Trinity Church Geneva

  • Who
    • History
    • Community Today
    • Staff and Vestry
  • What
    • Worship
    • OUTREACH & ADVOCACY
    • Trinity Place
    • Weddings
  • When
    • Weekly Schedule
  • Where
  • Sermons
You are here: Home / Archives for community

3 Easter: A Season of Grief

May 1, 2022 by Cam Miller

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

~From “Fishermen” by Francis Harvey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Share this:

  • Facebook

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: community, Fishfry, grief

1 Lent B 2021: Don’t wait for the angels

February 21, 2021 by Cam Miller

Scroll down for Video version

I’m starting all over again.
This is a second stab at a sermon,
the first one just didn’t seem right.
It may have been okay
if we weren’t in our eleventh month
of a pandemic
but context is everything. Right?

We don’t need the Holy Spirit to drive us
out into the wilderness
because we have been wandering it for awhile.
We just want “the other side.”

We’re like those ancient escaped slaves
brought by Moses through the wilderness
to the far banks of the Jordan River.
They could look across that small
meandering boundary but weren’t allowed to cross.
They had to sit down
and listen to another sermon
when right across the muddy way
was a land of milk and honey.

Slowly but surely,
chaotically and maddeningly,
we are getting vaccines.
Hope for “the other side” is named
as “July” or “the end of the summer”
or ”by next fall.”
But we are here, on this side,
with the threat and memories
of sickness, variants, and death.
For many of us loved ones are far away,
even if we can see them through plasma screens.
Good friends must keep a distance
and smiles go unseen.
Favorite cafes, bars, and restaurants
have closed.
We are close and yet so very far.

For some of us
the wilderness is knowing that our pain
is so much less than most people’s suffering.

Millions and millions and millions
have lost work,
live tenuously in the shadow of back rent
and food lines, or worse.
Around the world the pandemic
has only deepened the isolation
of those suffering extreme deprivation.

We see it,
know about it,
do not live it and
are far from doing anything about it.
In that scenario,
we are in the land of milk and honey
looking back across the Jordan
at those still in the wilderness.

Yet, somehow,
we feel as though we are wandering
in the wilderness still.
And we are.
Such is the strangeness of this time.

Obviously the boilerplate for Lent
comes from the gospel story
about Jesus in the wilderness for forty days.
But he got angels waiting on him. No fair!

There is yet another thing to notice about that story,
at least in Mark,
and it is a parfait of love and suffering.

First he has a private religious experience.
A voice in his head (remember, in Mark
only Jesus hears the voice),
tells him he is beloved.

That peak spiritual and emotional embrace
is followed by some kind of harsh wind
that transports him to a wild and desolate place.
It wasn’t a polite invitation to Lent,
it was coercion.

In the midst of a wildness,
home to beasts and the darkness of his shadows,
he gets some TLC from angelic counter-forces.

Then, after surviving that,
his spiritual mentor and a prophet like him,
is arrested.
So from the spiritual high
of an intense experience of both light and dark,
he now has to decide whether the risks are worth it.
Apparently he does, and goes off preaching.

Just as an aside, Mark is an economic story-teller.
He describes all of that action in seven sentences.
Our tradition lumps Mark in with Matthew and Luke
and so we lose Mark’s point of view.
Jesus was totally human,
had a spiritual awakening as an adult,
knew he was beloved by God,
and it empowered him to do what needed to be done.

And just an FYI,
Mark never proclaims Jesus as the only son of God.
The earliest Gospel doesn’t make that case,
nor offer any notion of a supernatural birth
or extraordinary beginning.
To Mark, Jesus was a human being like us,
who has an intense awakening
and allows it to change him.
Much like Noah, Abraham, and Moses.

When I am in the wilderness
and need a guide and a hand to hold,
I prefer that prophet and messiah
to the one Paul and John proclaim.
But that is just me.

Now, back to our wilderness wandering.

In normal times
the wisdom I would think to follow
is community.
Community is a spiritual practice, you know?
It is the practice of inter-dependence.

In order to practice community
we have to run interference with
the demons of individualism
and self-sufficiency
that whisper we don’t need others —
especially those others not like us.

You know those beasts.
They insist that we resist vulnerability,
that no one is to be trusted,
that we have to look out for Number One.
Those beasts.
They make community difficult, and impossible
if they have taken over.

The practice of community
involves throwing our lot in with others
as if – AS IF –
our well-being and survival
is dependent upon them.
AS IF we are all in this together.
You know, as if we are dependent
upon those who harvest the crops
and slaughter the meat
and drive the produce
and stock the shelves
and sell it to us.
You know, AS IF
we were dependent upon those folks.

That practice of community
also involves an intentional,
and continuous choice
to live connected to people we may not even like.
People we don’t agree with.
People we don’t want to be connected to.
All of that is required because it is real.
Interdependence is the actual nature of the universe
and it does not consider whether the elements in play
like each other or agree with one another.

So you see, the practice of community
is a big, complicated, and even
comprehensive practice
that includes our economic choices
and our political choices
and our social choices,
along with all our more personal choices.

That is why there are so many beasts and demons
at work to keep us from practicing it.
There is a lot of room in there
for those shadows to fly around and create havoc.

But you know, a community
making it forty years in the wilderness together,
like those escaped slaves did,
seems like a more realistic strategy
than waiting forty days in the wilderness
for the angels to arrive.

We are all in this together
whether we want to be or not.
We will do better practicing community
than waiting for the angels.

Plus, it is usually in the practice of community
that we encounter our own belovedness.
Often just after
we have run into our own beasts and demons.

So community is practiced a bit differently
during a pandemic
but the alternative is an awful isolation
that makes social distancing
seem like child’s play.

Welcome to Lent,
and a communal practice
of wilderness wandering.

Share this:

  • Facebook

Filed Under: Sermons Tagged With: community, Lent, Spiritual Practice

Search

Contact

  • Email
    infotrinitygenevany@gmail.com
  • Phone
    (315)325-4216
  • Address
    Trinity Place
    Offices & Program
    PO Box 287
    Geneva, NY 14456

Follow us

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

Staff and Vestry

The Rev. R. Cameron Miller is our rector, which means the resident clergy leader. In addition … Read more

Newsletter

Coming soon!

Links

  • subversivepreacher
  • Episcopal Diocese of Rochester
  • The Episcopal Church

Site Navigation

  • Who
    • History
    • Community Today
    • Staff and Vestry
  • What
    • Worship
    • OUTREACH & ADVOCACY
    • Trinity Place
    • Weddings
  • When
    • Weekly Schedule
  • Where
  • Sermons

Copyright © 2023 · Outreach Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in