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4 Easter, B 2021: The Earthrise Changes It

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A video version of this text follows below

As you may know, if you
have heard me before,
I like to dig around in the context
of the gospel
to see if it offers us
a good perspective
from which to read and hear
the stories we are otherwise asked
to take at face value.

Whether Mark, Luke, Matthew, or John,
it is good to be curious
about when they were writing
and why they were writing
and who they were writing to.

And at the same time,
realize the answer to those questions
are anything but absolute
and in every instance,
have a multitude of scholars
each declaring their own answers.
So when I say what I am about to say,
and go down the road I am about to travel,
you know I am not giving you a recipe
that is universally embraced
as the one and only, absolute best recipe.
There are other ways to read it
and other ways to interpret it
and other ways to understand it.
This is merely the way I do.

John did not know Jesus,
that is not even controversial.

John lived far away, very far away
by the standards of that time and place,
from where Jesus lived.
That too is generally recognized.

At best, John wrote sixty years
and three-hundred miles away
from anything to do with
the life and times of Jesus of Nazareth.

That is not controversial either.
Some scholars place him eighty years
after the death of Jesus.

And yet, John makes speeches for Jesus.

More than the other three gospels,
John places long, involved and often complex
prayers, sermons, and theological images
on the lips of Jesus.

That is just obvious
to anyone who puts the gospels
side by side.

So, if we get curious,
then we want to know where
John came up with these speeches,
prayers, and ideas?

I do not raise such questions in a hostile,
suspicious way –
although that is how I used to feel
about the Gospel of John.
Rather, I just wonder about him…
about his imagination or dreams
or whatever muse it was
that delivered fully cooked speeches
for the tender, young Messiah-movement
not yet old enough to be called “Christianity.”

So here is the skinny on John
as far as I have gathered it,
being a preacher more than a scholar
and a poet more than an historian.

John was not John at all, but several Johns.
Some of those who study such things for a living,
think that the Gospel of John
was written and edited
by several people over time,
and that what we read today
has been sculpted by many hands.
But they had to start from somewhere,
and some scholars who work on this Gospel
believe that the corpus – or original body of it –
had a basic coherence to which much was added.

When this gospel began to be written
they propose,
it had two major purposes.
The first was to stand in opposition
to the synagogue –
meaning against the Jewish followers of Jesus.
In other words, John was originally written
as an argument against remaining
a reform movement of Judaism,
and instead, to become a church —
which did not exist yet.
“Church not synagogue”
could have been John’s campaign theme
and a major plank
in his theological platform.

The second purpose to John’s Gospel
is as an argument against
the John the Baptist movement.

You see, John the Baptist
was far more well-known
and popular
in his day than Jesus was,
at least that is what we think.
In fact, there is still a small sect
of John the Baptist followers
called Mandaeans
who speak a dialect of Aramaic
and live primarily in Iran, Iraq, and Syria –
though there are 10,000 of them
living in Australia.

Both John and Jesus
were executed by civil authority
as treasonous revolutionaries
so presumably they both had popular followings.

But in the several decades following their deaths,
John the Baptist had the edge
in carrying the popular imagination.

So the Gospel of John
takes considerable effort,
as do the other Gospels,
to subordinate The Baptist
to Jesus.

We might say
that the Gospel of John
was an evangelical tract
that promoted Church-over-Synagogue
and Jesus-over-John-the-Baptist.

So with this understanding
of where John’s authors and editors
were coming from,
we can readily see
what the Good Shepherd image
is all about.

Who is the Good shepherd?
Oh, it is Jesus
not John the Baptist.
Jesus is the “good” one.

Then John has Jesus say:
“I have other sheep
that do not belong to this fold.
I must bring them also.”

Who are those other sheep?
The followers of the Baptist, of course.
Also, members of the synagogue.
“So there will be one flock”
John has Jesus say,
and “one shepherd.”

From the point of view
of the Gospel of John,
those other guys have to be put out of business
and brought into the fold –
a fundamental business consolidation strategy
of beating the competition
and taking them over.

I don’t fault John and his friends
for seeing the world
and religion
as a dog-eat-dog enterprise,
because we have been chewing on
that human flaw
for as far back as we can see.
But it really sticks out like a soar thumb today.

With the lunacy of
Afghanistan and the United States,
Israel and Palestine,
India and Pakistan,
Sri Lanka and Tamil,
Iran and Saudi Arabia,
Buddhists and Rohingyas in Myanmar…
the sectarianism found in John’s Gospel
seems, well, it seems stupid…
ignorant…
and utterly antithetical
to the core of any spiritual wisdom.

So today, I want to raise up that tension
that is always present
at the very moment we say,
“this is who we are”
and “this is what we believe.”

How do we claim identity
and participation in community,
without also drawing too hard a boundary
between “us and them?”

How do we make being a Christian meaningful
when the original arguments
that constituted Christianity
no longer shape what we believe?

How do we allow our identity as Christians
to feel good
when it also creates an association
with people who use that same identity
to behave in ways we reject?

How do we form a Christian identity
that is meaningful and positive
when we are pluralistic
and embrace the value of other religions
at the same time we uphold our own?

I am an Episcopal priest,
but I am a baptized Christian first.
But before that,
I am an agent of God’s love,
a creation of the Creator-of-all-that-is,
and so any human affiliations are thin by contrast.

We live in 2021
on a planet we have come to see
from the moon
and beyond.

We are not in John’s world,
persecuted for our affiliations
and in a war of beliefs
against competing religions
oppressed by a common enemy.

From our post-modern perspective
do we really believe that God insists
that there be one shepherd?
Are we a people who define ourselves
over and against Muslim believers,
or Jewish believers,
or Buddhist believers?
Are we a people who insists
we are right
and the others are wrong?

OR…are we a people
who can trust the voice of wisdom
we hear within the Gospels
while affirming that others hear a trustworthy voice
within their own, and different, traditions?

The shepherd I hear
does not worry about being the only shepherd,
and so I can accept
that he has sheep in other folds
I know nothing about.

It need not make us jealous
or feel threatened
that our siblings —
our fellow creatures
and adherents of other and no religions –
are well loved
just as we are well loved.

The Good Shepherd,
it seems to me,
is the one who loves us all
and releases us from the need
for fierce memberships
and affiliations
that keep us
at one another’s throats.

In 2021
the Good Shepherd,
and the good sheep for that matter,
recognize that all the flocks
share just one pasture
and have no fear,
no trepidation,
and no resistance to it.
I know John didn’t say it that way,
but he never saw what the earth looks like
from the moon, either.

3 Easter, B: Coming to Life within Life

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For a video version scroll to the bottom of the following text

Texts: Luke 24:36-48 and “What the Living Do” by Marie Howe

In that poem we heard,
Marie Howe is talking to her deceased brother, Johnny.
It’s the voice of ordinary grief
that has taken up residence
and become…well, ordinary.

When grief starts out
it is anything but ordinary.
It is a trauma
landing
with the force of a horse
sitting down
on its rider.

But eventually
it works its way into the ordinary –
that old grief.

We start talking to the dead person we miss
as if he or she is standing next to us
and as if it is not weird
that we are talking out loud
to someone who has died.
We just do it
because, well, because
it has become ordinary for us to do it.

Here is Marie Howe again:

”…This is the everyday we spoke of…

…For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in
the street, the bag breaking,

I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday,
hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee
down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush:
This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you
called that yearning.

What you finally gave up…

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of
myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped
by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned
coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.”

Oh, and there it is:
I am living
and I remember you.

As you’ve heard me say
so many times,
the Gospel of Mark
has no such stories –
it ends at the empty tomb.
It ends by grief arriving with a thud.

Luke’s gospel
tries to bridge the distance
between
”I am living
and I remember you.”

Luke has stories of Jesus,
having died on the cross
then doing what the living do –
ordinary stuff,
like eating
and drinking.

The distance between living
and being remembered
is halted by Luke,
just for a moment,
just for a chapter,
at the end of his story.

In fact,
in a kind of reversal
of the Marie Howe poem,
Jesus, the dead man,
says he is going to remember us, the living.

There is no making any sense of it,
any more than
we can make sense out of talking to the dead –
it is something we do
but not something we can explain
and not something
we even want to explain.

Do you know
when grief goes from being trauma
to becoming ordinary?
It probably isn’t an exact moment
but sometimes it feels like it
because it is often a single moment
when we suddenly become aware
that a shift has happened.

It happens
when our hearts
find their place
in gratitude.

It’s when the gratitude
becomes big enough
or deep enough
or just plain solid enough
to hold the grief
rather than the other way around.

When it is grief
holding everything else,
including our sense of gratitude,
then it isn’t ordinary yet.
It is still the dragon
guarding the entrance to our heart and mind
and letting nothing pass
without first being singed
or outright scorched.

But one day
the dragon goes missing
and other things in the cave of our heart
and mind
start interacting with the grief,
and the grief becomes conversational.
And then, if we allow it,
our sense of gratitude
for the person who has left us
grows and grows and grows
and starts to collect the grief in its arms.
The grief is still there
but now it is held by gratitude
and then it becomes
more ordinary.

Then one day,
without warning
and without planning,
we are living again.
If feels odd at first
but then, once and awhile,
we are thrilled to be living again.

Can you imagine
what it would be like
if we all got to do what Luke says Jesus did?
You know, die
but then walk around living –
not being remembered yet
but living.

Well, if we did that,
then we would all write poetry
with as much poignancy and depth of gratitude
as Mary Oliver.

We would walk around
savoring every small thing
we had rarely noticed while alive,
and just touch it
or kiss it
or hold it.

A single blade of grass would be so marvelous
it would make us cry.
A snow flake would take our breath away.
A toad hoping in the grass
or a worm writhing in the soil
or the diamonds the sun scatters
on the morning waves
would make us swoon.

We would walk around savoring
every small, delicious
molecule of life
and just drip with gratitude.

Honestly, I think that is a spiritual exercise
that would change
a whole lot of things for the better
if more of us practiced it.

Heck, we might like ourselves
a lot better too.

So we are deep into the Easter season now
and the stories we tell each week
are a strange kind of ghost story.
On their face, I find them difficult to relate to –
which may sound strange
coming from a preacher.

But when it comes to Jesus
I am all about what the living do –
and what the living Jesus did.
But even so,
there are all kinds of ways
to enter into these stories,
because on some level they are human stories.

Thinking about Jesus being like Mary Oliver,
and walking around looking
and touching
and oohing and aahing
every small and delicate thing
that never begged a notice before,
makes for a pleasing and startling image.

What if we practiced it?
What if, on some regular basis,
maybe only on Monday mornings at first,
we ogled and savored?
What if we slowly ate the sunrise?
What if we very slowly breathed in
the scent of love?

What if we ran our fingers
along a smooth wood finish
and noticed the beauty of every grain?
What if we peeled an apple
and cried from its clean, simple lines
and stunning colors?

You get the idea.

Five minutes.
Only for five minutes.
For five minutes once a week
savor the world around us
as if we were the dead
given one last chance
to encounter the world
through gratitude.

I can only imagine
how that might change me
so I think it is worth the risk for you too.

The risk being
that we could fail
and fall back into
our poor, self-interested perspective
that takes everything for granted
or simply doesn’t notice
what we are not consuming at the moment.
That is really not much of a risk, is it?

On the possibilities side though,
we might enter into a whole new realm of pleasure –
because gratitude is pleasurable.

So give it a try sometime:
Be Jesus back from the dead
savoring every small thing life has to offer
and get blown away
by the beauty
even in the midst of grief.
Maybe that is what resurrection is:
to come to life in the midst of life
and fall head over heels into gratitude?

 

 

2 Easter, 2021: Small Wire

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For video version, scroll to bottom

Sermon Texts: John 20:19-31 and…

Small Wire
by Anne Sexton

My faith
is a great weight
hung on a small wire,
as doth the spider
hang her baby on a thin web,
as doth the vine,
twiggy and wooden,
hold up grapes
like eyeballs,
as many angels
dance on the head of a pin.

God does not need
too much wire to keep Him there,
just a thin vein,
with blood pushing back and forth in it,
and some love.
As it has been said:
Love and a cough
cannot be concealed.
Even a small cough.
Even a small love.
So if you have only a thin wire,
God does not mind.
He will enter your hands
as easily as ten cents used to
bring forth a Coke.

I am asking for your grace here,
and perhaps indulgence.
This Anne Sexton poem
has a place in my heart
and life
that is abiding
and powerful.

Someone gave me
a handwritten version of it
that I carried for years and years
until is became too faded and frayed.
It was a double-sided gift
that only revealed one side
at the time I first read it.

Honestly, it has been so long
with so much water under the bridge
that I can’t clearly remember in detail
what was going on at the time,
except that I was considering leaving seminary –
in the very first semester.
Perhaps a bit like Thomas,
everyone else seemed to know more than me
and seemed so sure of what they knew.

I had entered seminary as an exploration,
not with any clear vision or understanding
or with a goal in mind.

Halfway through that first semester
I was pretty sure it was a mistake.
And trust me, if I couldn’t handle
The Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, MA.
then I wasn’t going to fit in anywhere.
It was a wide-open feminist, social justice,
and academically venturesome institution —
at least for its time.

But dang, if people didn’t walk around
talking theology
with the confidence of ideology
and as if it was obvious and apparent
for everyone to see.
It was like the week Thomas had to live through
with his colleagues all talking about something
he couldn’t understand because
he had not experienced it.
And to be brutally honest,
it had been five years
since I attended church
other than Christmas Eve with family.

Suddenly I was in the belly of the whale.
I felt like I was in the old horror/Sci-Fi movie,
”Invasion of the Body Snatchers”
and I was the last one left.

Well, along came this poem
from Anne Sexton.
She was speaking my language
and saying something I could understand.
Somehow she gave me a little confidence
with which to see through the bravado
being exhaled all around me.

Anne was just one of the reasons
I kept on going
but she came to symbolize so much more.
Then the other side of the gift
came along years later.
She was the one
who introduced me to poetry I liked.
She wrote poems I could understand
in a language
and with a concreteness
and frankness
that the poetry I read before her
never seemed to have.
All these years later
all those poems later
I count this poem, Small Wire,
as the first.

Okay, that was a way-long introduction
that was too much about me
and maybe not enough about us.
Except that I think maybe it is about us.

Faith IS “…a great weight
hung on a small wire,
as doth the spider
hang her baby on a thin web…”

But here is the thing about faith,
it doesn’t take goo-gobs of it
to be a person of faith.

”…God does not need
too much wire to keep Him there,
just a thin vein,
with blood pushing back and forth in it,
and some love…”

How is it we came to think of faith
as a quantity?
It’s like the old McDonald’s cheeseburger, fries,
and coke that got super-sized
but now requires an athletic eating competition
to consume.

Faith isn’t an athletic ability
that measures whether you are a LeBron James
or Mr. Magoo,
one with obvious superior talent
the other a cartoon character.

Faith, authentic faith,
is always hung
by a thin wire
but we confuse faith with belief.

We have tons of belief
about all sorts of things.
We believe in conspiracy theories
and we believe that science will save us.
We believe the vaccines are not safe
and we belief they are the answer.
We believe in what Donald Trump says
and we believe that anything he says is unbelievable.

We believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost
and we believe that Jesus is God.
We believe that Buddha uncovered the path
to enlightenment
and we believe that Mohammad
was the last of the prophets.

Those are all beliefs not faith.

Belief comes from the Greek word, PISTIS,
which denotes an investment of confidence
in something
or someone, but most especially
that something is true.
We believe in certain descriptions of reality
and act accordingly.
Beliefs are an intellectual assent,
a decision to give credit to something.
Beliefs are ideas about how things are
or the way things are supposed to be
and we back those with our confidence
and choices.

But faith is something else altogether.

In ancient Hebrew, the word translated into English
is EMUNAH and shares its roots
with the words for WOMB and MERCY.

Faith is experiential rather than intellectual.
It is what surrounds us
and holds us.
It is not something we “believe in”
it is an EXPERIENCE to which we say “YES!”
or even, “NO!”

Like all experiences
we hold onto them or we do not.
They slip away into memory
and fade in importance,
or we hold onto them
and keep them present.

In fact, “to hold onto”
is a common Biblical interpretation
of the word Emunah.
Faith is the experience of holding onto God.
That is why it is hung upon a thin wire —
because experience for us
is a spider’s web
upon which we dangle.
We are always playing with memory
of experiences
and interpreting and re-interpreting them
so that they conform
to our beliefs.
Belief has confirmation bias
built into it.
We look for what we believe
and when we find something that contradicts
our beliefs,
we look to re-interpret it or discard it
of somehow make it conform
to what we thought in the first place.

Faith does not interpret.
Faith does not subject experience to analysis.
Faith holds onto the experience.
Like awe or joy,
once we start analyzing faith
it is gone.
We hold onto it
or we don’t,
and then it fades and is gone.
It does indeed hang from a small wire.

But just like a cough
and love
cannot be concealed,
even a small cough
and even a small love,
a small faith held onto
is enough.

So I guess I am inviting you too,
to redefine faith, and
decouple it from belief.

Truly, a small faith
held tenaciously over time,
is enough.

Beliefs are a dime a dozen
and we have bunches of them.
But the experience of faith?
The experience of God’s presence?
The experience of the Creator-of-all-that-is
in the moment with us
as if the very womb that holds us?
That is a rare and precious moment
to hold onto for a lifetime.

I don’t know if I’ve ever said it before,
but thank you, Anne. Thank you.

https://youtu.be/N5QTGdMPq_I

Easter Day, 2021: Sun

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Link to the poem, “The Sun” by Mary Oliver: http://www.phys.unm.edu/~tw/fas/yits/archive/oliver_thesun.html

For the video version,  scroll down

I begin with that Mary Oliver poem:
“…and have you felt for anything
such wild love —
do you think there is anywhere, in any
language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,
as the (son)
reaches out,
as (he) warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed…” – Mary Oliver, The Sun

Well, really,
Mark has met Mary Oliver
and raised her bid.
Mark ends his Gospel
at an empty tomb
from which his closest friends
run away shaking with dread —
and tell no one
”…for the were afraid.”

This is Mark’s answer to Mary Oliver’s question:
“do you think there is anywhere, in any
language,
a word billowing enough…”
to describe that experience?

Mary, Mary, and Salome – who
the Gospel of Thomas says were disciples –
have braved everything else
the men were too scared to withstand.
But this one thing,
this empty tomb,
was too much even for them.

Something so terrifying
they told no one.

I want to simply be present
to their fear
and respect Mark’s silence.
I want to recognize
there is no word or words
billowing enough
to hold the moment
we are pointing at.

I do not want to be one of those
preachers
who yammers on
about things he or she has no business
speculating about,
because they don’t know.

I do not want to be one of those
pastors
at the graveside
who tells the family
that God wanted
their son or daughter or spouse or parent
in an attempt to fill the terrible gap
and empty tomb
that all of us look into
more than once
in our lifetimes.

Instead, I want to be Mary Oliver
who recognizes
there is no word or words
billowing enough
to deliver anything sensible.

I want to be Mark
who understands the story never ends
and does not try to tie it altogether
and put a bow on it.

You may have a theory
about what this story is about,
and you may have a speculation
that fills in the gaps,
but I am going to be so bold as to say:
“You do not know.”
The archbishop don’t know.
The pope don’t know.
The Dali Lama don’t know.
The preacher
the teacher
the physicist
and the biologist – they don’t know.

Matthew, Luke, and John
were not content to leave off
where Mark does –
running away from the empty tomb
and telling no one,
for they were afraid.
But they didn’t know either.

What is our problem?
What is it about us
that we cannot stand in awe of mystery
and simply be present to it –
and have that be enough?

What is it about us
that we have to color in every box and shape
and leave nothing empty at the edges?

This story
brings us back to the mountaintop
where Moses crouched down
between the rocks
and watched as God passed by –
but only the backside of God
because to look upon the face
the Creator Of All That Is
would mean certain death.
We cannot look upon God.
We cannot not know God.
The part,
teeny and tiny as we are,

does not get to see
or know
or understand
the whole
of which it is only one small part.

We only get glimpses –
traces
a fragrance
a mere scent
or reverberation
of what has already passed by.
That is all we get,
and to have any more
is to disappear
into the holy ether.

So today we celebrate
the end of our story.
Isn’t that fantastic?!

We celebrate the end,
which is a brazen total mystery
pointing toward something that is infinite.

We live one day at a time
in the midst of the infinite.
Hold that for a moment.

We live one day at a time
with the infinite.
We live in a restricted zone,
unable to leave it
without dying first.
And all around us,
on every side
and in every moment
is the infinite
that cannot be restricted to any place
but which also moves through
our space
like a spring wind
carrying the hope of summer.

Well, that is the best I can do
at saying something
about such wild love
that there is nothing, in any language,
no word billowing enough
for the pleasure
of standing here, empty-handed…

Palm Sunday 2021: This is not about once upon a time…

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A video format follows the written text of this sermon…

There is an argument that bubbles
just under the surface of Palm Sunday
and Holy Week – at least among some clergy
and planners of liturgy
who think about things
rather than just doing them.

It is not a very important argument
considering our current moment
snarling with anger
and anguished with grief
over mass shootings,
COVID deaths and job losses,
and the choking, shivering, and sweating
of the planet.

It is a little thing really
but I get agitated about it every year.
I want to observe “Palm” Sunday
on this day each year
instead of “Passion” Sunday.
I want to reserve Good Friday
for the reading of the Passion –
and broken up into bites during Holy Week.
But that is not the way we do it anymore
and believe it or not,
there are some aspects of tradition
and ecclesiastical protocol
I avoid betraying.

The reason we don’t do “Palm” Sunday
instead of “Passion” Sunday
is you guys.
Fretful Church fathers and mothers
bewail the fact
that few people attend Holy Week services
these days – and for a long time now.
Not even Good Friday,
though there are some interesting folks
who wouldn’t miss
Ash Wednesday or Good Friday
even though they don’t attend the rest of the year.
But anyway, the anxiety
among those with strange collars
and who dress in drag each Sunday
is that you will hear the triumphalism
of Jesus’ Palm Sunday entrance into Jerusalem
but by-pass the torture and execution
on your way to Easter.
If that happened it would, they say,
be cheap grace.

You, and I mean you who are not ordained,
have to experience Jesus suffering on the cross
in order to be able to celebrate the resurrection.
It is an absolute necessity they say.

Never mind that it is a story we tell
and not an event we relive on cue.
It is the church continuing to act as if
it sets the cultural table
and as if it sets the stage for what the rest of us
can see and understand about life as we live it.

That is what bugs me most, I guess.
The church, still acting as if this is Christendom.

All of which you probably could care less about
and wonder why I am yammering
about something of so little consequence
when this is Palm Sunday
and we are still separated by a virus
and the world all around is flopping like a fish
desperate to return to the water.

Okay, I am going to tell you
but don’t blame me if you get upset.
This story,
this so-called “Passion” story
falls on dead ears.

Our place in this story
is not in the crowd laying down palms.
We are not in the crowd jeering him
and asking for Barabbas to be freed.
We are not members of the Sanhedrin
or scuttling clergy
plotting against him.
We are not among the disciples
scared and brave and angry and scared again.
We are not among the brave women
who hang tough with him.
We are not the soldiers who abuse him.

We are not the haughty Herod
or malevolent Pilate who execute him.
Clearly we are not him either.

So who are we in this story?
We are a long, long way away.

We only appear between the lines.
We are the Romans back in Rome or
somewhere in Italy
who employ people like Pontus Pilate
and who deploy the legions.
They didn’t have drones back then,
but if they did,
Jesus and the disciples may have all been wiped out
because drones are much cheaper
and often more effective
against revolutionary riff-raff.
And that is what really matters to empire.

It is almost impossible for us
to hear this story
and feel its true resonance
because we do not listen to it
from our perspective.
We try to shoehorn ourselves into it
through somebody else’s part.

We don’t get the fact
that it was and is our agents –
people who work for us
to keep us safe and sound and secure
within our borders –
who kill people like Jesus.

Instead, we make our liturgical dramas
and our Passion Plays and movies
and feel just awful
when we see the reruns each year.
But we feel awful in the wrong place.

We feel awful for Jesus
as if he is still suffering.
Instead we should feel awful for ourselves
because we are still doing it.
And by “we”
I mean those of us in the controlling classes
all around the world –
in the U.S.
and across Europe
and in China and Myanmar and Thailand.
Everywhere.

You see, this story
is about what happens
when the agents of God meet us.

They die.
When they get too close
or get heard too widely
or start to resonate beneath the surface
they die.

As long as we keep the focus on Jesus
instead of us,
or on what happened back then
instead of what we are doing today,
then the story remains just a fascinating story.

I get why the church does it this way.
It is no fun to do what I am doing right now –
de-mythologizing
so that it shatters our resistance.
But honestly, I can’t be part of the pretend any more.
I was never very good at it anyway.

The Passion is not about Jesus it is about us.

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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