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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?

 

 

Last Epiphany C, 2019: Cloud Dancing Without Wings

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Honestly, I am more of a rabbi than a priest,
although I wouldn’t stack up intellectually
with most of the rabbis I have known.

I say I am more rabbi than priest,
because I am much more interested
in juicing the gospel stories
for all their practical spiritual wisdom
than I am ogling at the splashy supernatural stuff.
I want to know what Jesus taught
and where he pointed for us to walk,
rather than be asked to believe events from 2000 years ago
that have never entered the purview of my own experience.
Sure, I can handle the little mystical moments:
the still small voice
and the glimpse of something
through the veil of insight.

But don’t ask me to pass judgment
on water-walking without skies
or cloud-dancing without wings.

I have known plenty of people
graced with the ability to accept such stories
with open arms
and open minds
and open hearts
and I have marveled that they could do so.
I wish that was me,
but I am an unrepentant Thomas
who believes it
only when my own fingers
have felt the slick, wet wounds
and seen the blood stains move.

I am so much more comfortable
with Marie Howe’s description of an inkling of something.
“Once or twice or three times, I saw something
rise from the dust in the yard, like the soul
of the field – rise and hover like a veil in the sun
billowing – as if I could see the wind itself.
I thought I did it – squinting – but I didn’t.
As if the edges of things blurred – so what was in
bled out, breathed up and mingled…I saw it.
It was thing and spirit both: the real
world: evident, invisible.”

I wish Luke had done that with his transfiguration story.
Imagine Luke telling the story
from the poet Marie Howe’s perspective:
“Oh, about eight days after Peter
had sort of, kind of,
acknowledged Jesus as the Christ,
Jesus took Peter, James, and John
and went up on the mountain to pray.

And while Jesus was praying,
the disciples slept, as was their preference.
Peter, slightly aroused by his own snoring,
squinted open the slits of his eyes ever-so-narrowly,
and for an instant, he thought he saw Jesus
with two other people standing in a fog.
‘Once or twice or three times, he saw something
rise from the cloud there on the mountain,
like the very soul of the rock – rise and hover like a veil
in the sun billowing – as if he could see the Almighty itself.
He thought he did – squinting – but he didn’t.’”

You see, if Luke had only written something like that,
it would have been left to our own imaginations.
If he had made it more like a abstract painting,
or a poem
or a song
we could really get into it
and talk about how to interpret it.
Instead, it is more like a coloring book
where we are left to color inside the lines,
and if we don’t, we appear to be woeful scribblers.

Maybe it is just me,
and not very many of you share my struggle.
If so, God bless you for your patience.
Now that I have gotten that off my chest though,
we can move on
and knock on the door these readings lead us to.

Clearly, Luke knows that Jesus
stands in the shadow of Moses
and his story let’s everyone know
that while Moses went up on the mountain with God,
so did Jesus.
While Moses shined with the light of God,
so did Jesus.
While Moses received the commandments from God
so Jesus received wisdom from on high.

Trust me, this parallelism is no coincidence.
All through the gospel stories,
from the birth narrative
to the Passion of his last week and death,
the parallelism between Jesus and Moses,
and Jesus and Elijah, (the other great prophet)
is granular and intentional.

That is because,
in those first generations after Jesus,
Moses and Elijah
were THE frame of reference.
That was the comparison that mattered.
To say Jesus was like Moses and Elijah
was to say the best thing possible about him.

But we do not get it,
because Christianity does not care
about Moses and Elijah
even though Jesus was deeply rooted in a reverence
for both of them.
We care about Paul,
and Augustine and Thomas Aquinas,
maybe even Richard Hooker and Karl Barth,
but we have nearly forgotten
Jesus’ frame of reference:
Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Micah, Amos, and Jeremiah.

So, whatever else this story
about Jesus on the mountain tells us,
it is telling us
Jesus didn’t come out of nowhere,
and he wasn’t the first of his kind.

It is telling us, that what he taught
was wisdom with deep roots,
and points to the prophets that came before him.
That is the first thing that we need to recognize
in this story in front of us:
that Jesus is a continuation of a millennia
of sacred wisdom.

The other thing we might notice,
is the idea that sometimes,
in some places,
with some people
and for a special moment,
that veil
between the human and the holy
thins.

I’m not talking about cloud-dancing
or water-walking,
though maybe some of you have had such spectacular views.
I am talking about moments
when we imagine we saw something;
or suspect that the insight or inkling we’ve received
had a source beyond our own brain;
or interpreted a suddenly fortunate connection
or turn of events, as something more than serendipity.

I doubt any of us here
have ever been enclosed inside a cloud
on top of a mountain
within a whisper of Jesus, Moses and Elijah,
but it would not surprise me at all
to hear many of us have had mountaintop experiences
when a long-term fog dissipated
and suddenly we could see clearly again…and
finally, we could breathe deeply again.

Likewise, it seems doubtful
that any of us have been handed tablets of stone
that set down in no uncertain terms,
the boundaries on our choices and actions.
On the other hand, I would guess
that more than a few of us
have received stunningly clear guidance
when we had been lost and without a clue
as to how we should proceed.
Such an experience is even more astounding
if we didn’t really understand the wisdom at the time
we received it, but
only later, when we were looking back on it.

Most of us, I am guessing,
would be hesitant to report that God spoke to us directly –
in an audible voice,
from out of a cloud
or the back seat of a car.
Yet we may be more willing to share an experience or two
with a friend we trust,
about when God spoke to us with clarity
in the audible voice of another person;
or through the words of a prophet;
or even in the whisper of a dream
or an inner voice.

It would not surprise me at all, in fact,
if there was near universal consensus
about an experience of the sacred
appearing “once or twice or three times”
rising up like dew
in the field of awe
over some natural beauty
or nature’s exquisite symbiosis.

People of faith
are precisely people of faith
because we have been there
when the veil thinned
and something of the holy
leaked through.
It cannot be manufactured
and it cannot be sculpted or controlled,
it can only be witnessed
and experienced.
Most of the time
it cannot even be explained
or described very well.
And, truth be told,
the more dramatic we are in the description
the less likely we are
to convey it.

We should not look
to the bread and wine of communion
to thin that veil,
nor the music,
nor the prayers,
nor the beautiful bond of community,
nor even Exodus and Luke.
But if we come to them with open hearts and minds,
at least in my experience,
we will routinely receive reminders
of those times the veil thinned,
and hints about where to look next,
or a vision of what came through
at some past moment
when the veil thinned between us.

And sometimes, in spite of ourselves,
the liturgy and the bible and the sacraments
do become the vehicles that thinned that veil.

Truth is, unlike my dog, we human beings
rarely live in the moment.
So we need reminders
and encouragement
and rituals.
We even need those difficult stories
like Exodus and Luke today,
so that we struggle instead of get complacent.

But how lovely it is
when those moments arrive like the next tick of a clock
and we become suddenly aware
that something in the moment
has shifted,
and there with us in real time is a presence
or a wisdom
or “a thing and spirit both” –
and we know in our heart of hearts
we saw it or felt it or heard it
and recognized it before it was gone.

Proper 29A, 2017: A chance to clothe the naked

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Nu féminin, craie et charbon 1800

Link to Liturgical Poem – The Star Market, by Marie Howe:https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/01/14/the-star-market

Link to Matthew 25:31-46: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+25:31-46

SERMON

Picture if you will, a magnificent autumn day.

The sky is a deep blue,
the sun unusually intense, even hot
for that time of year.
The leaves were still turning
and so the world was cast in the golden and red glory of fall.
Summer warmth, pleasing colors,
the hum of pleasantness all around.

The church I served was on a Big Ten university campus –
fifty-thousand students, and
twenty-five thousand faculty and staff.
The university was surrounded by dense urban neighborhoods
but still leafy under the canopy of streets lined with
sycamore, maple, beech, and oak.

It was mid-afternoon on a Sunday
and the bishop had visited that morning
for a full complement of youth and adult confirmations,
the pews brimming with people and vitality.
It was just the kind of experience a thirty-six year old priest
wants to show off to his bishop,
especially when only a few years before
the church had been a bit threadbare and dog-eared.

After services, we had taken the bishop and his wife to lunch,
and the conversation was unusually interesting and pleasant.
All felt right with the world, at least my world.
After taking a few minutes to reflect on the morning
in my office, all alone, the voices
and events echoing in my thoughts, I left for home.
Stopped at a red light on the main street,
a north-south urban corridor that ran like a carpet
through the university district,
I did a double-take.
Through the open passenger window
I starred at a twenty-something young man
striding up the street buck-naked.
He walked with purpose,
his strides focused on going somewhere
but in no particular hurry.
Naked as a jaybird,
his partially bald head a tangled mess
of hair exploding akimbo in all directions.

I was speechless – not just because I was alone,
since that never stops me from talking.
But because there was a naked guy
walking up the busy street
as if it was an everyday kind of thing.
The car behind me honked
as the light had turned green.
I felt as though there was something I should do
but I didn’t know what.
The only thing I could think to do at that moment,
was to honk and wave.
So I did.
He did not acknowledge me.

Three blocks later,
stopped at another red light,
looking down at my trench coat
folded over the passenger seat, I suddenly remembered:
“When was I naked and you clothed me?
When you did it for the least of these, you did it for me.”
It had been the gospel reading that day!
And the bishop had preached on it!
No joke.
I kid you not.

How many times in my life
will I have the opportunity to offer my coat
to someone naked in public?
Surely, I had blown my one and only chance,
and clearly, I was a goat.

Caught up in my own urgent business,
I have missed the opportunity
and failed miserably, more than once,
to embody this gospel in real-time when given the chance.
Like you, I have also been able to meet the challenge
many times in my life, but
there are a number of spectacular failures
that haunt me.

Fortunately, such failure is not the last word. Ever.

The contrast between sheep and goats
in this once parable,
now allegoric saying from Matthew,
is not a coincidence.
Granted, it is a contrast lost
on most of us 21st century urbanites,
but for Matthew’s audience,
it would have been a vivid metaphor.
You see, while it is true
that during the day the sheep and goats were mixed together,
at night the shepherd had to separate them.
It turns out, goats need better shelter than sheep –
sheep are hardier than goats,
so they need less protection at night.

That is an interesting twist
if the goats are supposed to represent the bad guys
and the sheep the good guys.
But that is just an interesting side point.
The real kicker in this story is its focus.
Remember, an ancient parable has only a single focus –
a contrast between two elements.
It is easy to take our eyes off the simple contrast
and wander into the cattails of characters
inhabiting the sidelines.
But the contrast in this story,
the one holding the original parable,
is probably between the kingdom of God
and the act of separation.

The focus is not on the shepherd (Jesus).
The focus is not on the sheep (the least of these).
The focus is not on the goats (those who neglect the least of these).
Sad to say, but this teaching
is not really about that good old liberal social action agenda
to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. Sorry.
Rather, it is about separating,
and whether or not to separate,
sheep and goats.

Matthew has likely taken a parable spoken by Jesus,
that was a simple contrast between the kingdom of God
and the act of separation,
and written it into a complex metaphor
about the end of time
and the last judgment.

Matthew wants us to see our situation in life
as a single, either-or decision –
a zero-sum game in which a success for the good guys
is a loss for the bad guys,
and vice versa.
Matthew, in an urgent plea to his generation,
a full fifty years after Jesus had been executed,
paints the existential question as one about
whether we follow Jesus or not:
The sheep are in, they follow Jesus;
the goats are out, they do not.

I do not think that such bifurcated alienation
is what Jesus had in mind, rather,
I think it is a product of Matthew’s moment in time…
and ours.
You and I are in an alienated kind of moment –
sheep or goat,
right or wrong,
in or out;

Trump or not-Trump;

Republican or Democrat;
white or black;
English or bi-lingual;
born here or immigrated;
gun control or none;
choice or never;
fluid gender or as-assigned;
Christian or not,
even Trinity or St. Peter’s…

The molten issues between hardened lines
leaves little room for relationship.

We are separated.
It is enough to make a person sick, literally.

We can see with our own eyes,
it is enough to make a society diseased and ill.

It eats away at our humanity,
dissolving the veneer of grace and hospitality
that protects us from tribal warfare.

I do not believe Jesus was a champion
of vivisecting humanity
with a sword of judgment, dividing people
between those loved by God
and those unloved and abandoned by God.

It is true that the later followers of Jesus,
Paul and the gospel editors,
did see the world in such terms,
and that later the institution of the church
practiced a scorched-earth policy
of us verses them.
But if we pull the blanket back
on the teachings of Jesus,
I think we hear something else.

Jesus did not speak in one-size-fits-all terms,
that is a piece of his genius.
If we listen carefully to the parables and stories
handed down to us, even
through the distortion of later editor’s filters,
we can still hear the graduated tones of nuance.

When Jesus speaks, there is a message
for those who follow him closely,
but also a word to those who are in the crowd listening;
and there is a little something for the hostile too;
and even a message for those who are indifferent.

There is no way to know this for certain,
but it seems to me, Jesus spoke to each audience differently
and with different expectations – or perhaps
different invitations.
In other words, following Jesus is not for everyone.
In fact, I doubt that Jesus invited everyone to follow him,
or would even have recommended it to everyone.
And it is for certain, that the love of God
does not hang upon a condition
that we follow Jesus or be severed, then cast
into the outer darkness where the pitiful unloved shrivel.

Even the decision to follow Jesus
is not an all-at-once, or once-and-for-all, kind of action.
It is a decision, once made,
that we come to again and again and again,
as we fail to clothe the naked in front of us
and then remember or realize how to do it another time.

Instead of a straight line from us to Jesus,
as if a dart on its way to a bullseye,
following Jesus looks much more like a meandering river
snaking its way through mountains.
There are, and will be,
times when we are more like the experience
Marie Howe describes at the Star Market –
when we are freaked out or repulsed
by the needs of those around us.
Other times, compassion will well up within us
and empower our action, as if on a massive dose of steroids.
Each time is a new time,
and each time a discrete opportunity
to move from hostile voice in the crowd
to loyal follower,
or from a voyeur watching Jesus from a distance
to someone a little further up in the crowd,
nearly able to touch him.

But either way, sheep or goat,
close or distant,
disciple or agnostic,
God holds us in the arms of love
and we are inseparably connected to the Holy One
who created us from dust,
and imbued us with life – the actual breath of God within us.
We are not standing on the precipice
of light and outer darkness,
rather, we are held within the light at all times
whether or not we feel lost in the dark.
The ones we consider the enemy
have no true separation from us;
they are not either, nor are they or.

The enemy, those who are utterly wrong,
them that oppose us
and those that reject us,
are only goats because we see ourselves as sheep.
The truth is, we are both one and the same.

Following Jesus, it seems to me, looks a lot more like
knitting together alienated sides
and stitching up the open wounds of rancor,
than it does choosing sides
between them and us
or sheep and goats.
And we get to do it over and over and over again
instead of once and for all.

I hope that naked fella found his clothes
or got somewhere he didn’t need any.
But I am also grateful to him,
because of him, I became a bit less alienated that day.

Thanks be to God.

 

Trinity Place

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).

 

 

 

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