Trinity Church Geneva

You are here: Home / Archives for Sermons

2 Advent: Corner Man of Hope

by

Man, O man,
if ever there was an Advent sermon, this is it.
(Notice, I didn’t claim it is a ‘good’ sermon,
just that it is inherently an Advent sermon).

I won’t lie, this vision thing of Isaiah’s,
right now, today,
at this moment in history,
exhausts me.

“Really?
I have to preach hope,
now?
Really?
Now?”

So then I turn away from Isaiah and say,
“Let’s look at the Gospel instead.”
And there he is, right on cue,
John the Baptist:
“He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.
His winnowing fork is in his hand,
and he will clear his threshing floor
and will gather his wheat into the granary;
but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”

Can’t beat that,
sounds more like the world we know –
punishment from the top down
instead of Isaiah’s vision
of peace and equity
from the bottom of the food chain up.

I am an optimist,
and relentlessly hopeful,
but sometimes hope is a twelve round
boxing match in the ring of the soul.
Right now, looking around at the world,
hope is bloodied like Rocky Balboa before the bell.
Hope gets in a few good jabs now and again
but The Nasty
over in the other corner
has brass in his gloves,
and each punch lands hateful
and harsh
on the bruised
and battered face of hope.

Isaiah is the corner man,
or cut man as they say.

Isaiah sponges the wobbled fighter of hope
with ice water,
applying adrenaline-laced Vaseline to our cuts,
dabbing the bulge around the eyes
with an ice-cold iron to staunch the swelling.
He checks our vision to make sure it is clear.
He talks to us with calm and reassurance.

He reminds us of our strengths,
then cautions us to guard our weaknesses.
When the bell sounds
he lifts us up
and pats us on the back
and assures us
he is there waiting
for the next time we get a minute to rest.

That’s Isaiah,
the corner man for hope.

Last week
I spoke of what I know about hope,
and all of that was honest and true.
But it is a battle not a cakewalk.
Hope is arduous
and not for the faint of heart.
It is so much easier
to be grim
and calloused
and cynical in our world.
Really, it is.

We can so easily bend
the gray cloud of despair
down around our heads
so that it rains wherever we go
and thus fulfills bitter prophecies.

We can do that,
it actually makes us feel powerful
and secure
in a way hope never does.
We like cynicism, really we do –
it feels good.

“Yeah,
that’s what I’m talking about!”
we get to declare
whenever any bad thing happens
because we predicted it.

“Yeah!
I told ya!”
we get to say out loud
when disappointment rains down on the moment.
Sometimes we don’t even need to say it
to feel the satisfaction.
We can just give a knowing look and gloat.

Honestly, I think more than anything else,
even more than the reign of scientific
and economic worldviews,
hope is the primary cause
of rapidly disappearing Churches.

Really, hope is the problem.

You know those big, glamorous
stadium-size churches
with television audiences
and online ministries that rake in
tons of money and viewers?
The message of those places
is not really hope
it is wishful thinking.
It sounds like hope
but is just the opposite of hope.
It is actually cynical,
dog-eat-dog economics
disguised as hope.

You see, the so-called Prosperity Gospel
boiled down to its crude equation,
says that the blessings of God
are success,
achievement,
and prosperity.
We will get what we deserve
if we believe and do the right things.

Sooner or later
we will get what we ‘want’
if we just believe right.
Our desires
will be fulfilled, is the promise,
and our fulfilled desires
will be the sign we are blessed.
It is reward for the righteous and,
by implication,
often left unsaid,
deprivation for the unrighteous.

According to this false-hope Prosperity Gospel,
the rewards for our right thinking
and believing are economic –
gain,
recognition,
maybe even celebrity and fame,
as if those are a blessing.
It is the top-down equation
that we like so much better than
the bottom-up vision of a hapless guy like Isaiah.

This is tricky now,
so stay with me
because by promising
material, physical, even social well-being,
the Prosperity Gospel reinforces our cynicism
in an ironic
and paradoxical way.

Without our ever realizing it,
the Prosperity Gospel propagates

the worldview of consumerism
with its dog-eat-dog order we call Natural Selection.
Equating God’s blessings
with health,
power,
security,
and material well-being
sounds theologically pleasing
because its language is all blessing and happiness.
But that language disguises
what is actually a top-down,
trickle-down,
deny the margins kind of theology
that is very much at home with consumerism.
In fact, it is not a prosperity gospel at all,
it is a consumerism gospel
and it is a perfect fit
for a culture operated by profit margins,
short-term gain,
and winner-take-all.

Wishful thinking for the masses
means believing that God’s blessings
are material security,
and status-driven achievements,
that have us looking good
and feeling good
and winning the game.

But authentic hope,
the kind Isaiah’s poetry points to,
knows that looking good
and feeling good
and winning the game
are nowhere to be found
as the criteria of blessing
in the kingdom of God.

In fact,
authentic hope
has absolutely nothing to do
with yours
or my
benefit.
Yours
and my
self-interest
are not even a gleam in God’s eye – ever.
We may personally benefit
from things going well in the kingdom of God,
but we may also have to sacrifice for things to go well.
In fact, it could even happen that our self-interest
may actually have to be denied,
or even extinguished,
in order for things to go well
in the kingdom of God.
It is never,
ever,
about us, personally.

The kingdom of God
is about the KINGDOM
not you and me individually.
And authentic hope knows that.
Hope is all about the collective creation,
not even about our own species in particular.

But consumerism,
whether with economic language
or theological language like the Prosperity Gospel,
is always about consuming.
It is about exploiting our appetites,
our hungers,
our desires.
It is about somebody profiting
from our desires
no matter whether fulfilling our desire
is good or bad
for everyone else.

It is about profit.

It is about arranging the society
around making money off of other people,
any way we can.
The more money we can make, the better it is for us.

When that happens,
according to the Prosperity Gospel, we’re ‘blessed.’
When we are the top dog
eating the meat of the lesser dogs,
we are blessed.

Consumerism,
whether as an economic principle around
which we organize the society,
or as a theology
around which we organize our church,
is about exploiting the needs and desires
of other people for somebody’s profit.

In such a scenario, for example,
medicine is no longer about healing;
it is a commodity to be purchased
if you can afford it.

Housing is no longer about shelter,
it is about bundling mortgages
in such a way as to make more money
from people who cannot afford to live in their homes
without borrowing,
with interest, for decades.

Security is no longer about caring for one another
and looking out for each other’s needs,
it is about buying insurance in case bad things happen.
But we can only get that insurance
if the odds are extremely in favor
of the insurance company making a profit from
our vulnerability.

It is about the funding of public works
with taxes that everyone pays,
but the more money you actually have
the less taxes you actually pay;
so that public works are actually
funded more by people with less money
instead of more.

Hope,
authentic hope,
the way Isaiah envisions it,
is very much the opposite
of the prosperity theology and consumerism
that has come to own our lives
and define the world around us.
AND THAT
is why hope can be so exhausting –
it is a battle against all odds,
and a trudging upstream against a fierce current.

Here is the deal on Isaiah’s so-called
peaceable kingdom vision:
It is not in the lion’s best interest to eat straw.
I mean really, no one can imagine
a happy, straw-eating lion.

Here is an fierce example of Isaiah’s vision
embedded in our world.

Veganism is not likely a choice that gets made
by following our desires for something yummy.
It is a choice that gets made
by looking out at the valley
and seeing that the environment suffers
in multiple ways
from our obsession with copious amounts of meat,
which also happens to be driven by a small segment’s
compulsive thirst for profit.

Veganism or vegetarianism,
or a diet that vastly reduces our intake of beef and pork,
would be one of those choices
that is made not because of our self-interest, our desire,
but because of the common good.
I am speaking as a meat-eater by the way,
but I can see the difference between
the self-interest of my desires
and the common interests of my species.
Hope agitates me
toward a life-style change I haven’t made yet.

That’s just a little example.

The difference between
the authentic hope of Isaiah
and the wishful thinking of our consumerism
and consumeristic theology,
is quite clear.
Wishful thinking
says that greed is good for the marketplace
when it comes to economics,
and that the goal is to win rather than lose
when it comes to the accumulation
of resources and wealth.

The assumption underneath this wishful thinking
we call consumerism
is that it is a dog-eat-dog world
and therefore it is better to be a big dog
than a little dog.

Authentic hope,
the Isaiah and Jesus kind,
understands wishful thinking,
and recognizes the way we have constructed
our world is a dog-eat-dog coliseum for fighting.

But authentic hope
has a vision
for the re-construction of our world.

Authentic hope
can see that it would be possible
to construct a world
in which the role of the big dogs
is to nurture and support the needs of the little dogs,
and therefore enjoy the benefits of the common good
instead of only those of self-interest.

Authentic hope also knows
that it is not possible to construct this new world
with the use of coercion.
Coercion is the tool of big dog usury and profit,
and bringing about a new creation with coercion
will simply sow the weeds of the old world
into the fabric of the new.
So a different way must be found.
All the more reason
that authentic hope attracts few followers.

Still, as tired as we feel at any given moment,
getting ready to go into a new round
with cuts and bruises from the last round,
I know that authentic hope
is the only true hope.

The lion will probably never eat straw,
but it is possible for us to create a world,
one small community at a time,
in which the big dogs
tend to the needs of the little dogs
instead of eating them.

I chose that hope.

1 Advent 2016: Finding Light in the Dark

by

kosovo-metohija-koreni-duse027We need to take care of a little business
before launching into the sermon.
You may have read the article in the Finger Lakes Times
about our development project,
or you may have heard about it from your neighbor
who read it and surprised you with it.
You could have also seen it,
if you are on the distribution list
for the diocesan online newsletter.

As articles go, it was pretty good,
but it had one glaring bit of garbled information.
I mentioned to the reporter that part of our hope
is not only to continue worshipping in this building
but also to have a satellite location downtown
from which to do ministry and program.
That got translated
as we would be leaving this building altogether.

I don’t know about you,
but I have received concern from friends
and acquaintances in the community
about having just bought a house
and now what will I do with Trinity closing?

So even though it was in the newspaper,
and even though it was said we would be here
and continue as a congregation,
those details still seem to get lost.

We’ll just have to keep telling the story
and tooting our horn
and finding new and better ways
to keep the word out that Trinity lives on.

Of course, the best way to do that
is to grow in number,
deepen in wisdom,
and strengthen our ministry and witness.
That is a one-step-at-a-time process.

And with that I would like to point out
what many of you have already noted:
that less than a year ago
we stared our grim prospects in the face
without the slightest idea IF
or how
or what
or when
even the possibility of a future
could be a wish, let alone a legitimate hope.
Nine months later, a full term pregnancy,
we are moving in a specific direction
with prospects that have changed categories
from wish,
to hope,
to opportunity.

Standing here on November 27th
I would also like to add that this experience,
of encountering light in the dark,
is the very substance of what we call “Advent.”

So keep that shared Trinity experience in the background the next few moments
as we explore this Advent theme a little deeper:
Light in the midst of dark.

I want to tell you something I know,
but in order to tell you what I know
I have to tell on myself
in a way that may be more personal
than some folks are comfortable with from the pulpit.

On the other hand,
it is not a big secret or anything either,
because it was in the newspaper last January,
and came up in my interview with the Search Committee.

I am a recovering alcoholic and drug user.
Now that is not a very exclusive club
and I am sorry to say it is becoming even less so.

Anyway, I mention it
because what I learned about myself and other people
during that time before recovery,
and in recovery itself,
is a guiding light for me in dark times.

Advent is about light in dark times, by the way,
as in seeing the path to peace
in the midst of war;
or reaching for equity
in the throws of oppression;
or perceiving the stillpoint
in the midst of chaos and imbalance.

So in order for me to tell you what I know –
the kind of knowing that both glows and gnaws
in the marrow of my bones,
and lines the sheathing of nerves along my spine
with both silk and sand –
I need you to know there was a time in my life
when I was owned, utterly consumed,
by the hungers and thirsts of my darker angels.

When I was trying to stop drinking alcohol
and using drugs,
I simply did not see
how stopping could possibly work.
I could not see to the other side of the river, so to speak.

I could see how bad it had become,
and I could see how much worse it was going to get
if I didn’t find a way to stop,
but I could not see how the heck it was going to happen.

Now anyone who uses mood-altering substances
does it for the same reason,
whether a mere social drinker or a drug addict.
The doggone stuff changes our mood –
when used well and properly
it makes us feel good
without having to pay a price for it.
Almost everyone likes a little bump now and again.
Heck, these days they sell stimulant drinks
over the counter
and advertise them as a daily fix
to help us through the day.

So like everyone else
who abuses mind-altering substances,
I was self-medicating in order to numb myself
against emotional pain.
The unfortunate thing for me was that I started so early –
getting high and drinking in seventh and eight grade.
You see, the earlier a person starts
the greater the impact on them over time.

There probably isn’t a seventh or eighth grader alive
who does not claim to have emotional pain,
even if the pain is stuff that seems pretty typical or silly
by adult standards.
So if a kid starts numbing it that early
he or she will never learn how to manage it.
That’s what happened to me.
I numbed myself for about fifteen years,
more and more thoroughly as I got older.

I knew that if I suddenly took away the numbing agents
that everything from those fifteen years and before –
from the tiniest injury
to the ugliest shame
to the most disabling anxiety –
would be right there in the room with me.

That is the first challenge people face,
if you happen to know anyone going through recovery.

Standing in the presence of anything and everything
that goes bump in the night
without any true experience or methods
for staying present to them
is daunting.

And by the way,
I am still learning how to do that –
it is never a once and forever thing.
Anyway, I discovered that acting as if
I could do it even if I was afraid I couldn’t;
and acting as if
I could do it even if I didn’t know how;
and simply putting one foot
right in front of the other
without skipping steps
or making leaps;
that if I did those things
I got to where I needed to go.

What I had to learn,
in other words,
was to make a radical act of trust
that I could get from here to there
even though I did not know where there was,
and even though I did not know how.

And in the process of learning how to do
what I didn’t know how to do,
and to get to a place I did not know where it was,
I learned some valuable wisdom
that has stayed with me.
I find it to be an especially potent wisdom in dark times.

Part of that wisdom is this:
When we ask the question “why?”
of a situation we cannot and will not
ever be able to answer with any kind of certainty,
we get stuck.
Buddha called them ineffable questions
and said it was a roadblock to enlightenment.

So instead, in the dark
when we need to go somewhere we do not know where,
or do something we are not sure how to do,
we need to take an outrageous
and radical step off the plank into trust.
We do not get to know why
we have arrived at this moment
any more than we get to know what
will happen in the next moment.
If we dither around with why and what
we will get stuck.

Now, because no sermon should be about me,
allow me to pivot away from myself
to someone with a lot more credibility, Isaiah.

We are going to be hearing from Isaiah
nearly every week in Advent and Christmas
so here is a little perspective with which to hear his prophetic poetry.

He lived in a very scary time.

Israel was divided.
The northern half had already been annexed
by the dreaded Assyrian Empire.
Judah, the southern half,
where the Holy City of Jerusalem was situated,
was paying bribes to the Assyrian Emperor
and ingratiating itself
like a sniveling Smee to a nasty Captain Hook
in order to keep from getting gobbled up.

Isaiah was a prophet
but even so he could not see
what was going to happen next.

He could see
the horrendous injustice in his society.
He could see
that the national and religious leaders
were living very far from the values they professed.
And he could see
an enormous disparity in wealth
and an economy based upon violence and war.

He did not know
exactly what was going to happen
but he could see trouble brewing
with little chance of avoiding it.

It was a time not unlike our own.

Isaiah was pretty sure
a national disaster was on the way;
a time when even the highest national leaders,
and the King himself,
would groan in despair.

He had no answer
for the injustices he saw.

He had no answer
for the fact that God,
who was supposedly a God of justice and mercy,
was not acting like it.
He had no answer
for what seemed like God’s utter neglect
of those who were most vulnerable.
He had no answer
for why bad things were happening to good people
and yet so many bad people
were getting away with so much bad.

What he did have, and what he did know,
was an understanding
that he did not have enough perspective
to perceive final outcomes.
He was powerless in that moment
to see or know
what he most wanted to see and know.
He knew he did not know enough
to answer the questions
that he and other people most wanted answered.

Even so, he refused to make up answers.
He refused to allow his dread of powerlessness
to provoke him into premature action.
He refused to attempt to leap ahead
because he could not tolerate the pain of the present.

And along with that embrace of his limits
and the understanding of his powerlessness,
he had one other small weapon
against the darkness:
Hope.

It was an outrageous hope
considering the barrel of the gun
they were looking down.

It was a hope born of trust,
and it was simply that God loves us
and cares for us
and is present with us.
Because of that trust
he could act as if…
as if
the right outcome
depended upon his small acts of love.

His or anyone else’s puny actions
were clearly not enough to make a difference,
but he trusted that if he did what he could do
it would be enough.

It was a hope
created by an act of trust
that even the gravest,
most horrendous dangers
were capable of being addressed and resolved
by one small love
added to one small love
added to one small love
until the sheer weight and power of each small act
overwhelmed the hazard
or enlightened the darkness
or righted the wrong.

Deep darkness
and overwhelming odds
require
that kind of trust
and that kind of hope.

At the end of our nose,
pushed up against us and smooshing our face,
is an overwhelming force
with unbeatable odds
against which we are powerless to succeed.
So the only option to cynicism
or despair
or utter hopeless,
in any such situation,
is to act as if…
as if
one small act of love
and one step at a time
can possibly lead to the other side.

That is what I know.

Thanksgiving Celebration

by

TEXT for PREACHING
Deuteronomy 26:1-11

Way, way, way back
on January 24, 2016 –
remember that far back?
It was my second Sunday here
and I preached on the text in Deuteronomy
in which today’s Hebrew scripture is also lodged.

There could hardly be a more perfect reading
to be inserted between post-election
and pre-Thanksgiving,
not to mention the day on which we
celebrate the in-gathering of our pledges for 2017.

I will get to Deuteronomy in a minute
but first, allow me to hover over a single word.

In street vernacular,
this bread and wine ceremony we do every week
is called “Communion.”
In the peculiar parlance of church-speak
it is more properly called, “Eucharist.”
“Eucharist” is the Greek word for “Thanksgiving.”

When those early conspirators
in the subversive moment
that came to be called “Christianity”
spoke about the kind of worship they did,

“Thanksgiving” is the word they used.
Every week for us is “Thanksgiving”
and that is the context
for these next remarks about Deuteronomy.

If you were to quarter a big, juicy red apple –
you know, cut it into four equal parts –
you would end up with four pieces of the core
as well as the flesh.

But unlike an apple,
in our spiritual tradition the core
is the most delectable part.

Not all Biblical wisdom or perspectives are equal.
In fact, there are some core insights
so scrumptious,
so luscious,
that they are potent enough to live on
without any other source of nurture.

The opposite is true also,
and we know it:
some Biblical perspectives are not even palatable,
and some are toxic.
But the core
is so sweet,
so delicious
that even poetry and music cannot begin to touch it.

Today we bite into a piece of the core,
the one I set on the table back in January
and that is with us week to week.
It is this:
the enemy of gratitude is amnesia;
and the power of gratitude is healing.

Let me repeat that, for effect if nothing else:
the enemy of gratitude
is amnesia;
and the power of gratitude
is healing.

That snippet of Deuteronomy we heard
is part of a long speech Moses delivers
to the all the people of Israel
gathered on the floodplain of the Jordan River.
It is an urgent plea for them to remember
who they are
and whose they are.
“When you have come into the land
that the LORD your God is giving you
as an inheritance to possess,
and you possess it,
and settle in it,
you shall take some of the first
of all the fruit of the ground,
which you harvest from the land
that the LORD your God is giving you,
and you shall put it in a basket
and go to the place that the LORD your God
will choose as a dwelling for his name…

By the way, I suspect that line of scripture right there
is what those early Pilgrims were doing on the first Thanksgiving,
though in our secularized worldview
the biblical background is lost.
Anyway, Moses goes on.

(And you will say)
“A wandering Aramean was my ancestor;
he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien,
few in number,
and there he became a great nation,
mighty and populous.
When the Egyptians treated us harshly
and afflicted us,
by imposing hard labor on us,
we cried to the LORD,
the God of our ancestors;
the LORD heard our voice
and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.

The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm,
with a terrifying display of power,
and with signs and wonders;
and he brought us into this place
and gave us this land,
a land flowing with milk and honey.

So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me.”

Even though we are not farmers,
most of us anyway,
we still understand this “first fruits” idea.
Clearly this is a description
of an early liturgy
instituted for the people to remember
how they became a people
and why they were a people
and who it was that made them a people.

As you may recall,
the Book of Deuteronomy is a re-telling of Exodus
and it delivers within its verses,
the constitution for a nation.
Surrounded by monarchies and empires,

Israel is given the constitution of an egalitarian society –
a radically new model in a world
dominated by brutal hierarchy.

It is a constitution designed for ex-slaves
who are to remember
their slavery,
and remember
their escape,
and remember
what it was like to live without the love of God
as the guiding principle of the society.

“Never forget,” was Moses’ plea to them that day at the Jordan.

After forty years of wandering in the wilderness
looking for the Promise Land
they have finally arrived at the border.
After forty years of looking around each corner
and hoping for it;
drudging over every mound of sand
and yearning to see it;
climbing every steep and treacherous mountain
pleading for it to be on the other side.
After burying the weak and the infirm
in unmarked graves along the way,
they now held them in memory
even through the fog of years
as they gazed across the river into the Promise Land.

Wanting now to charge across the shallow water
into that long, long awaited land of milk and honey,
Moses by act of will and miracle,
makes them sit down and listen to him
for thirty-some chapters.

What we heard today is almost the end,
almost the period at the end of the sermon
and their moment of release into the Promised Land.

And here,
as he has through all the promises,
proclamations,
laws and statutes and social prescriptions
for thirty chapters,
Moses insists that whatever else they do –
whatever abundance and joy
they harvest and enjoy –
that they remember.
“Remember,”
he tells them.

Remember
where you came from: Egypt.
Remember
what you came from:
slavery.
Remember
how you got here:
an act of God and not by your own strength.
Remember
these are cities you did not build,
these are goods you did not make,
these are cisterns you did not dig,
these are grapes and olives you did not plant,
this is food you did not harvest.
Remember
you were slaves with nothing of your own
except the suffering you endured.
Do not forget the origin of your abundance
because if you do,
if you forget,
you will lose it all.

Moses warns them over and over and over again,
that prosperity brings on amnesia,
and amnesia is the enemy of gratitude.

So there it is, the succulent morsel of wisdom:
When we forget
who we are
and whose we are
our gratitude becomes weak and flaccid
and may evaporate altogether.
And when that happens,
we run the risk of being overtaken by
cynicism,
depression,
or just plain self-centered anxiety.

When we are full and satiated
and all our basic needs are met,
we sit back and we offer a deep sigh,
“Ah…the good life.”

But the punch line to this whole thing
is that forgetting
who we are
and whose we are
and what it is we have to be grateful for,
is a gratitude killer.
I dare say, all of us know what it is like
to live without gratitude.

One day,
even though we never meant to,
we woke up without gratitude.
We may not have noticed immediately –
brushing our teeth,
taking our shower,
eating our breakfast.
But without gratitude something happens
that re-shapes the experience of life.

Without gratitude
life becomes all about us.
In fact, life becomes about “me.”

Without gratitude,
life becomes an endless river of thirst –
surrounded by water yet never quenched.

Without gratitude,
life becomes an empty pit of hunger –
surrounded by abundance but obsessed with scarcity.

Without gratitude,
life becomes a festering wound of dissatisfaction –
no matter what we have
it is never enough.

I know you know
what that feels like.
All of us have succumbed.
It is almost a universal infection
we have contracted at some point
and will likely be hit with again.

When we run dry of gratitude
no amount of medical or psychological attention
will cure what ails us;
we will be dry bones in a valley of dry bones
and the misery of it is woeful.

At those moments,
gratitude is what injects marrow into our bones
and re-establishes the sinew and cartilage
to make gracefulness a renewed option.
Gratitude keeps us anointed
and well oiled
with the possibility of…
joy.

Conversely, without gratitude there is no possibility of joy;
and a life without joy is, well,
it is mere consumption.

But we cannot give ourselves joy –
that is something visited upon us
and utterly impossible to create on our own.
But gratitude can begin as an act of will.

Gratitude can be conjured up
when we are not feeling it
by remembering
who we are
and whose we are.

Memory activates gratitude.

There is always
and forever
a memory of gratitude.
We can call on it
and invite it to be present in the moment.
Even if we cannot feel it
we can remember it
and invite it to be present.

Remembering who we are
and whose we are
will activate gratitude.

And gratitude is what makes it possible
to survive grief.
Gratitude is what makes it possible
to endure pain.

Gratitude is what makes it possible
to perceive hope
even when we are only getting through
one step at a time.

Gratitude
empowers healing
even when a cure is out of the question.
Gratitude creates an opening for joy
even when sorrow and grief surround us.

The beginning of gratitude
is remembering…
who we are
and whose we are.

It is a very powerful moist morsel of wisdom
we have from these voices
that rise up to us up out of the soil of Biblical history.

Prosperity creates amnesia
and amnesia causes us to live without gratitude
and when that happens
life is only about me;
and in that kind of life
the best we can hope for is mere consumption.

But gratitude is always within reach,
a simple act of will to remember
who we are
and whose we are,
which then sets us back on the road
toward the possibility of joy
and all the other things
for which we give thanks.

I want to pause then,
and thank you,
each of you,
for making me your priest.

As your priest,
I want to thank you for your gifts
of time,
money,
labor,
commitment,
and love in the arms of community.

Beginning now our balancing act
between the living out and letting go of 2016
and stepping up onto 2017,

I invite you to sing your thanksgiving with me:
(Sing the doxology).

 

All Saints’ Day 2016

by

I have preached this sermon in one version or another,
in every parish I have ever served.
You will understand why as it unfolds.

 I love All Saints’ Day!
I might even like it better than Christmas or Easter
because it is less adulterated with cultural spew.

Maybe I like it so much because it is bittersweet in the way that grief is,
when it mellows and has been with us a long time.

All Saints’ does not simply celebrate the past
or raise up big named heroes
or in any way invite nostalgia.
Rather, All Saints’ invites us to dig down
and mine our memories –
both our individual and collective memories –
for people who can teach and guide us
through the murky present into a clearer future.

But we not only seek the counsel of our saints
we need to also celebrate their gifts,
and that is what All Saints’ Day is truly about:
Thanksgiving.

I invite you to play a game of “pretend” with me.

Now some people hate this kind of thing
and if you do, I apologize and ask your patience
as other people play along with me.

I invite you to close your eyes –
if that helps you to imagine.
And we might as well relax a little too.
So take a nice slow, deep breath –

Inhaling through your nose,
and exhaling through your mouth.
Let’s just do that a couple times
and clear our minds for a moment.

Now, imagine if you would…your kitchen.
Just bring to mind the kitchen in your home –
its colors,
the textures,
the furniture and aromas.

Now…with your imagination,
invite important people from the past into your kitchen –
invite people you actually knew,
those who have died;
and invite other people you did not know –
people from history you admire,
or wish you had known.

Invite those folks into your kitchen.
However many chairs are around your kitchen table,
that is how many to invite.

And feel free to try them out and substitute freely
rather than be stuck with the first ones to appear.
Good group chemistry is important.
Karl Marx might not get along with Ronald Reagan,
and your great-grandmother may not be on
speaking terms with Jesus at the moment.
So gather a group that can work with each other
as well as being wonderful and great individuals
you happen to admire.

I am going to stop talking now
and give us just a moment
to conjure up the saints at our kitchen table.

Well, I don’t know if that worked for you or not
but it is the kind of thing you can play with.

Who do you invite?
Why them?
What values does their presence
indicate you cherish most?
Why those people instead of all the folks
you could choose from?

What do they have that is attractive to you:
power,
greatness,
wisdom,
intellect,
beauty,
strength,
faith,
holiness…
or did they just love you really well?

Chances are that the people we invite to the table
say more about us and what we value
than it says about them.

Our saints reveal what we cherish and value,
aspire to, and reach toward.

I have a saint that hangs out in the corner
of my mind – not front and center.
Other saints come and go
depending upon my mood,
in the same way that all memory
is subject to the character and substance
of the moment in which it is remembered.

But this particular saint is always at the table
hanging out in the basement of my memory –
sometimes a treasured guest,
sometimes a forgotten one,
sometimes a ghost who haunts me.

At the seminary I attended,
The Episcopal Divinity School
in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
there was a life-size oxidized bronze statue
outside the chapel.
It was a dark tortured figure
kneeling in anguish,
his face raised toward the heavens,
and hands covering the eyes and face
as if holding back an ocean of grief.

It was dedicated to Jonathan Daniels,
an EDS seminarian
killed in Hayneville, Alabama.

This is how it happened.

In 1965 Jonathan Daniels,
along with Ruby Sales,
a 16-year-old African-American girl,
Judy Upham and Joyce Bailey, also Episcopal seminarians,
and a Roman Catholic priest named, Richard Morrisroe, were arrested and beaten.

I mention them all by name,
even though they are not famous
and you may never hear of them again,
but they deserve to be remembered
and honored.
That is the way with saints –
most of them are historically anonymous.

And also, a side note of personal serendipity.
I came to know Richard Morrisroe’s son
when we both lived in Buffalo
and were active in the community.
Meeting and getting to know Richard Morrisroe, Jr.
was like a hand from the past on my shoulder
assuring me that Jonathan Daniels, who I never knew,
was indeed a presence to be both
welcomed and reckoned with.

Anyway, those earnest young Christians I mentioned
committed what the society considered to be
a subversive activity:
they registered African-Americans to vote.

It serves as a great reminder to us
that what is considered subversive in the moment
often looks like exactly the right thing to have done
when it is remembered a generation or more later.

Anyway, they spent six days in the Fort Deposit, Alabama
jail for the crime of registering African-Americans to vote,
and on Friday, Aug. 20, 1965, they were released.
This is a quote by Ruby Sales, a first hand account of the incident as it appeared in the Washington Post (1990):

“We left the jail in a group, and we walked up to the corner. It was one of those hot steamy days. We’d been in jail, underfed, and we were thirsty. As we were walking to the store to get a soda, suddenly there was an ominous sense that filled the air and I became very nervous…the street was clean of cars. There was literally no one around. It was as if the town was suddenly shut down. We started up the stairs.

I was in front, Jon was behind, and Joyce Bailey and Father Morrisroe were walking side by side up the steps. When I got to the last step, Tom Coleman (the sheriff) was standing there brandishing a shotgun. He said, “(Expletive), I’ll blow your brains out.” And then I felt a tug and I fell back. A shotgun blast, a thud. A few seconds later, another shot. And then I heard Richard on the ground crying for water.”(Washington Post 1990).

Now According to Ruby,
Jonathan Daniels
pulled her out of the line of fire
and was shot in the chest with a 12-gauge shotgun.
The force of the blast sent his body flying backwards
and he was killed instantly.
Richard Morrisroe was wounded but recovered.

Jonathan Daniels died at age 26 that August day in 1965,
which was his mother’s birthday.

Jonathan wrote this shortly before his death,
a description of how the Communion of Saints,
at his “kitchen table” of saints,
was empowering him through the dangers of 1965,
and allowing him and his colleagues
to practice their courageous form of spirituality.

“I lost fear…” he wrote, “when I began to know in my bones and sinews
that I had been truly baptized into (Jesus’)
death and Resurrection,
that in the only sense that really matters
I am already dead, and my life is hid with Christ in God.

I began to lose self-righteousness
when I discovered the extent to which my behavior
was motivated by worldly desires
and by self-seeking…
The point is simply, of course,
that one’s motives are usually mixed,
and one had better know it.

As Judy and I said (prayers together) day by day,
we became more and more aware of the living reality
of the invisible “communion of saints” –
of the beloved community in Cambridge
(meaning Episcopal Divinity School)
who were (sharing our prayers) too,
(and) of the ones gathered around
a near-distant throne in heaven –
(those) who blend with their (prayers)
our faltering songs of prayer and praise.

With them,
with black (folks) and white (folks),
with all of life,
in Him Whose Name is above all the names
that the races and nations shout,
whose Name is Itself the Song Which fulfills
and “ends” all songs,
we are indelibly, unspeakably
ONE.”

To me,
it is both comforting and haunting
to read these words Jonathan Daniels wrote
about the table of saints in his own life,
so soon before he gave it up to save another.
In my loneliest moments in seminary,
late into the night,
I used to go sit under that memorial to Jonathan Daniels.
He is the saint at my kitchen table
who reminds me to be brave
when I don’t want to be.
He reminds me that I am never alone
when I am feeling all alone.
He points my attention out the window
when I get absorbed
by the minutia and the business of doing church.

That is what saints do for us,
and so I mention Jonathan
as an example of a kitchen table saint.
I know there are such saints in your life too;
ones who perhaps cradled you
and ones who, like Jonathan,
whisper to you from a greater distance.

We have no shortage of saints
but you and I have to empower them
so they can perform their function.

But here is what we also need to remember,
as scary and intimidating as it is:
you and I are potential saints for other people.

It would be utter narcissism for us to only look
beyond to other saints for ourselves,
and not give considerable thought
to how we might encourage and strengthen,
heal and challenge,
those around us.

You and I may never know
that we are sitting at the imaginary kitchen table
of those with whom we lived and worked and played;
but we should aspire to that position.
I don’t mean in an egotistical, self-righteous way.
I mean that we need to be thoughtful about
how we nurture and care for those around us.

I am not talking about do-gooderism.
I am talking about living as though we never know
who is observing us,
and learning from us,
and even copying us.

I never knew Jonathan Daniels
and he died when I was a child
long before I ever imagined becoming an Episcopal priest.
And I have grave doubts
about whether I would ever be brave enough
to do what he did.

But even so, along with many others people,
I continue to live off the spiritual marrow of his bones.
You and I might be like that for someone we know
or even someone we do not know who is watching us.
We may be like that for someone
who only comes to know about us after we die!

It is an awesome, humbling and sobering thought
that begs for our imagination and contemplation.

So today is for giving thanks for the many
who have gone before us,
known and unknown,
and who bequeathed to us
a treasure-trove of love we call spiritual community.
It is a day to give thanks for saints
at our kitchen table and elsewhere,
and to ponder if we are one too.

For all the saints, we give our thanks.

Amen.

 

Proper 26 C: A Sense of Abundance & a Garden of Gratitude

by

Texts for Preaching

“Isn’t the Creation Wasteful?”
by Helder Camara

Lord
isn’t your creation wasteful?
Fruits never equal
the seedlings’ abundance.
Springs scatter water.
The sun gives out
enormous light.
May your bounty teach me
greatness of heart.
May your magnificence
stop me being mean.
Seeing you a prodigal
and open-handed giver
let me give unstintingly
like a king’s child
like God’s own.

Gospel: Luke 19:1-10

Sermon

We wouldn’t know it
from the way it gets told in the churches
but the Gospel is a manifesto of class warfare.
The Gospels, especially Luke,
are full of stories about God’s activity
among ordinary human beings
told from the bottom of society up,
not down from thrones or the head of the dinner table.
UNLIKE our own political discourse
and public myth making,
the Gospels and the rest of the Bible,
are full of self-critique
and honest confessions of wrong done with malice.

Odd little Zacchaeus is an example.
We get fixated on the fact that Zacchaeus
was short and climbed a tree,
but the action hovers around his social standing
not his height when he is standing up.
The folks telling this story hated Zacchaeus.

He was a collaborator.
Zacchaeus was like one of those Vichy French
that collaborated with the Nazis
and got fat doing it.
Or closer to home,
a greasy executive of a credit card company
getting rich off of obscene usury
from people that can’t really afford it.
You get the picture; he was hated.

When Luke tells us Zacchaeus was a tax collector,
he doesn’t mean someone that works for the IRS.
A tax collector in the Roman system of occupation
was a local that squeezed his neighbors
like a loan-shark break knuckles.

Tax collectors went around exacting whatever the Roman’s charged at the time,
but were also allowed to charge excess
to pay themselves and their cronies.
It was a despicable act of self-enrichment
at the expense of neighbors.

Luke tells us that Zacchaeus
was the “chief” tax collector.
He was the guy
over all the other guys that everyone hated.
He was therefore the most hated guy.
Then, just to make sure we get it,
Luke says, “and he was rich.”

Do you hear the class warfare now?

This story does not come from patricians in Rome
or the small niche of well-off Judeans,
it was a story told by hard scrapple peasants
who hated anyone rich
and especially those who got rich from Rome
at their expense.

But the storyteller understands
such hatred is not pretty.
In fact, that class hatred also becomes a target
in the story.
To everyone’s dismay,
the hero of the story, Jesus,
picks Zacchaeus to hang out with.

But there is even more here to read between the lines,
and to see underneath the obvious.

To eat at the table of a tax collector
was not just socially obnoxious
and a clear betrayal of class solidarity,
it was spiritually impure.
Tax collectors mixed with pig-eaters, heathen,
and made themselves religiously impure doing so.
They had to interact with gentiles
and exchange money with them,
and enter into their homes and establishments.
Tax collectors were therefore filthy and dirty
and not to be socialized with
by those who cared anything about their standing
with the temple or with peers.

By going to hang out with Zacchaeus,
and actually eating a meal at his table,
Jesus was violating social, spiritual, and religious taboos
more powerful than any social norms we have today.

We can hear the outrage and dismay
in the tone of the story
even two thousand years later,
translated into an alien language,
and filtered through multiple historic cultures.
“Jesus, what are you doing with Zacchaeus?”

Then the storyteller does something interesting.
He or she does not tell us what happened
but simply shows us what happened.
Zacchaeus changed.
We do not get to know anything other than that:
Zacchaeus changed.

He gave back what he extorted from people,
and gave away half of what he had
to those who had nothing.

That is all we know.
Jesus ate with him and he changed.

We don’t even get to know
if that changed how people viewed Zacchaeus
or if they went on hating him.
We don’t know if he stopped being a tax collector.
All we know is that Jesus ate with him
and at least on that one day,
Zacchaeus changed from despicable to generous.

Seeing you a prodigal (Oh God)
and open-handed giver
let me give unstintingly.

Man, is that difficult –
the Camara poem is likewise haunting in its challenge.

Obviously it is more difficult for some
than for others,
but for everyone
there are times when giving our stuff away
is like trying to slide a heavy couch over carpet.

In other words,
lots of grunting and groaning
just to pry a little bit out of us.

But the universe is not a zero-sum game.
We often act like it is;
we act like anyone who gets something
gains it at our expense,
as if we live in a world of scarcity
that is necessarily a dog-eat-dog environment.
That is the way we act,
and it is the way we have set the stage
for the life we live,
but that is NOT the way of the Creation.

In the world God made
there is abundance
and the problem is not scarcity
but distribution.
We muck up the abundance
by hoarding and over-accumulation,
and the refusal to distribute much of anything equitably.

But my saying that won’t convince you of abundance
if what you see is scarcity,
and what you fear is loss,
and what you want is absolute security.
Nevertheless, examples of Creation’s abundance
drip from every medicated leaf of the rain forest,
and well up in the sands of every desert
within which minions of miraculous creatures
live and work and play
in that oven-baked crust of the earth.

We cannot turn our head
or look beyond our nose
without witnessing abundance
where we assumed scarcity –
unless of course,
we simply do not want to see it.

Something about God, and the agents of God,
causes us to change and see it.
I think it has to do with what we see
when we encounter God,
that we may not have seen before.

For some people,
after some moments of holy shock and awe,
it is a lifetime change,
while for others it is a momentary change.
But there is something about the presence of God
or being in the presence of an agent of God,
that changes us.

We suddenly get more generous than ever before.
We suddenly get less scared and more open.
We suddenly see the ill effects of our own behavior
in ways we never quite recognized before.
We suddenly want to be different
and make up for what we’ve done.
We suddenly listen to the angels of our better nature
and live out beyond our self-interest.
We suddenly,
when standing in the presence of God
or an agent of God,
want and need
to be different than we have been.

We could speculate all day long
and far into the night,
why God has that effect on us
but there is really no point.

Rather, we can simply recognize that such change
is part of the physics of God
and do what we can to position ourselves
to be open to God’s presence when it comes.
We can scurry up a tree and wait
or stand by the road and wait
or enter into a yoga position and wait
or come to a place like this and wait.

There is nothing we can DO
to make God or the agents of God come our way,
but we can prepare ourselves to be open
when it happens.

We can DO the things we need to do
to open ourselves to the actual and ordinary presence
of God in our midst, and so prepare ourselves
to accept the change that happens
when we encounter God.
We cannot make God present
but we can prepare ourselves to be open
to God’s presence when it comes.

While there a million ways
to prepare ourselves to be open,
I am going to name just two today,
in reference to Luke and Camara: Abundance and gratitude.

We know fear is a powerful emotion
and it is probably the primary cause of blindness
when it comes to perceiving abundance.

Lord
isn’t your creation wasteful?
Fruits never equal
the seedlings’ abundance.
Springs scatter water.
The sun gives out
enormous light.
May your bounty teach me
greatness of heart.
May your magnificence
stop me being mean.

We can train ourselves to see abundance
instead of fearing scarcity.
It is a practice like anything else.
When our frame of reference is NOT self-interest
it is much easier to see abundance.

When our self-interest
is merely one of our vantage points
instead of our only or primary lens
then we begin to see things all around us
that we never saw before.
That is what we need to do
to see abundance where previously
we feared scarcity.
It is darn near miraculous how it works.
You probably know that already.

Extracting our self-interest from the picture
suddenly reveals abundance in the background.

The other thing is gratitude.
It is incredibly difficult
to feel both gratitude and fear
at the same time.
It’s actually kind of weird,
like patting your head and rubbing your tummy:
it can be done, but it is not easy.

Gratitude for what we have,
or have had,
or have seen and done and known,
is an experience that is at one and the same time
past tense,
present tense,
and future tense.
It is a vibe
that resonates from wherever we are standing
and moves outward
to encircle where we have been.

Gratitude is down right spooky in its power
because it can start as something small
and grow to encase the moment before we even know it.
And that is all the room gratitude needs
in order to grow and expand –
just a tiny little note or peapod
within the heart.

So the practice of standing in vantage points
that have little or nothing to do
with our own self-interest
will give us the vision we need
to perceive abundance
where previously we feared scarcity.

And even a pinpoint of gratitude
within the arid land of resentment within our hearts
will sprawl into a vine that takes over
and changes us from the inside out.
Whether we are Zacchaeus
or those who hate Zacchaeus,
a sense of abundance
and a garden of gratitude
will open us to encounter God
or the agents of God
when they are present.
And when that happens
we change.

 

Trinity Place

 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).

 

 

 

Like us on Facebook

Like us on Facebook

Newsletter

Coming soon!