the Colonialists hear.

Yes, they hear the poetry of the dry bones.
But underneath it,they hear the music.
They hear a drum
beating a steady rhythm
to which those in the box seats are deaf.
They hear God, and feel freedom pulsating.

Did you ever wonder
why 19th century slave Spirituals
were so dominated by Old Testament themes?
Or did you ever wonder
why Latin American and South African
Liberation Theology
is so infused with the stories of Israel,
even more than those of the New Testament?

It is because their ears perked up
when they heard their oppressors
glibly reading stories
about a people called Israel
who were once slaves…
who through an act of God, escaped…
who formed a small but mighty nation…
who fell to another Empire
and were taken away in slavery again…
who sat by the Rivers of Babylon and wept
because they thought
they would never be free again…
who heard the question,

“Mortal, can these bones live” and knew the answer.
Unlike their oppressors,
they knew that God was talking to them
about their freedom.
”Slave, can you be free?”
“Indigenous person,
can your land be restored?”
Can your bones live?
Can the scattered,
dry bones of your people…live?

Whether it is Ezekiel prophesying to the Exiles
that they can be restored,
or the bereft disciple being promised
they have a powerful Advocate even without Jesus,
the Biblical story challenges us
with the question:
Can God act?
Does God act?
Will God act?

Okay, let’s bring it forward.

Each and every one of us
has a personal Valley of Dry Bones.
A painful grief…
a debilitating depression…
a captivating addiction…
an acute loneliness…
a broken relationship…
an open, oozing wound of the soul…
Do we believe that God can do a new thing?

Do we believe
that God can and will do new things
even with us…
even within us…
even for us?

Now let’s climb up to a 50,000 foot view
and look out upon our national
and even global

Valley of Dry Bones.
Wars waged for corrupt reasons…
an abatement of civil liberties and human rights…
cruel disparity of wealth…
segregation along every conceivable
social boundary…
crime and violence of a breadth and brutality
that boggles the mind…
environmental degradation for profit
that is threatening us all…

Do we believe that God can do a new thing…
even for us…
even with us…
even to us?

Here is my assertion:
History itself is the poetry of God doing new things.
Hold that for a moment,
swish it around in your brain
and let it palpitate in your heart:
History is the poetry of God doing new things.

I know. Believe me, I know.
That is not an easily ingested idea
in our world of quantifiable,
observable
and economic reality.

How do you prove God is doing a new thing?
And when the new things are taking place,
and they can no longer be denied,
how can you prove God is the author
or even an invisible hand guiding in the market?

Going back to the 19th century,
there were many victims of Colonialist oppression
and the atrocity of slavery
who could not answer,
“Yes, these bones can live.”

And yet,
there have always been those who could:
Frederick Douglas, said yes.
Susan Anthony, said yes.
Dorothy Day, said yes.
Dietrich Bonheoffer, said yes.
Mohandas Gandhi, said yes.
Martin Luther King, Jr., said yes.
Abraham Heschel, said yes.
Nelson Mandela, said yes.
Desmond Tutu, said yes.
Alicia Garza, said yes.

They were all too experienced
in the true and painful ways of the world
to be engaged in wishful thinking.
Instead, their “yes” was authentic hope.
Wishful thinking says, yes, and waits for it to happen.
Authentic hope says, yes, and helps make it happen.

The case I want to make –
and it is not likely to ever be proven
or replicated in a laboratory
nor generate a computer model –
but the case I want to make
is that nothing is hopeless,
because if we human beings
move together for reconciliation and peace
then God is present
and God acts.

But likewise, if we do not, God does not.

God is not an enabler of co-dependency.
When we humans act together
and move together
and struggle for all the right things together,
then God acts
and it happens.
That is what hope is made of.
Slavery did not end
by God waving the proverbial hand
to make it disappear.
Slavery was made illegal by a mighty,
sustained, and costly human effort
in which God was present
and through which God acted.

Colonialism did not come crashing down
because God loved it one day
and dismissed it the next.
Colonialism began disintegrating,
and still is,
with a concerted struggle
by millions of people
to cast it off
and lift it up
and through them God acted.

If we want to slow and survive climate change
then we human beings
simply must come together
and struggle for liberation and restoration
so that God will act
and make it possible.

It is true on a personal level as well.

Whatever has dried out your bones,
whatever pain
whatever grief
whatever wound
whatever sorrow…
keep working it,
keep struggling with it,
keep reaching out and asking others
to join your struggle and help you,
and if you do,
God will act.
Indeed, even now,
God has acted through your efforts.

Ezekiel or Pentecost,
that is what this is all about:
we act and God acts.

Like I said, there is no proving it
but I believe it.
I have seen it.
I say, “yes” to it.
“Can these bones live?”
Yes.

6 Easter B, 2021: The Kitchen Table

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Sermon Texts:

John 15:9-17
(https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu//texts.php?id=91)
“Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Joy Harjo
(https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49622/perhaps-the-world-ends-here)

Visit our Facebook page for a video version of this sermon

You won’t be surprised
to hear that I have a totally different view of Jesus
than that famous bit we just heard
from the Gospel of John.

If you are a traditionalist,
orthodox,
Fundamentalist, Literalist,
or in any other way resistant
to a perspective on Jesus
that does not conform
to the widest swath of Church teachings,
then your money is with John.

It won’t matter to you
when I point out that John didn’t know Jesus
any more than I do,
or that John’s inclusion
as one of the canonical gospels
was not without struggle and controversy
back in the day.

You will quite rightly point out
that I have zero credibility
and zero authority
and perhaps even scold me
for being so presumptuous
as to disagree a Gospel.

To which I would agree.
I got nothing in my favor…except,
that poem we heard today.

What we have this morning
is a beautiful contrast between
John’s vision of Jesus
and the poet’s description
of what I think is a wonderful metaphor
for Jesus and the realm of God.

So let’s dig in.

“I loved you as God loved me,” John’s Jesus says.
That is powerful.
It is equivalent to God’s coo in Jesus’ ear
at his baptism: “You are my Beloved.”

”I loved you as God loved me” — in other words,
no greater love
has ever been humanly given.

But then comes the contradiction: ”Remain in my love.”
That should make us wince
and hurt our ears
as if a sharp painful noise.

We have just been told — I say we,
but it was actually told to the disciples,
so we do not even know if John imagined
Jesus was universalizing this or not.

We have just been told by implication
that it is possible to not remain in his love.
How?
Well, John tells us
that God’s love of Jesus was conditional —
dependent upon Jesus
obeying God’s commandments.

Likewise, Jesus’ love for his disciples — or us,
if we want to be hopeful —
is also conditional.
We must obey his commands
if we wish to know the joy
of being loved by Jesus as God loved him.

If John had just had Jesus say,
”This is my command: Love each other
as I have loved you,” and then
followed it up as he does
with “the greatest love a person can show
is to die for his friends,”
that would have been lovely.
But instead, he wrapped it
in a straight-jacket of conditions:

Keep my command.
Keep God’s command.
Live in this box
and you will have the joy of a love
greater than anyone can know.
Leave the box, leave the love.

So that is John’s view of Jesus,
and God, I suppose.
I do not find that compelling.

But before I offer an alternative view,
I don’t want to go overboard
with the hippie-dippy idea of unconditional love.

Way back in Exodus —
which, remember,
is the beginning of our story
not Jesus —
there is a condition.

God says to Moses,
way back at the beginning:
”IF you obey me and keep my covenant,
you will be my people —
chosen from among all the nations.”

There it is, a big, fat condition.

We can hear that as a carrot and stick,
as I believe John intends it to be in his Gospel,
OR we can hear it as a clear boundary,
as in, “do not abuse me or this relationship
because I have a limit to what I will accept.”

I prefer the latter, that God refuses
to be in an abusive relationship
with a planet full of creatures like us.

It is not that God will stop loving us
but God will not save us
from the consequences of our choices.
Instead, God offers “tough love,”
the kind that desperately hopes
and relentlessly encourages us
toward our better natures.

But God does not enable abuse
and self-destruction.
So, as I interpret it anyway,
the built-in conditionality is not about loving us
but about setting appropriate limits
on behavior and relationship.

God doesn’t stop loving us
because we have abused the planet
and climate change is upon us,
but God won’t come fix it for us either.

Every parent, sister, brother, aunt,
uncle, and grandparent
understands this choice:
we don’t stop loving the person
when we object to their behavior.
In fact, often when we see someone we love
keep making unfortunate choices
our compassion inflates our love
even more.

Tough love does not end at a condition,
it sets a boundary on acceptance
and loves fiercely
even through the powerlessness
over the other person’s decision-making.

The presence of love remains in ‘tough love,’
even when those
toward whom the love is directed
reject and abuse
the boundaries on the relationship.

The love remains present even when the other
walks away from it by violating the boundaries.
What makes the love ‘tough’
is its willingness to hold those boundaries
for the sake of itself, and the one who is loved.

To hold the boundaries with love, that is holy love.
I submit that John’s depiction is not tough love
but conditional, even manipulative,
love.

We get it IF
and we are cut off from it IF.

Now, to the contrasting image we have this morning,
that of the poet, Joy Harjo:
”the kitchen table.”

The kitchen table is a metaphor
for the place we gather
with those we love
and where we live through the joys
sorrows
and ordinary yet devastating anguish
that conflict, achievement,
and loss brings.

It may be a dinning room table,
or living room sofa,
or the altar around which a spiritual community
gathers and prays.

My vision of Jesus’ love
is the table fellowship he hosted
in which people from all social and economic castes
gathered and ate together:
men, women, and children
even though elsewhere they were segregated;
rich, poor, peasants, and artisans,
even though elsewhere they were segregated;
reputable, privileged, outcasts, and anonymous,
even though elsewhere they were segregated.

The table is the icon of Jesus’ love
and while there may have been boundaries
placed on what and how people treated one another,
the edges of that table
had no pre-conditions to their welcome.

For me, it is the table not the cross,
that most fully captures the love
within which we are held by God.

For me, the kitchen table is the altar
and rather than treat it like some rarified spectacal
that should never be touched,
revered with kid gloves,
and adorned with silver and gold,
it should have the look of life
having been relentlessly welcomed
and lived hard
around its edges.

At Trinity we do not have pews any more
so we need to rub our prayers into the table
and place our prayer stones on it,
and light our candles at it,
and gather around its edges
where we also look one another in the eyes.

In short, God is present
at the table
that Jesus hosted — wherever it.

In God’s presence
we are loved —
we are the beloved.
There is no condition to God’s presence.
There is nothing we can do to push God’s presence
out of our lives,
or away from our table.

That is the joy of God’s love.
We remain in it no matter what,
even when we have pushed ourselves away.
We remain in it no matter what,
even when we have rejected the beauty
of God’s justice
for the grimy, slimy gluttony
of our own self-centeredness.

We remain in the presence of God’s love
no matter what we do,
even though what we do
does impact
whether or not we can experience
that love.

The condition is not whether God is present
and loving us or not,
the condition is our choice to accept it or not.

Accepting it
also means trying to live in such a way
as to reflect the presence of God’s love —
basically, to be a reflection of God’s love
and so a part of God’s presence.

But even if and when we choose otherwise,
and knowing us, it is always “when,”
God continues to love us.
The joy of God’s love is abiding presence:
we can walk away from it, but not lose it.

5 Easter: “From Blossoms” to Bread and Wine

by

Sermon Text: “From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43012/from-blossoms

From blossoms –
those wafer-thin pedals of color
now adorning trees all around us –
comes a brown paper bag
full of late summer
dusty skinned,
succulent peaches.

Oh, mamma,
the round jubilance of peach,
as the poet says,
can make it seem as if death
were nowhere in the background.
Just life full of blossoms.

If I may,
I want to wax a little bit theological.
Not in an overly academic
or rationalistic way,
but more in the way of blossoms.

The opposite of sacred is not “profane.”
The opposite of sacred is not bad or evil or nasty.

The world, the Creation,
is not divided into sectors
in which the sacred is a dimension we enter
only if we are able to travel
through the ugly profane like a Teflon pan,
and collect no debris.
That is a Medieval world-view
and in it the Church
becomes the gate-keeper of the sacred
as well as the arbiter
of all things sacramental.

We all know how that story ends,
and how corrupt religion becomes
when it assumes that role
and people allow it to.

The opposite of sacred,
the boundary on that other territory
that gives the sacred its definition, is
commonness…ordinariness.
It is not that the sacred is good
and the common is bad;
or that the sacred is pure
and the ordinary corrupt.
We need to get rid of such false distinctions
and moral judgments
if we are to catch a view of the sacred
from our perch in the ordinary.

We live in the ordinary
but we are fortunate
in that we regularly
brush up against the sacred,
and like those blossoming trees
with fragrant scents wafting in the air
around us this spring,
we are reminded of the presence of
the extraordinary in life
and the magnificence of Creation.

Oh, how truly blessed we are –
living from “joy to joy
to joy to joy,
from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”

Even the common,
even the ordinary,
is almost too gorgeous to behold –
hearty with goodness
and succulent with joy.

But the sacred,
the sacred when we glimpse it,
will bring tears to our eyes
and reduce our heartbeat to a quiet pulse.
The sacred will hush
even the rowdiest, most monkey of minds.

But we also know
that while the sacred is not fragile
our hold on it
is astonishingly delicate.

Like rice paper,
or those wafer-thin petals,
the veil
between the sacred
and the ordinary
will simply dissolve
into nothingness
if we are too rough with it
or hold it too long.

It is that very thin veil
that actually allows us to glimpse God.

It is the veil
through which we sniff the holy
and feel God’s warm breath
upon the back of our neck.

It is that thing between us
we may wish to get rid of
that actually allows any near contact at all.

Remember the story
about when Moses gets a glimpse of God?
It turns his face into a brilliant light
and from then on
he must wear a veil over his face.
No one can look on Moses’ face anymore
after that.

Elsewhere, the Bible warns
that to look upon God
is sure and certain death.

It is not death and destruction
as in crime and punishment –
it is more like Icarus flying too close to the sun.
His wings melt.
Well, we just can’t get that close to God
without being obliterated.

We need the veil in order to glimpse the sacred,
just as we need special sunglasses
to look upon a solar eclipse.

That can be maddening to creatures like us.
We do not like limits to begin with,
but to be told that we don’t get a choice
in this scheme
can rub us the wrong way.
But alas, we are limited.

But think about some of the veils
we have available to us.

Blossoms,
and other such exquisite works of nature,
can become a veil for us.
They seem like ordinary old flowering trees
we see every spring
until they aren’t –
until we suddenly see them
in their burst of sweet, delicate beauty
and we gasp: “Uuh!”

But we also make veils
through which we catch a glimpse –
sometimes,
randomly perhaps,
but with a kind of regularity.

We have veils
that work a bit like a favored fishing spot –
someplace we’ve caught fish before
but not always.
Veils that catch the light
and form rainbows sometimes
but not always.
They are a little mysterious
and can even be frustrating
because they let us down as often,
if not more, than they reveal the holy.

I am talking about veils like bread,
and wine,
and even water.

We might rightly ask,
with our most rational mind,
how such things can work –
how ritual can take something at one moment
quite ordinary
and turn it into something,
at the very next moment,
sacred.

How does a blossom turn
from an ordinary tree in flower
into the spectacular presence of the holy
in our midst?
That is precisely how fragile a veil can be.

How can bread,
at one moment common flour and yeast
baked into a crumbly whole,
at the very next moment
become a sacred food
through which time and space is collapsed
and heaven and earth are joined?

How can water,
the most common substance on earth
and the most elemental substance for life itself,
be that clear, wet, thirst-slaking liquid one moment
and the very next appear as a veil upon the sacred?

Well, you know the answer of course?
It is you.
It is us.
Like the shutter on a camera
opening to regulate the light entering through the lens,
we open our minds, or not.
We open our hearts, or not.
We open ourselves to one another, or not.

On one level, the rational level,
these veils
are all human creations.
We construct them.
We make them what they are.
They are not magic.

On the other hand, together — and
it’s always together;
historically and communally, together —
we allow certain things
to open us up.

We allow certain things
to help us see and hear
and feel
what normally we are insensitive to.

We imbue certain moments;
we imbue certain elements;
we imbue certain people;
we imbue certain texts;
we imbue certain relationships —
with the power
to reveal the presence of God
even in the ordinary.

And here is the thing:
If we do not imbue such things with power
we simply do not see,
we simply do not know.
That is why there is a difference
between receiving the communion
as a symbol of something that happened
sometime a long time ago,
and participating in Communion
as a transformative event.

They look the same
but the are worlds apart.
We cannot count on the transformation
taking place every time we receive Communion;
but we can count on something happening
as a result of returning again and again and again
and being present with others in community
as we share those moments.

Something some of us learned
during the pandemic
is that it can even happen
when we are together while apart.

Whether blossoms or bread,
the iris in the eyes of a friend
or an iris growing unexpectedly among weeds,
there are ordinary things
that become veils
through which we glimpse the extraordinary —
the holy in our midst.

It is that simple act of posing
with our hands opened in vulnerability,
waiting in anticipation,
even somewhat awkwardly
while someone mumbles their way toward us
and places in our open, exposed hands
a tiny piece of bread
and a tiny sip of wine.

Week after week after week after week
we do it, and the effect accumulates
and it eats away at our arrogance.

Week after week
the effect accumulates
and eats away at our pretense of self-sufficiency.

Week after week
the effect accumulates
and slowly the veil moves into place
and then one week,
suddenly, without warning,
we see what was standing there all the time:
Love –
love so deep,
so pervasive,
so abundant
and so completely without condition
and impossible to earn or lose.

Love.

Present here in the field around us,
within us,
among us,
so completely surrounding and imbuing us.
Love.
And then the veil reveals it
and we are taken up
in that “joy to joy
to joy to joy,
from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.”

How is it that we can sit in the ordinary
and see the sacred?
Only because we allow ourselves
to become so open.

That’s all, just us allowing
the veil to appear —
the one that is there all along.

How great is that?

Trinity in Time of Pandemic

Our vision…to be 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).

Trinity’s historic building and our adaptive reuse plan has been named and embraced by The Landmark Society of Western New York. Among thousands of worthy historic sites and projects, Trinity’s was selected. Follow this link to read more: https://landmarksociety.org/2019-five-to-revive-announced/

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.

https://www.savetrinity.org

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