Anniversary of the Dedication of St. Mary's Episcopal Church

Genesis 28.10-17
1 Peter 2.1-5, 9-10
Matthew 21.12-16

From ancient times, human beings have set apart sacred space. In the Bible, such spaces are typically associated with great events – times of thanksgiving or deliverance or intense encounters with the divine. You have all read or heard these stories. These encounters between God and humanity occur in what seem to be ordinary places and they appear to be unique events. But the places where they occur frequently begin to attract people. They take on the character of holiness as of the result of those events. Locations that are sanctified by a unique experience of divine presence become identified as places where God is experienced at all times.
Our church building did not come about in that way. The holiness of our sacred space began with a building that suspends time and invites reverence. It grew from there through the lives that were touched by this place- the joys, sorrows, failures and accomplishments are reflected within its history and its fabric.
Today we begin a six-week celebration of some of those persons whose lives were touched by this building. It is called “The Saints of St. Mary’s.” We aren’t the first to use that expression or to identify these persons as saints. Their faith and their spiritual legacy to us merit the recognition and thanksgiving of every new generation of parishioners. Today as we celebrate the anniversary of the dedication of this building, we take particular note of William Halsey Wood, the architect who designed it and the Rev’d. John Sword, the Rector at the time of its construction.
William Halsey Wood was a high church Episcopalian from the day he was born. He was a choir boy as a child and served his apprenticeship in the firm of a well-known architect of the High-Church movement in England. Wood embraced the principles of the Oxford movement as an ideal and translated them into designs to be realized in bricks and mortar. His career was sadly brief. He died at the age of 41. He was fortunate to have a combination of innate skill and excellent training that allowed him to advance to the mature phase of his career in his late 20s. Wood was described by Ralph Adams Cram, one of the great church architects of the last century, as someone who understood the meaning of gothic as well as the most accomplished 13th century stone mason. But he was enough of a modernist to design a building with a space between the inner and outer brick walls that gave St. Mary’s the distinction of being the coolest church in town during hot weather. Wood lived and worked in the midst of a theoretical and stylistic transition in architecture. He died before his part in that transition was fully realized. The church that he designed for us would live on through many great transitions.
In the spring of 1886, parishioners of St. Mary’s were only a few months past the shocking death of their rector, Fr. Jardine. In March of that year, the Vestry issued a call to The Rev’d. John Sword. A month later, they hired an architect to design this church and they broke ground for it four months after that. There had been some controversy over building the church on this spot which the parish had received as a bequest from Mary Troost. Some people thought it was too far out in the country. They wanted to build at 11th & Central. The history of the Episcopal Church in Kansas City might have been very different if they had. But Fr. Sword is said to have persuaded them that the city was going to grow in this direction.
The Vestry took the bold step of selling the land where the old church building stood and demolishing the building. You can see a picture of that building with Fr. Sword and Fr. Betts standing on the front porch hanging on the wall by the entrance to the nave. The congregation moved to this building and worshipped in what we now call the parish hall while the nave was being constructed. They expected to spend $75,000 on the building and they had enough money in hand to do it without incurring any debt. And then the tower began to lean. It appears that the tower was constructed close enough to an underground spring for the water to have undermined its foundation. No one knew the spring was there until it was too late. The Vestry discussed their possible options, one of which was to take the architect or the builder to court to get some money out of the deal. In the end they decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. Fr. Sword had left a law practice to enter the priesthood. One wonders if his past experience informed the judgment of the Vestry. They borrowed $12,000 rebuilt the tower and finished the building.
It opened in early June, 1888. Fr. Sword proved to be right – people did move into the neighborhood. He stayed another three years and then resigned to move back east, much to the disappointment of the Vestry. When the building opened, the windows were made of small panes of colored glass alternating with clear glass. You can still see one if you look up the little stairway going up to the balcony in the corner of the nave. The rood screen wasn’t yet installed, the organ was the little instrument in the chapel, there were no stations of the cross. People began to fill this space with the stories of their lives. They began with a few things from the old building at 8th & Walnut: the wooden cross suspended in the rafters, the window in the northwest balcony that you can see if you look closely at the picture of the old building; the desk at the main entrance made from materials salvaged after the old church was demolished.
The first couple to be married here celebrated their wedding in October 1889 with Fr. Sword officiating. They were William and Georgine Huddle Stephens. The St. Stephen window in the north balcony was a gift in memory of William. The window that the congregation brought with them from the old building was a memorial to a child who died at the age of three. Her parents made the move with St. Mary’s from 8th & Walnut to 13th & Holmes. The daughter’s window is the small round one in the northwest balcony. When her father died about 10 years after this building was constructed, his wife gave a window in his memory – the far right window on the west wall. When she died, a window was created in her memory and installed next to her daughter’s window. It’s hard to see that one from the nave, but there’s a picture of it in our tour guidebook. This family is the reason why the windows on the west wall are out of order. You see gethsemane, then the resurrection then the ascension. The risen Christ should be the next one in line, but it’s all the way at the other end. It was installed there so that the windows memorializing this husband and wife and their child would be as close together as possible.
This sacred space of ours ties us to other people and other times. It also links us with other places. William Halsey Wood designed more than forty churches in a 16-year time span. One of them was St. Mary’s Cathedral in Memphis. One of our windows commemorates a tragic and momentous event in the life of that city that is woven into the history of the Episcopal Church – the priests and nuns who lost their lives in the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 who are known as the martyr’s of Memphis. Their image is prominent in that other church that our architect designed. An unlikely pairing between Kansas city and the Yukon territory is reflected in our sled dog window in the northwest balcony. Its subject – an English archdeacon named Hudson Stuck was a missionary there. A parishioner of St. Mary’s by the name of Hannah Ragan was a great supporter of church missionary activities and particularly interested in the exotic endeavors of Archdeacon Stuck. Miss Ragan was eventually homebound by chronic illness. Her friends created a window in thanksgiving for her and gave St. Mary’s one of the most curious works of art displayed in a Kansas City church.
The stories of William Halsey Wood and John Sword are only a few stories reflected in the fabric of this building. Those stories – the lives lived in relationship to this building – impart its sacredness. It has been entrusted to us. It is a heavy responsibility which does not always translate easily into late twentieth and twenty-first century values that involve calculations of cost and efficiency and economies of scale. This is an age when decommissioned Wal-Mart stores frequently become houses of worship. Whether they become sacred space, I don’t know.
Today we give thanks and bless the new doors that have been installed at the many entrances to our church. Some of them you have seen at the main entrance, the west end of the parish hall and the tower room. One of them you may not have paid attention to. It’s visible on the northeast corner of the building as you drive west on 13th Street. It is the exterior entrance to the sacristy. Interior remodeling has made it impractical to use this entrance any more, but as the doors were being renovated, we discovered the original 1888 door in that location under a newer outer batten. We removed the outer covering, restored and protected the door and it is there now. Fr. John Sword no doubt walked through it several days a week.
In dedicating these doors, we give thanks for those who have added a new chapter to the story of St. Mary’s church: The members of the Vestry and Building Work Group who guided the decision making, Susan Richards Johnson and Julie Arntson, the architects for the project, Richard Herndon, the engineer, Bryan Parris the builder who fabricated the doors and the Kemper family whose generous gift supported the work.
Faith, commitment, determination and love built this building and filled its space with life stories. Its future is in our hands now. The community outside our parish will help, but we have to show them that we are committed to the keeping alive the story of this building and the lives it has touched in three different centuries and across time and place in this – our sacred space.

Pentecost 16

Wisdom of Solomon 1.16-2.1, 12-22
James 3.13-4.3, 7-8a
Mark 9.30-37
A recent news item reported that two teen-age Australian girls were spending some free time together and decided it would be fun to explore a storm drain in an area fairly close to where they lived. They jumped down into it, looked around for a while and then tried to climb out. They couldn’t do it. Fortunately, both had mobile phones and they were well within signal range. But instead of calling for help from family members or police, each girl updated her status on her Facebook page, indicating that she was trapped in a storm drain and noting its location. Then they settled in to wait for their rescuers. A friend of both girls noticed their identical status and thought it was a joke. Hours later, when the friend had visited Facebook several times, he noted that neither girl’s status had changed and began to wonder if there might be more to it. It had apparently not occurred to their parents that anything was wrong. The friend called for help and the two girls were rescued no worse for wear.
Another recent news item reported a public meeting organized by the office of a congressional representative to allow him to communicate with his constituents about health care reform. One of them arrived carrying a sign that read “keep the government out of my Medicare.”
The prison system in California is running at 190% of capacity. The overcrowding has led to escalating levels of violence. A recent news report described a proposed rehabilitation program. Inmates who were willing to go through it could have their sentences shortened by a few weeks or months, thus reducing the prison population. These are people who had committed serious crimes and served long sentences. The reduction of time was reportedly a small fraction of what they had already served. The program requires approval by the state legislature and attorney general, which it is reportedly unlikely to receive. The reason has little to do with the quality of the program, its anticipated effectiveness or the likelihood of a favorable outcome. It is because several persons whose approval is critical to the program’s implementation are fearful that if an inmate who obtains early release commits a violent crime, the resulting publicity will threaten their ability to get re-elected.
Our lessons today speak of wisdom, the good life, and good works. They focus on justice and the courage to seek and obtain it even when that requires sacrifice. The wisdom books in the Old Testament fall into a category of Jewish scripture known as the writings. Included among them are books that actually have the word “Wisdom” in their titles in English language Christian Bibles, along with the books of Proverbs and Job. Among the distinguishing characteristics of the writings are their tendency to come from sources that are more urban than nomadic, more associated with the political than the agrarian, and less influenced by Israel’s sense of being “set apart” from foreign cultures than we see in the books of the law and the prophets. The wisdom literature is more cosmopolitan. Its origins are not in the tribe or village, but in the king’s court, where trade and diplomacy necessitate the exchange of ideas with outsiders.
Those real-life examples of apparently willful cluelessness and deliberate inaction in the face of crisis that I mentioned earlier are 180o opposite from the kind of wisdom and courage that are spoken of in today’s lessons. And yet they are much more like the kind of behavior we typically witness in everyday life than the noble sacrifice and wise understanding that are spoken of in the texts from James and the Wisdom of Solomon.
The absence from our culture of the kind of wisdom, civility, inclination to sacrifice and sense of community that these lessons address is frequently noted, but remains largely unaddressed. We tend to note the injustices we and others like us suffer from the bad behavior of others, but we are less inclined to explore areas in which we might lack wisdom or the will to take action because the cost is too high. You might imagine that churches would lend a hand to the effort. But in practice, they have frequently been part of the problem rather than contributing to the solution. Or the effectiveness of their efforts has been limited by internal squabbling over the best course of action.
We make frequent reference to Jesus’ sacrifice on our behalf. But that sacrifice was not intended merely as a gift – it was a lesson about how we are to live our lives. Jesus’ example for us was of a wisdom that seeks truth even when it is complex or obscured by circumstance or deliberate misinformation. As his followers, we are called to do things like identifying injustice or the misuse of creation, call them what they are, and take action to change them. We’re called to put in the effort of being knowledgeable – of understanding what’s going on in the world aroud us. We are called to communicate our ideas respectfully and to acknowledge the heartfelt, thoughtful opinions of others, but also to challenge inaccuracies, particularly those that result from laziness in gathering information. We are called to seek resolutions to serious problems with determination and humility, working with those who share our opinions as well as those with whom we disagree. Following Jesus’ example, we do all these things with courage and the knowledge that it may cost us something.
We seek to live patiently, thoughtfully and prayerfully in a world that has grown accustomed to instant analysis and gratification, no matter how useless or unsatisfying they might be. We are called to work hard at forming relationships and solving problems in a world that seems willing to make do with sound bites and superficial connections. We are called to serve justice and peace, sometimes at the expense of our own comfort or well being.
The problems we face – economic, environmental and social will not be solved by waiting until someone – human or divine comes to rescue us. They will not be solved by ignoring desperate human need and hoping it will somehow go away. They will certainly not be solved by circulating distorted facts, provoking useless conflict or attempting to intimidate and destabilize those who offer their gifts for leadership.
In a recent Vestry meeting it was noted that in difficult times, Christians step in and take on the challenges that seem insurmountable. We do the things that others are afraid to do. It is the task of the righteous one who follows the path of wisdom, patience and peace. The cost of doing so is described in today’s lesson from the Wisdom of Solomon. It is to be threatened, ridiculed, and opposed by those who are envious or who seek to distort the truth for their own gain. The cost can be high and the reward is often fleeting and frequently realized in the long term, but it is how we draw near to God and God draws near to us.

Pentecost 8

2 Samuel 11:1-15
Psalm 14
Ephesians 3:14-21
John 6:1-21

How much is enough? Living in a culture in which people have had to recalibrate their expectations rather dramatically in the last year, we hear a lot about how and where there isn’t enough: the budget wrangling in California, arguing in congress over what to do about health care and how much that’s going to cost, coping with a spouse’s layoff. We hear a lot about where and when and how there is not enough, but what really is enough?
In today’s gospel lesson, Jesus asks Philip – “where are we going to buy bread for all these people.” Philip answers a completely different question. Jesus asks about method. Philip’s reply is about feasibility – he tells Jesus there’s no way because the resources aren’t available; six months wages wouldn’t buy enough food for this crowd. Andrew finds a kid with a few loaves of bread and some fish. Jesus gathers the people together, gives thanks and everyone has enough to eat.
What is the real solution to our feeling of emptiness? It’s no surprise that many religious traditions express their most profound realities with ritual consumption of and abstention from food. Being hungry is the simplest and most obvious reminder that human beings have empty spaces within that need to be filled. Our fasts and our ritual meals heighten our awareness of that inevitable sense of space that cries out to be filled. We 21st century westerners have been encouraged to fill that space with the desire for and consumption of things – cars, houses, phones, fast food. Most of us here at least had a feeling that unfettered consumption really wasn’t going to be the answer. So what would it mean to have enough – regardless of how difficult things get, regardless of the extent of our personal losses, regardless of whether the communities from which we gather our meaning and identity disintegrate, is there something that could still fill the empty places within us?
The text from Ephesians gets at that. The letter to the Ephesians speaks to a maturing, self-aware faith community than Paul’s letters of a decade or two after Jesus’ death. The church in Ephesus has seemingly moved beyond the urgent preparation for Christ’s return that consumed the earliest churches. When it didn’t happen immediately, they began to look elsewhere for meaning and purpose. Today’s epistle text invites the hearer to look within – to be strengthened in his inner being with power through the indwelling spirit of Christ which is realized through faith and rooted and grounded in love.
What would it mean to be filled with the fullness of God. How would we do that. Is there a way for us to carry God in those empty spaces inside us. Can doing that create in us a sense that whatever else we have or don’t have, that fullness of God is enough?
I admit, I struggle with achieving that sense. When I realize the needs of this parish, the uncertainty of our ability to go on given the resources available to us, the demands of this building and the work we have undertaken it feels like I am faced with a bottomless well of empty space. I am like Philip saying to Jesus – who cares where we would buy bread for all these people if we don’t have the money to do it.
But when I take a moment to consider what God has accomplished in this parish, not just in the time I’ve been here or even in the time Dick and Betty Herndon have been here, but over 150 years, I begin to understand what faith, rooted and grounded in love can accomplish. In the last two years, we, as a community have experienced substantial growth. We’ve made a start on another major effort to preserve this building as a reminder in space and time of the richness of God’s glory. St. Mary’s has never been a wealthy parish and has only on relatively rare and fleeting occasions been financially comfortable. But somehow those who were here before us found a way to carry on.
Their legacy to us is the challenge to find that sense of being filled with the fullness of God, as one of those families in heaven and on earth that bows before and takes its name from the Father whose power, working within us is able to accomplish far more than all that we could ask or imagine.

Pentecost 6

2 Samuel 6.1-5, 12b-19
Psalm 24
Ephesians 1.3-14
Mark 6.14-29

We have an odd collection of lessons today. The OT and gospel lessons are both about resentful women. Saul’s daughter despises David who arguably outshone her father as king. Herod’s wife resents John the Baptist for criticizing her marriage. In between them is this gentle and urgent message from Ephesians about how much God loves us. If I as preacher, were a contestant on iron chef, these lessons would be analogous to me being presented with a trout, a dozen lemons and a bag of ice as the ingredients for a meal.
May I suggest that the OT and gospel lessons could be about the inevitable consequences of claiming divine inspiration or divine mandate? No matter how many people support or agree with your claims, you are guaranteed to scare some people with them and arouse the disagreement of others, if not in your own time, at some point in the future. All of these folks will try to prove you wrong and sometimes they will be right. David in today’s Old Testament lesson gets off fairly easy. He becomes a legendary leader with some notable moral imperfections. John the Baptist does not fare so well. John is a prophet – an astute moral critic of his place and time who claims a divine mandate to take his critique out into the world and try to change it. Herod is certainly one of the targets of his criticism. Strangely enough, he likes to listen to John. Who knows what emotional or intellectual kinship could exist between the two of them – maybe the mutual understanding of two guys with unpleasant jobs they can’t get out of doing?
Herod is duped into ordering John’s execution when John’s moral critique touches on Herod’s marriage and his wife takes offense. Messengers get killed all the time. The ones whose honesty and courage suggest divine inspiration drives their work seem to get killed particularly often.
The information we have about Saul and David from the Bible makes claims on their behalf for divine inspiration or mandate. Did their actions do justice to that claim? There are probably some who would argue that David’s legacy is comparable to that of Jesus or Mohammed. And there are Christians who would be very angry that I would even say that out loud.
The General Convention of the Episcopal Church meeting in Anaheim right now is arguing over what it means to do God’s will. The big fight right now is how we’re going to treat gay and lesbian members of the church – will they will be accorded the same access to all of the sacraments as other baptized persons or does their manner of life present sufficient challenge to some members of the church as to warrant their exclusion from marriage and ordination? Persons on both sides of that argument have made claims that their position is supported by the teachings of the gospel. And persons on both sides believe their opinions and actions are inspired by God. What are the consequences of making such a claim?
Some of you know that one of the initiatives funded by the grant we received a few months ago from the Kemper Foundation was to create a tour guidebook for St. Mary’s. That book is close to being handed over to the printer and it came to mind when I was considering this question. The book contains color photos of all of our windows along with descriptions of their content and some information about the people who gave them and in whose honor they were given. One of our most eye-catching windows is the last rectangular one in the north balcony – which most people seem to call the “sled dog” window. Everyone wants to know who that guy is – and why a midwestern church has a window with a dog musher on it. The man in the picture is an English Archdeacon named Hudson Stuck. He was a missionary in Alaska and the Yukon between about 1895 and 1920. He had no connection with St. Mary’s except that the parishioner in whose honor the window was given was a supporter of the church’s overseas missionary work and was particularly interested in his. Archdeacon Stuck traveled around what is now the state of Alaska and the Yukon territory of Canada. You can imagine him providing food and clothing and health care along with spiritual care for the small, far flung and diverse population across a large area of land. No doubt in his day and time he would have been considered divinely inspired and doing the Lord’s work. I don’t know a lot of the details of his day to day activity or the inner workings of his mind. But given where and when he undertook his mission, you would have to allow for the possibility that he was also engaged in what we now call the sin of racism against the aboriginal peoples he was called to convert to Christianity. I don’t imagine we will ever know for certain whether that is true, but even if we discovered that it was, we’re not going to smash that window. It’s part of the story of who we are as a parish and as a larger church.
Two windows to the right of the sled dog window you see a scene in which people are gathered around a sick person’s bed. The subject of the window is a group of people known as the Martyrs of Memphis. When an epidemic of yellow fever struck the city in 1878, more than half of the city’s population fled, including many medical personnel and clergy. Those who remained behind were too old, too poor or already too sick to travel. A group of nuns and priests, who had the option to leave, remained in the city to care for the sick. When the epidemic ended, only 800 of the 21,000 persons who had remained during the epidemic were still alive. The dead included all but one of the group who are memorialized in our window. In their place and time they claimed a divine mandate and made a very clear moral statement about the availability of health care to all who need it. Our General Convention is dealing with a resolution that we hope will make health insurance more affordable to parishes that provide it to their clergy. This discussion takes place against the backdrop of our national debate over health care - if and how we will assure its availability to all who need it.
The last rectangular window before the tower in the north balcony and the last one on the right in the south balcony tell us about the unintended consequences of political and governmental claims of divine mandate. The window on the north side shows Archbishop William Laud emerging from his cell in the Tower of London on the way to his execution. He was a high churchman who supported an unpopular king who was also a high churchman. When England’s pendulum swung in an evangelical direction, the adherents of that position not only gained control of the church, but of the government as well. When those whose past claims of divine mandate fall out of favor or out of power, those who come after them have to gain control of the present and they have to figure out how to change God’s mind in the past tense. Frequently, like Herod’s wife, they simply mow down whatever reminders exist of God’s supposed prior opinion. William Laud and his king were casualties of such action.
On the south side, is a window representing Samuel Seabury, first bishop of the Episcopal Church of the United States. Many of you know his story. At the end of the revolutionary war, Anglicans in the United States were in trouble. There was no model for our church except that which existed in England and its colonies. There were no bishops in our new nation. Bishops in England were unwilling to ordain them and, in any case, American bishop could not swear the required oath to the British crown. Among the founding principles of the new country was one which outlawed such ties between religion and government. The church had to set aside its past beliefs and claims that religion and government ought to go hand in hand if it hoped to survive. The priest Samuel Seabury, was put on a boat to Scotland where three bishops agreed to ordain him. He made it there and back safely and the new church once again had the leadership it needed to maintain its identity. And only a few years later, Seabury was arguing with his brother bishops – whose ordinations he had brought about – over the location for the General Convention and which of them would be the presider at its meetings. Some things never change.
I don’t pretend to have any answers about the truth or wisdom of claims for divine mandate. It seems we only know whether those claims are true in hindsight – long after the claimants are dead and gone and it is left to others to deal with the consequences of their actions. Given that knowledge, it seems wise at least to be cautious about making such claims and instead focus on the blessings offered to us and the sacrifices made on our behalf that the Epistle lesson reminds us of – in particular, that Christ’s plan for us is brought about and known in the fullness of time. If that is true, then what we or anyone else does in our time and place ought to be considered with thoughtfulness and generosity of spirit and but also with the understanding that it is our best judgment based on the information we have at hand. As the text from Ephesians reminds us, we are to be a people of forgiveness, grace and generosity; we are a people of promise, rather than perfection. With those gifts in mind, we gather as community to find out way in our own place and time.

Pentecost 5

2 Samuel 5:1-5, 9-10
Psalm 48
2 Corinthians 12:2-10
Mark 6:1-13

What does it mean for power to be made perfect in weakess? We usually understand the term ‘perfect’ to mean flawless. More likely in the text from 2 Corinthians, perfect is meant to mean completed or finished. So, how then is power made complete in weakess?
Jesus and Paul lived in a society in which the economy and social order were organized in networks of clients and patrons. Relationships between individuals involved the exchange of resources, power and influence for loyalty. The one with more to offer made a share available to the one who had less in exchange for the lesser’s loyalty and service. The feudal system of land ownership and tenancy is a similar one. Within such a system, society is one long, complicated pecking order. Public religious rituals, such as the sacrifices in pagan temples that Paul notes in his letters, were symbolic expressions of the network of relationships through which society was organized. The important thing in such a society is having some characteristic or resource that makes you valuable to someone who has what you need. If you have nothing to trade on, you can’t work your way into the network.
It’s no accident that Jesus sends the twelve out to preach and heal without extra food or clothing or a plan for where they will stay at night. It forces them to interact with the people they encounter. It also offers those people a different idea about how the world might be organized. The new model is one in which people are valued for themselves – not for their usefulness to someone more powerful. The weakness of the twelve – their lack of food, extra clothing or a plan for lodgings - challenges the assumptions of those they encounter about what people are supposed to mean to each other. The resource that the twelve offer isn’t anything material, nor is it power or influence. It is a new way of thinking about who and how people are as individual beings and in relation to each other. What they offer is the conviction that they and every other person are valuable for no other reason than being loved by God. In the prevailing culture and economy, that knowledge shouldn’t count for much, but in reality, it gives these seemingly powerless disciples the power to change the way the world works. Their power is made complete by their weakness.
Today’s gospel lesson is a reminder that ultimately the good news is transmitted by personal encounters that embody its message. We all have a part in this. Frequently it has little to do with explaining the traditions of the church or quoting the Bible. It has to do with encountering others with the attitude that all of us are valuable because we are loved by God by virtue of our humanity. When we really believe that to be true, it changes the way we know ourselves and the way we encounter others – regardless of who we are, what we have or how well we do what we do; and, regardless of whatever else we have to offer them or they us. Those encounters have the ability to change the way other people feel about themselves and their subsequent encounters change others. That’s how Jesus brought the good news to the world and it really hasn’t changed that much.
For some time now we’ve lived with an undercurrent of fear and anxiety. People are afraid they’re not going to have enough of what they need – a way to earn money, food, a place to live, the things they need to care for their families. All of those things are important and right now many of us are feeling powerless to control the circumstances that control our continued access to them. This is an opportunity to reconsider our priorities and the way we understand ourselves. Are we and others valuable because of our participation in an economy of winners and losers or are we valuable because God created us and loves us. It is a time for us to remember Paul’s words: I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, I am strong.

Pentecost 4

2 Samuel1
2 Corinthians 8.7-15
Mark 5.21-43

Our religious practices and our habits of mind direct us toward separating out things that are holy from things that aren’t. The Old Testament stories about the ark of the covenant detail the elaborate measures for safeguarding the tablets on which the law is written. Early on, when Israel is still a nomadic culture they are consigned to a container called the ark which is transported with great ceremony from one place to another. The tent in which the ark rests between its travels may only be entered by certain people. Later on when the temple is constructed, the measures for setting apart the tablets from the everyday world become even more elaborate. Fewer and fewer people are allowed to get anywhere near them.
Church architecture adopted that attitude of setting apart the holy from the everyday. The medieval Europeans gave us things like the rood screen and the chancel gate. Their churches, like ours, were used for many purposes other than worship. Sharing of the space was non-negotiable. Frequently the church was the only building in town that would accommodate a large gathering of people. But there was a sense that the religious identity of the building had somehow to be cordoned off and left untouched by all of the other more ordinary activities that happened there. So the parts of the building that were deemed holiest, the altar and its surrounding space, were separated off by barriers. We still have the gate, but we keep it open. We very intentionally offer the building for gatherings other than worship, but when we have visitors, we invite them to approach the altar, hear its story and learn its history. Almost invariably, they are hesitant even to ask, until they are invited.
There are good reasons for recognizing the distinction of that which is holy from that which is ordinary. There are other good reasons for blurring that distinction. One of the things that happens when we put a lot of energy into making that distinction, is that we come to think of holiness as something that is fragile and in need of protection. It is a next logical step from the practice of distinguishing between holy and ordinary. Works of art that are on public display have protective barriers around them, not unlike the ones that are built into churches. Centuries-old sculptures, paintings and documents are vulnerable to the effects of light, temperature and pollutants that cause their fabric to deteriorate. They won’t survive a lot of handling or exposure to the elements. We frequently represent holiness with materials that are fragile or very valuable: precious metals, fine fabrics, elaborate but fragile ornamentation. We remind ourselves that holiness is something extraordinary with these extraordinary surroundings. But we also put ourselves in the habit of assuming that holiness is as fragile as those things with which we surround and represent it.
Today’s gospel lesson is a reminder that holiness is in no way fragile. It is enduring and plentiful. It merits our respect, but does not require our efforts to defend its survival or its integrity. The text comes from Mark’s gospel in which Jesus is portrayed as an itinerant holy man, a preacher and wonder worker – a type of individual that was not at all unfamiliar to Mark’s contemporaries. In one part of the story, a woman who had been ill for years is healed by touching Jesus’ clothing. In another, a girl who appears already to have died from her illness is made well at Jesus’ command. In all three of the synoptic gospels, holiness as it is manifest in Jesus is out there in the real world – unprotected, unreserved, fearless of being used up or somehow made less holy by its exposure to real life. Jesus’ holiness does not require defense, it does not require any special handling in order to be kept pure. It survives all manner of accusation and ill treatment, even the worst death imaginable.
In Mark’s gospel Jesus’ holiness imparts wholeness and integrity to those who encounter it. They are able to live what they believe, regardless of the challenges and struggles they face. In today’s gospel lesson, the encounter with Jesus’ holiness happily ends one woman’s struggle to regain health and restores wellness of body and mind to another whose life is despaired of by her loved ones.
We as a nation are struggling now with issues pertaining to our health. The costs and sacrifices involved in getting well and staying well have reached a crisis point. It seems that it costs too much for us to be healthy. Those costs lie in the sacrifice of profits by businesses that create and sell foods and beverages and other products that contribute to various conditions of illness, as well as the effort and disappointment required for us as individually to modify our unhealthy habits in healthier directions. Those costs lie in the decision to reduce the profit generating potential of a health insurance system that costs a fortune but still excludes some from coverage and leaves others in a state of financial ruin after an illness. The cost may be a shift in our attitudes about what personal responsibility means – away from the idea that health care is a consumer-driven choice, available only to those who have the means to participate in our consumer culture to a decision that it should and will be something that all of us have when we need it. Paul speaks of a balance between want and excess in today’s lesson from 2 Corinthians. Changing our culture to reflect that attitude that health ought not be unaffordable for anyone will not be as simple as the woman being healed by touching Jesus’ clothing. But as a nation, we have chosen to do things that are equally challenging and eventually succeeded.
As a church and as a culture we are struggling also with the defense of another kind of holiness. Today we observe the 40th anniversary of an event that is understood as the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States – the encounters between police, patrons and bystanders at the Stonewall Inn in New York in June 1969. In their time, those events were hardly covered at all by the media and are certainly not as well known as many of the other watershed moments in our nation’s quest to achieve and safeguard the basic human rights of all persons. As a nation, and as a church, we have set apart marriage as a state of holiness to be defended, both legally and liturgically. It is argued that if two men or two women are permitted to marry each other, both in the eyes of the law and with the blessing of the church, somehow the goodness and integrity the marriage as an institution will be impaired. A glance at the news in any given week reveals yet another adulterous adventure by a public figure, many of whom have, at one time or another, aggressively defended the sanctity of marriage against any modification. If Elliot Spitzer and Mark Sanford haven’t impaired the sanctity of marriage, Adam and Steve aren’t going to hurt it. The lifelong covenant of two spouses in heart, body and mind for their mutual joy and their support in prosperity and adversity is one expression of God’s understanding in the creation story that human beings are not meant to live alone. Friendship and community are equally important expressions of that reality, but the holiness of any of these forms of human companionship is not lessened by their being shared generously and unreservedly to those who are called to participate in them.
Our habit as human beings is to set apart those things we consider to be valuable and determine criteria for who gets to have them and who doesn’t. We seem always to need to choose some category of persons who don’t qualify for whatever it is we hold dear. We characterize our actions as defending the importance, perhaps even the sacredness of whatever we have set apart. Today’s gospel lesson reminds us that holiness does not need to be defended or rationed. It is a boundless gift from the God who was and is and will be forever.

Pentecost 3

1 Samuel 17.1a, 4-11, 19-23, 32-49
Psalm 9.9-20
2 Corinthians 6.1-13
Mark 4.35-41

Today’s lessons made me think about the final episodes of a couple of television series I’ve seen in the last year or two. One was the Sopranos and the other was the new Battlestar Galactica. Most of you know something about the former. For those of you who don’t know about Battlestar Galactica, it’s a tv show that explores, among other things, the question: what if the end of the world ended up being not all that different from everyday life.
We know from all of the commentary that followed upon it that the final episode of the Sopranos had a lot of people looking at the televisions asking “is that it?” The ending pointed two a couple of possibilities, but didn’t tell you which of them actually came about. And one of those possibilities was that life went on for the Soprano family (both immediate and extended) not terribly differently than it had before – dealing with emerging crises, finding new ways to generate income and getting together for dinner on Sunday afternoon. Violence and sorrow struck the family in shocking ways, but you could argue that such things were fairly commonplace for them. There was no great moral reckoning on screen.
The same was true of the final episode of Battlestar Galactica. Crisis was once again upon the crew of the ship and its leaders had to make an agonizing life and death decision, but they had been doing that on a weekly basis, if not more frequently, for several years by the end of the series. When Nelson and I came to the end of the final episode, I turned to him and said “is that it?”
We like a hollywood ending. We’re probably accustomed by now to it being something other than “they all lived happily ever after” but we like some closure at the end of a story. But the truth is, in real life, closure is elusive and the hunt for it is frequently futile if not tragic.
The story of David and Goliath does have that Hollywood ending. God vindicates the underdog Israelites. The boy David defeats goliath in an unconventional way, against all the odds and then goes on to become the greatest of all their kings. There are stories like that in the New Testament also – Jesus is preaching outside a town, the crowd becomes hungry and nobody has any food, but they are fed from a few loaves of bread and a few fish.
But much of the time, the Bible is a lot like real life. Look at today’s epistle and gospel lessons. The Corinthians are still squabbling, despite Paul’s best efforts, so he tries again – tells them how much trouble he has and is willing to endure to persuade them to live in peaceful community. He pleads with them to open their hearts.
In the gospel lesson, Jesus’ disciples are flying off the handle again. Their boat is caught in a storm and this crew of professional fishermen wake up the building tradesman turned itinerant preacher to ask him what they should do. He calms things down, literally, and urges them to put aside their fears and live in faith.
It would be possible to say that the overarching theme of these stories is that God is on our side. The description of David’s triumph over Goliath certainly seems to have been interpreted in that way, and Paul all but says as much to the Corinthians. I am reluctant to claim God’s partisanship for a whole variety of reasons. There are plenty of Christians who disagree with that position and plenty of them are far more famous and brilliant than I am. They may turn out to be right and you may agree with them. What I do believe is that God is love and our best expression of that love is life lived in relationship to others with a commitment to share the divine love that we have experienced.
The David and Goliath story does have that final sense of moral vindication – the segment from 2nd Corinthians leaves us hanging. And, even if the storm does subside, giving Jesus’ disciples a relative sense of security, they are all still out there on the water at night headed for their next challenge, moving, inexorably toward his death and the time when they will be on their own to continue his work.
In our lives, moral vindication is incremental. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work toward the realization of our ideals, but it’s good reason to be cautious about believing that some kind of ultimate moral vindication is an all or nothing proposition – a war to be won at any cost. George Tiller’s death did not end the occurrence of genetic abnormalities or horrific instances of abuse that motivate women and girls to consider whether or not it is best to terminate a pregnancy. The fracture of the Anglican Communion hasn’t put an end to the circumstances that motivated it. Life will go on, people will have differing opinions, sometimes they will behave badly, terrible things will happen, some of them completely beyond our control.
The lessons of the gospel teach us how to live with each other during those times in between those fleeting but satisfying moments of moral vindication and relative security. We are encouraged to speak the truth in love, with perseverance and courage. We are taught to respond to human need, to be honest about our limitations but to be generous in the face of them. We are encouraged to open our hearts, even when doing so poses a challenge to our principles. Our options will rarely offer us a clear-cut, morally perfect solution. In this life we will always face risk and struggle, compromise and the tendency to error with all of its consequences.
But we can still create communities that are characterized by faith and courage; we can still offer open our hearts to those who would enter into our community of believers; we can still step into that boat and go out on to the water at night, braving the storm and moving toward the next challenge. Once in a while, David will defeat Goliath; once in a while a great leader will bring about a change that makes us believe that we will never again have anything to fear. In the times between those moments of great inspiration, we continue to learn how to live faithfully and well.

Corpus Christi

Deuteronomy 8.2-3
1 Corinthians 10.1-4,16-17
John 6.47-58

The feast of Corpus Christi – the body and blood of Christ, has its origins in 13th century Belgium. It began as a local festival in the diocese of Liege, at the suggestion of a young woman named Juliana, who later became a saint. A few years later, the scope of the celebration was enlarged to encompass the entire western church. The original day selected was the Thursday following the conclusion of the great 50 days of Easter. Thursday was chosen because it harks back to the liturgy of Maundy Thursday during Holy Week and its story of the institution of the Eucharist. A wordsmith no less prominent than Thomas Aquinas himself was appointed to create the official prayers of the feast. They have been set to music and appear in our hymnal. We sing them on Maundy Thursday and at benediction of the Blessed Sacrament which will follow the conclusion of our Eucharistic celebration this morning.
As frequently happens, the iconic representation of the feast of Corpus Christi becomes the ceremony surrounding it, rather than what it represents. It became the tradition to process with the consecrated bread of the Eucharist through the neighborhood surrounding the church. The trappings of the procession became increasingly elaborate and took on greater and greater emphasis and attention – canopies, gold and bejeweled monstrances, elaborate orders of march with dozens of persons. The means by which respect and honor were shown the consecrated elements of the Eucharist became the focus of attention and the representative image of the festival. You might argue, though, that the truth was ultimately told in these elaborate processions – the church, the body of Christ gathered together in celebration and mission, was present to the world outside the church’s walls in those elaborate processions.
The Eucharistic teaching of the Episcopal Church is that the real presence of Christ is in the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist. Unlike some of our sister traditions, such as the Roman Catholic and Lutheran, we don’t have an official teaching about how that takes place. As persons of the Anglican persuasion we are at liberty to believe in a doctrine of transubstantiation or consubstantiation if we choose to do so, but we are also free to regard the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist as a mystery that we need not nor cannot explain. What we all know it to be is the gift of the whole person of the risen Christ in whom we dwell and who indwells us when we receive communion. It is why we treat the consecrated bread and wine with particular respect and why we hold it in reverence regardless of the place in which it is received and consecrated – be it one of the altars of this church, a hospital room or a prison cell. It is why we do not make a required age, membership in our tradition or the ability to form an intellectual understanding of the Eucharist barriers to participation. We invite all the baptized to gather around Christ’s table.
The tradition of going forth from the church with the elements of the Eucharist is a reminder that Christ’s real presence among us is more than a focus for our gathering – it is a command to go forth into the world with mission and purpose. In doing so we take with us the whole person of the risen Christ who receives the work of our hands, minds and hearts, our triumps and failures, our joy and pain, our understanding, confusion and doubt into himself, making us one body and one spirit.

Trinity Sunday

Isaiah 6:1-8
Psalm 29 or Canticle 2 or 13
Romans 8:12-17
John 3:1-17

If you go looking for the word “trinity” in the Bible, you’ll never find it. You’ll find the names of the three persons of the trinity, but the way they fit together took some centuries to work out. And even after it became official, people still argued about it. Many would say that it is what makes Christianity distinct from the world’s other major religions. Judaism and Islam interpret monotheism in a manner that excludes the possibility of a triune God. The polytheistic religions understand their various deities as distinct and separate from one another. Still other religions do not personify the divine. We know God as three persons, father, son and spirit, of the same substance undivided. it has been argued that this description make much more sense in the third and fourth centuries when the categories and definitions of greek philosophy were more familiar to Christians. Regardless of how well any of us can articulate it, early in the 14th century, John XXII, who was the bishop of Rome at that time, declared that a feast of the holy trinity would take place on the Sunday after Pentecost in the western church.
The idea is that Trinity Sunday is the punctuating mark, or the line drawn under all that we have learned and experienced about the persons of the trinity from the first Sunday of Advent through Pentecost. Consider the advent prophesies of the coming of the messiah; the stories of Jesus’ birth and the prologue of John’s gospel during Christmas; they are followed by the gospel lessons describing Jesus’ ministry, his arrest, trial, and death and the celebration of the resurrection at Easter. Those stories continue through Easter season, which culminates with the story of the ascension, followed by the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The feast of the trinity weaves all of those stories together and presents us with a doctrine that presents three essential aspects of our faith: that which is ultimate – the father, a material manifestation of the ultimate, the son and that which makes them known to the faithful and the seeker, the spirit.
The trinity is a source of dynamism for our beliefs. It is the engine and the fuel that allows our faith to be a journey rather than a stopping place. We know God the father as our beginning and ending, where we live and move and have our being. Our experience of our own humanity is both shared and perfected in the person of Jesus. Our faith is made new in the work of the spirit who unites us with all those who in every age have been and will be the community of Jesus’ followers. Whether or not we can readily articulate or understand a doctrine of the trinity in the categories of fourth century greek philosophy or the language of the Nicene Creed, we know it is there shaping and teaching us from one day to the next. It is a reminder that what we believe is not trapped within the realm of imagination, but can be made real with God’s help. Today as we celebrate this feast of the Holy Trinity let us give thanks for a faith that is rooted in the divine, before us in daily living and made real and alive in the relationships and communities in which we share it.

Sixth Sunday of Easter

Acts 10:44-48
Psalm 98
1 John 5:1-6
John 15:9-17
In the book of Acts, there is an ongoing struggle about what one has to do to be a member of the community of Jesus’ followers. Peter and James and the church in Jerusalem are inclined to believe that one must be a Jew first before being a member of the church. Paul and his colleagues see it differently – gentiles need not first make full conversion to Jewish faith and practice before becoming members of the church. So we hear the text today: “While Peter was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles, for they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God.” And Peter changes his mind.
After a recent discussion about preaching on Facebook, I am cautious about the use of humor in preaching – so think of the following as more of a footnote than an attempt at a joke. You may be familiar with the joke about the man newly arrived in heaven. He is met by a guide who gives him a tour of endless beautiful rooms, sparkling bodies of water, green fields and endless gardens filled with people interacting with joy and harmony. Then they come to an elegantly appointed room full of people enjoying each others’ company. The guide cautions the man to be quiet as they approach the room. They observe it silently for a while and move on. Once they’re far enough away not to be heard, the guide says “those are the Episcopalians, they think they’re the only ones here.” Depending on the audience, you might say those are the Baptists, or Presbyterians or the Fraternal Order of Moose, but you get the idea of this footnote. When it comes to what we believe in, many of us are certain that we’re the only ones who have it right and that we will be rewarded for it.
We become increasingly aware of the variety and diversity of religious belief and practice in which we function as a community of believers. Among some of our brothers and sisters in Christ there is still an insistence that we are right and “they” – that being anyone who believes different from me and those who agree with me are wrong. Some go so far as to say they’re really, really wrong and God is going to punish them for it. Others simply believe that it is their responsibility to set the wrong ones straight and get them on the right path. Like Peter, in today’s lesson from Acts, they may eventually be very surprised upon whom the spirit falls.
Krister Stendahl, a New Testament scholar who was a bishop of the church of Sweden and a Professor at Harvard Divinity School had some important words of caution about judging the truth and validity of religious beliefs and practices other than our own. He noted that if you wish to understand another religion you can only truly do so by consulting one of its believers. He cautioned against comparing the best characteristics and achievements of one’s own religion against the least admirable ones of another faith. Finally, he said - Leave room for "holy envy." Make an effort to recognize elements in another religious tradition or faith that you admire and wish could, in some way, be reflected in your own religious tradition or faith.
The days of Christianity as some sort of default assumption for our culture are over, and that may be just as well. Whether religion as such is in decline, I don’t know. People seem to be talking about it a lot right now. And although much of that discussion is critical of what has been the role of religion in public life in our country, it’s still part of the conversation. It’s much better to be the target of criticism than it is to be considered irrelevant.
We who gather here weekly and who do the work of this community outside Sunday worship have made a decision about what we believe and a commitment to the church to live according to the baptismal covenant. We sense the presence of the spirit here among us and each of us senses it as we live out the many aspects of our lives. Let us reflect with joy and thanks upon the presence of the divine in our lives and let us acknowledge with generosity that we share that presence with many and diverse others with whom it has the power to unite us in peace and good will.

Fifth Sunday of Easter

Acts 8:26-40
Psalm 22:24-30
1 John 4:7-21
John 15:1-8

This week my personal experience coincided with the lesson from Acts in today’s lectionary. I had someone come to me to inquire about being baptized. The conversation was friendly, but it included one statement that left me momentarily not knowing how to respond. When I asked “have you been baptized?” the response was “I haven’t been, but I’m a Christian.” For those of us within the church, our way of thinking makes that statement a contradiction. But apparently, there are those who understand it differently than we do. What I have frequently heard from people new to the church, or returning after a long absence is that when they come to the church seeking to learn or be included, the response is little more than a recitation of the rules and requirements that must be fulfilled in order to be considered or an explanation of all that they have done wrong in being absent from the church. I didn’t want this person to have that experience. So we simply continued to talk for a while. We left it that if she hadn’t visited on a Sunday by the end of this month, I would call her back to find out how she was doing.
The metaphor of the vine in today’s lesson from John’s gospel is a brilliant one for explaining the central ideas of the fourth gospel. John is determined that the reader clearly understand the relationship between Jesus and God. Its author is also struggling with issues of community – who is inside it and outside it, and what the consequences will be for that latter group. The richness of his metaphor and the clarity of his vision have made his words and ideas compelling to Christians through the centuries. The fourth gospel is full of quotable phrases like “I am the way, the truth and the life,” “nobody comes to the father except through me,” “ love one another as I have loved you.” They are statements that set clear boundaries; a community that embraces them is sure to be identified as standing for something specific and unambiguous.
But a lot of different kinds of things grow on vines – things as diverse as grapes, flowers, sweet potatoes, and ivy. My sense is that there are a lot of different kinds of spiritual foliage out there claiming to lie within John’s clear cut boundaries and making pronouncements about who is about to be pruned.
All three of today’s lectionary texts are about the importance of community for teaching and growing people’s faith and religious experience. I don’t think there’s any doubt that we uphold that ideal here. The church made it work relatively effortlessly for centuries. Our challenge now is to figure out how to preserve it within a larger culture, the presumptions of which are all about individuality, its expressions and demands. John points out the importance of the attachment of the fruit to the vine. The world we live in is focused on celebrating the variations in size and color of each grape and developing marketing strategies to meet their individual needs. The church’s way of doing things isn’t an easy fit with the expectations of a consumer culture. I can begin to understand why, when someone comes to one of my colleagues saying something like “I’ve never been baptized, but I’m a Christian,” his first impulse is to set that person straight about the traditions of Christian initiation.
What Philip does in today’s lesson from Acts may be an example for us. He looks for opportunity to bring a new person into Christian community. His spirit is open to the encounter with the Ethiopian. He makes the approach, but leaves room for questions. He responds with generosity. He realizes that the spirit moves others in the same way it does him. He allows its leading to move the Ethiopian to ask for baptism, rather than presuming to order the man’s spiritual life for him.
Human nature being what it is, those who are inclined to quote John’s gospel seem to focus more on the parts about the unproductive branches being removed and thrown into the fire. But throughout the gospels Jesus’ message has much more to say about the patience and forgiveness of God, both for those who do and do not produce good fruit. We and our companions among the spiritual foliage will always be tempted to express an opinion about the growth and productivity of others, but the gospel makes it clear that God will always be more generous than any of us can imagine. The communities we build ought to be guided by that ideal of generosity and acceptance, no matter what challenges we face in making that happen. Fear of those challenges may tempt us to build walls rather than opening doors. But, as we are reminded in today’s epistle lesson there truly is no fear in love and we can love because God first loved us.

Fourth Sunday of Easter

Acts 4.5-2
Psalm 23
1 John 3.16-24
John 10.11-18

Psalm 23 has been a source of inspiration and comfort for centuries. The image of the shepherd in connection with spiritual leadership is an enduring one in the sacred writings of the Judaeo-Christian tradition. It appears in various parts of both the New and Old Testaments. It is an interesting coincidence that the lectionary offers us Psalm 23 and its words of assurance of God’s presence and providence as we contemplate the potential effects of an influenza pandemic and the ongoing world economic crisis.
The true historic context in which the Psalms were created is impossible to determine with any certainty, but it has been speculated that at least some of them were composed in exile. It is not difficult to imagine a poet giving voice to a desire for hope and consolation in a time of helplessness, alienation, sorrow and fear. It has been suggested that those who created John’s gospel and the three epistles of John in the New Testament also found themselves in a situation of helplessness, alienation, sorrow and fear. The image of the shepherd who offers his life for the sheep was a familiar one to the first century followers of Jesus who knew the Old Testament and it is not surprising that they wove it into their stories about him.
The passage from John’s gospel about Jesus as the good shepherd and the words of comfort offered by Psalm 23 have been taken by some as a motivation to put their troubles “in God’s hands.” I’ve never actually asked anyone who has said those words to me what he really meant by them. My sense is that one who speaks those words frequently imagines that human beings can figuratively hand over their problems to the divine with the expectation that God will sort them out and return the results promptly. Traditional teachings of the church emphasize our powerlessness to make ourselves righteous; they are filled with a strong sense of human sinfulness and the incompleteness of our nature. Such an outlook, coupled with images of God as generous and loving father have motivated some faithful people to take an outlook of moral passivity and assume that God can and will fix their lives for them. I would never say that humanity is free of sin or fully realized. But despite our imperfection, God has blessed us with the gifts of memory, reason and skill. Humanity can and has been characterized theologically as a created co-creator, doing the work that God has given us to do.
The genius of the leaders of the first century church was in transforming peoples’ perceptions of Jesus’ death. The idea of a crucified messiah was, as Paul puts it, a stumbling block for the Jews and a joke for the gentiles. Anyone who might have become a follower of Jesus was going to have to find a way to get his mind around it. The leaders of the early church made that possible by helping their contemporaries understand Jesus’ death as a noble offering of himself in support of a new way of understanding the world and as a sacrifice that renewed the relationship between humanity and God. That is the teaching that has come down to us. The leaders of the early church used the image of the shepherd – already familiar from the Psalms and the prophets to help people make sense of what they were teaching.
The descriptions we have of those early Christian communities suggest that they used Jesus’ teachings to change the way people interacted with each other. Within the community they broke down barriers that existed outside of it. Paul refers in his letters to the prohibition of eating meat sacrificed to idols. He’s talking about the ritual meals that followed the sacrifice of animals in pagan temples. The ritual of sacrifice and the distribution of meat from the animal that was killed followed a prescribed pattern that reminded participants of the social and economic pecking order in which they had a role. The rich and powerful received the most and the best along with the power to give the prescribed portion to those whose loyalty and service maintained their wealth and power. The ritual meal of Jesus’ followers was very different. At that meal the sacrifice was rememorative – it made a present reality Jesus’ redeeming death which had made new his followers’ relationship with God. The participants gathered as equals, beloved of God and shared equally the food which was distributed. That is how we come together each week.
We share equally also in the responsibility for coming to this table for strength as well as solace and for renewal as well as pardon. We may know Christ as the good shepherd whose presence strengthens and inspires, but we also know him as the one who sends us forth into the world to be shepherds ourselves as it were, to live as a people who know what it means to gather around this table.
I can’t tell you exactly how you might do that. In general I can tell you that we are called to be a people who live in hope rather than fear. In a time of anxiety as we are experiencing now, we can be realistic and intentional about taking the kinds of precautions that promote health and prevent the spread of disease. We can offer that sense of realistic precaution to those around us who tend to let their fears overcome their reason. We can also offer our time and resources as we are able to those who are in trouble – we can be the body of Christ – eyes that observe need and suffering, hands and voices that take action and inspire others to generosity. We can do all of these things with a sense of God’s presence and power – not as the one who fixes our lives for us but who empowers us to lead and offer support to others who are struggling with helplessness, alienation, fear and sorrow.
We are a people who know ourselves to be always, as the Psalmist says, in the presence of God’s goodness and mercy. As you go forth from this place, the house of the Lord, take goodness and mercy with you and offer them to the world.

Third Sunday of Easter

Acts 3:12-19
Psalm 4
1 John 3:1-7
Luke 24:36b-48
Our 1st and 2nd century spiritual forbears have left us an interesting record of their struggle to build the church. It lives in the pages of the gospels, Acts of the Apostles, many of the New Testament epistles and other writings that are not included in the Bible. The meaning that their words and stories had for them is sometimes obscured by its distance from us in time and cultural context. We reach across 20 centuries looking to their words for meaning for our own lives. That’s a good thing for us to do. Because in many ways, their struggles are not dramatically different from ours.
The early church took its message in two different directions. We read about the disagreements between Peter and James of the church in Jerusalem, and Paul, the church’s persecutor who became its champion. Peter and James were leaders of a community that was evolving from a primarily Jewish culture. The members of that community understood monotheism. They were accustomed to setting themselves apart from the spiritual traditions of the Roman Empire. But their community attracted followers of Jesus who were not Jews. In the book of Acts you can read about their struggle over the question of what is required to be a member of the community of Jesus’ followers. Do you have to be a Jew first? Do you have to follow the law of Moses in order to be a follower of Jesus?
Even in this moment, our church is struggling with cultural distinctions that have threatened to dismantle the Anglican Communion. Our co-religionists in Africa and Asia tell us that they cannot achieve the respect of the majority muslim cultures in which their churches exist unless we in the west agree to exclude our gay, lesbian and bisexual members from full participation in the church. Do you have to be straight or at least act straight in order to be a follower of Jesus?
Those who undertook the mission of spreading the teachings of Jesus within the Jewish community struggled also with Jewish traditions concerning the messiah and resurrection. Jewish thought and tradition were no more monolithic in the first century than they are in the 21st, but the church’s teachings about Jesus as the messiah and about his resurrection were distinctly different from Jewish tradition. In very broad strokes, that tradition envisioned the messiah’s coming within the context of a messianic age – a time in which the world would live in peace and plenty and all (Jews and non-Jews, by the way) would be gathered into the presence of God. For Jews who believed in resurrection, it was an event in which all participated together. The resurrection of one man, and the claim that he was the messiah in the absence of a messianic age were challenges to traditional expectations. The stories of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances were a means of attempting to deal with those expectations.
John’s three letters, one of which we hear from today in the epistle, and Paul’s letters were written to congregations dealing with internal conflict or struggling to define themselves in relation to others. Having no more knowledge of Jesus than they did, it’s not surprising that they interpreted his teachings in a variety of ways. Human nature being what it is, there was an inclination to draw boundaries around what the community would believe and do and what it would not. The trick was getting everyone to agree on where the boundaries would be. How often do you hear of different varieties of Christians condemning each other for false teaching.
The leaders of the early church took their message to an audience that was at the very least skeptical, and in many cases hostile. In addition to the discontinuity between Jewish and Christian teachings about the messiah and resurrection, the early church had other challenges to deal with when offering the good news to non-Jews. Church teachings prohibited such activities as eating meat offered to idols. Participation in the religions of Greece and Rome was important to the social and economic life of prospective non-Jewish converts to Christianity. The social life of the pagan temples was integral to maintaining one’s economic standing in the community. Worshipping in the temples of the gods identified with one’s city of residence was considered essential to public well-being and the common good. Were they to leave that activity behind, they would be judged as disloyal and perhaps even dangerous by friends and family. For many, becoming followers of Jesus meant leaving behind an entire way of life.
Since the first century, the church has had the experience of being the driving social and political force in western culture. We have been representative of the cultural majority and have had a voice in public life, for good and ill, depending on the circumstances. The church has also experience the challenge of the enlightenment and the rise of science as a means of explaining natural phenomena and human behavior. In our country we see now, on an almost daily basis demands that individual religious belief be taken into account in the formulation of law and the standards of various professions. We regularly hear religious faith ridiculed as fantasy by those who would seem to elevate science as a belief system on par with religion.
The 21st century church takes its message to a generation of young adults, a large proportion of whom have built lives and identities and communities for themselves in which Christianity is perceived as irrelevant and potentially destructive. The church is arguably at least partly responsible for those perceptions. Too much of our time has been spent in answering questions the world is no longer asking. Too much of our energy has been spent on defining boundaries and too little on finding ways to include people in our mission.
Last Thursday night and last Friday morning, St. Mary’s took an important step into our future. I’ve been talking to you for at least three years now about the need to restore and renovate our building. Last Thursday night the Vestry voted to allocate funds from the William T. Kemper grant for the first major project to that end. On Friday morning, the Landmarks Commission approved the design for that work. Our first project will be replacement of all of the exterior doors of the church building and repair or replacement of doorsteps and masonry surrounding the doors. This project will move us in the direction of making the building look open and active. Working first on the doors is an important expression of how St. Mary’s has defined itself during the last several years – as a place that is open and welcoming to all who come here.
We have many things in common with our first century church counterparts – we’re small, we’re short of resources, we have a few dedicated people doing a lot of important work. Most importantly though, we’re committed to communicating our mission outward, rather than holding it within and we greet with joy all those who visit with us and welcome them to stay and join with us in our work. Let us join together in giving thanks for the generosity, skill and devotion to our mission that have allowed us to come to this point and ask God’s blessing on the work on our building that we are about to undertake and upon all those who enter through our doors at this time and forever.

Fifth Sunday in Lent

5th Sunday in Lent
Jeremiah 31:31-34
Hebrews 5:5-10
John 12:20-33

Today’s gospel lesson includes that familiar text: “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life.” There’s a book we use for confirmation class now entitled “Those Episkopols.” It’s been highly praised within the church as a brilliant, elementary exposition of the Episcopal Church and what it means to be a part of it. People really seem to enjoy reading it and get a lot from it. In this book the author devotes many words to the Episcopal Church’s interconnectedness with the world and our sense of its value and goodness and of God’s presence there. I don’t disagree with him, but it may be what most clearly sets us apart from other Christians whose faith is characterizes or even overshadowed by the sense that humanity and the world we live in are inherently corrupt. A faith with that area of focus is very different from one that embraces the world with all its wonders and risks. This text from John is one that is frequently claimed as proof that they are right and we are wrong.
It is a text that may have meant something very straightforward to the one who composed it. Many of his recent ancestors and contemporaries were probably called upon to give their lives for their faith. A sacrifice of that magnitude has to mean something. Those who offer it and those who witness it feel compelled to communicate that meaning to future generations. Twenty centuries later, we may be growing increasingly skilled at imagining threats but the demand that we give our lives for our faith still seems a remote possibility. If that is true, how can we honor the meaning of this text in our own time and place?
I’ve been reading a book entitled The Age of the Unthinkable. Its subtitle is “why the new world disorder constantly surprises us and what we can do about it.” The author is Joshua Cooper Ramo. One of the things he describes in the book is a physics experiment initially imagined by a Danish physicist named Per Bak. Think first about Galileo’s experiment of dropping two balls from the tower of Pisa, one light and one heavy, and noting that they hit the ground at the same time. As Ramo notes, in physics it is not uncommon that multiple layers of complexity underlie a relatively simple observation.
The question posed by Per Bak was this: If you piled sand, one grain at a time into a heap about the size of your fist, how would you know when the first little avalanche would occur? It was a certainty that as the sandpile got higher and the sides steeper, some would slide off. How would you predict when that would happen? Bak’s conjecture was that the sandpile would initially organize itself into instability. He described that condition as one in which adding one grain of sand would trigger an avalanche OR have no effect at all. What made this conjecture depart from the conventional thinking and observation of his discipline is that he was saying that these cones of sand – that looked fairly stable were deeply unpredictable. There was no way of telling what was going to happen next and the relationship between input and output was a mystery. It was organized instability. Bak went on to say that he thought that the energy of systems constantly poised on the edge of unpredictable change was a fundamental force of nature, giving as examples the assembly of clouds and the hard-to-predict onset of rainstorms or the evolution of mammals whose progress frequently jumps past the next logical step. Ramo observes that this sandpile view of the universe does not deny that stability exists in the world, but sees it as a pause in a system of incredible and unchartable dynamism. It is what science calls a “nonlinear” system in which internal dynamics disrupt the idea that you can expect a given action to produce the same reaction every time.
If you could make a model of such a system, you might begin to make sense of how and why they evolved over long periods of time. Another physicist set out to model Bak’s sand pile conjecture. He took sand from the beach and put it through a sieve to get grains of about the same size. He dried them thoroughly and put them in a device that looked like an automatic pepper mill. The mill could measure and control how many grains it dispensed over a period of time. Below the mill he put a plate the size of the palm of your hand, put the plate on a scale and the entire apparatus inside a plexiglass box. Then he hooked it up to a personal computer and started making sand piles. As predicted they initially shaped themselves into cones. Nobody told the grains of sand where to go, but the intrinsic physics of a falling grain of sand meant that they would organize themselves into a pile. But once the pile reached a certain size it went into a strange “critical” state predicted by Bak’s conjecture. With one pile, the addition of a single grain of sand at this point would trigger an avalanche. With another pile, a thousand additional grains could be added before any sand started sliding. You could predict the general chances of getting an avalanche at any given point, but whether or not that next grain of sand would set one off was fundamentally unpredictable. What happened within the pile – the shifting and sliding of grains of sand against each other was as important as any outside force acting upon the pile. There was no clear link between what you did to it and how it responded, nor was there any proportionality between cause and effect. And measuring all of those tiny, instantaneous changes in relationship between the grains inside the pile was impossible. No computer could manage it.
Ramo, the author of The Age of the Unthinkable suggests that the world we live in is much more like one of those piles of sand than we have been willing or able to understand up to this point. It certainly seems true that the world grows more chaotic and the effects of the chaos are hitting closer and closer to home, eroding our sense of security and causing us to question whether the way we have become accustomed to live is sustainable.
What if we do have to figure out how to live in this chaotic and unpredictable environment? In particular, what if we have to do so as Christians continuing to shape our own lives around the baptismal covenant and to encounter the world with a sense of love for God and neighbor? We might begin by re-imagining our understanding of loss. John does it when he describes the grain falling into the ground and dying. How do we make our losses redemptive? Just as an example, how do we experience empathy with the many comfortable and privileged persons who after watching the events of September 11 on television complained “I don’t feel safe any more” But then how do we go on to find a way to help them feel empathy with the child growing up impoverished, with an addicted parent, hearing gunshots outside his windows all night – someone who hasn’t felt safe a day in his life.
Or how might we empathize with the victims of someone like Bernard Madoff but then find a way to help them understand their losses in relation to the life of a single parent trying to raise a family with a minimum wage job in a tough economy?
The analogy of the sand pile, in which the fate of each grain is utterly and completely dependent upon its relationship with all the others offers a different perspective on John’s words about loving one’s own life and the grain of wheat falling into the ground and ultimately bearing fruit. What we imagine to be our individuality and autonomy may be little more than illusion. At the very least, it has less relative importance that we typically give to our life in community. Losing our lives may mean our realization and acceptance of the knowledge that they are linked with those of others in ways that we will never understand, control or predict. What Jesus teaches us is that in living out the baptismal covenant the links between our lives and those of others will be signs of God’s presence. In the experiment of creating the sand piles, the ultimate effect of piling grains of sand was an avalanche. We think of an avalanche as negative – they injure and kill people and destroy things. But that negative connotation is an artifact of the words used to describe it. In the reality that is modeled by this sand pile experiment, the avalanche produced by mysterious shifts in relationship between the grains of sand can be beneficial as well as destructive. What Jesus’ life offers us is the knowledge is that the fruits of our gains and the redemptive nature of our losses are always to be shared and made meaningful.
We may not always have control over what happens to us, but we always have the opportunity to give meaning to it. What we cannot control can bring us an awareness of the love expressed for us by God in shaping a world in which all is interdependent an in which that which is lost is ultimately made meaningful.

Sixth Sunday After the Epiphany
A Service of Healing

The concept of healing is a big part of the Judaeo Christian tradition. We have story after story in the Bible about cures of bodily illness or emotional disorder brought about through spiritual means. We have extended that idiom to refer to the healing of relationships between individuals and larger communities. Biblical accounts of healing have a particular form – there is something similar about all of them. The sufferer of the affliction is identified. We may or may not learn the details about the effect that it has had on his or her life. A healer is identified who describes the means by which well being can be restored. The afflicted one chooses whether to undertake those means with varying degrees of deliberation. The results are made known.
The means by which healing takes place are usually some kind of ritual words or actions. To us in the 21st century they can seem almost magical. Certainly they are distinct from the kinds of medical procedures, medications or therapies that we are accustomed to identify with the restoration of health from a physical or a mental ailment. There is one thing that never happens in these stories. Healers don’t apply the means of healing without somehow engaging the one afflicted and receiving his or her assent and cooperation. Occasionally the one who is ill is so sick that others seek healing on his behalf, but in one way or another, the one being healed really has to want to change.
Today’s story from the book of Kings is interesting for its little side excursions from the main story. Naaman, the great Aramean general (Aram is the ancient name of Syria) is ill with the fearsome disease of leprosy. Knowledge of a cure comes from a very unlikely source – a young Israelite girl who has become enslaved as the spoils of war. There is an odd irony to that. Why is this insignificant one who has suffered as a result of the great general’s military genius inclined to be so generous? Why doesn’t she at least use this knowledge to bargain for her freedom? And why do all of these more powerful people even listen to what she has to say? If we are looking to be made well the means of doing so may be revealed in unexpected ways. That revelation may reflect unexpected and undeserved generosity on the part of another. From the readers point of view in this story from 2 Kings the revelation puts the general in the debt of one whom he may indirectly have harmed. Her generosity of spirit is an implied forgiveness for his actions that puts him on the road to healing.
The Syrian King sends him off to the King of Israel with an explanation of their request and an impressive array of gifts. The King of Israel views the request for healing through the lens of his own limitations. His life isn’t about healing – it’s about politics. The king can’t put aside his own sense of limitations or his fear for his own well being to engage with the afflicted general. Life will put in our path those whose well being we can have a hand in. Those opportunities may be unexpected and they may seem daunting. They may appear to be threatening to our own sense of who we are and who we want to be. To assist them may seem to require an unreasonable sacrifice. Our responses to fear and threat may blind us to need which seems to great, but with which we are truly capable of assisting.
Fortunately for Naaman, Elisha steps in. He explains to Naaman what he must do to be healed – wash himself in the Jordan seven times. It is, as we might expect, a ritual action. An act of cleansing that is both literal and symbolic – the latter because of the powerful presence of the Jordan in Israel’s sense of itself as a nation and its spiritual life. We learn at this point that Naaman has traveled to Israel with some expectations about how healing is supposed to happen. His expectations are focused on the outward manifestation of the illness and an inclination to place the means of healing outside himself. He wants the healer to wave his hand over the spot on his body where the leprosy is evident and call upon the God of Israel to cure it. He doesn’t anticipate much of a part for himself in the cure. And if it isn’t going to happen as he envisioned it, he’s a little disgusted that he had to travel all the way to Israel and wash in their river when there are perfectly good rivers where he comes from. Naaman’s expectations threaten to get in the way of his being healed. He comes to Israel not expecting to have a part in his own healing. And he comes without expecting that the means of healing will take him beyond what he already knows and where he has already been. The means by which we will be healed is frequently simpler and more straightforward than we imagine it will be. But it is never something applied exclusively from the outside – we always have a part in it. It will take us into unknown territory – perhaps to a place that challenges our assumptions of who we are and where we belong.
Naaman is furious when he hears Elisha’s instructions. He storms off, intending to refuse the healing altogether. His servants call him back and persuade him to try it – even though it may look too easy and seem very unsatisfying. He does it and is restored to health.
Healing is often much more about accepting a challenge to our own assumptions about who we are and what we should do than it is about anything coming to us from the outside. Shedding our afflictions can truly just that – letting go of what makes us sick, unhappy or anxious, robs us of our integrity or seems to make us behave in ways that we. Letting go involves the engagement of the one who is to be healed. It isn’t relief enacted entirely from the outside, independent of our engagement. As Naaman learns, the process of healing may seem to be less than it is cracked up to be and more trouble than it is worth until we experience the results.
All of us have identified with more than one of the characters in this story at one time or another. Like the slave girl, you may have had an opportunity to step beyond the moral high ground of victimhood and offer help to one who has harmed you. Like the king and his wife, you may have listened to an idea from a source that seemed absurdly unlikely or too insignificant to be worth bothering with. Like Elisha, you may have had something important and valuable to offer to someone who was very reluctant to accept it. Like Naaman, you may have made the leap of faith and a journey toward healing that seemed to have too many twists and turns ever to be worthwhile. I welcome you to join in the prayers for healing today in whatever role you find that you occupy in this moment, trusting in God’s presence with us as we engage our own well being and that of others.

Sermon - Third Sunday in Lent

Exodus 20.1-17
1 Corinthians 1.18-25
John 2.13-22

Biblical text can mean different things depending on what lens you read it through. It is interesting to read John’s account of Jesus’ action in the temple amid our current economic environment. Our culture is engaged in the moral reckoning following a long time of confusing what we have and what we do with who we are. We are dealing with the consequences of having given moral value to wealth and moral credence to the wealthy whether they deserved it or not.
All four canonical gospels include the story that biblical scholars refer to as the “cleansing of the temple.” John’s account is different from the other three in that he places the story chronologically at the very beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. Mark places it in the week before Jesus’ death and Matthew and Luke do the same. The fact that it is in all four books is an argument in favor of its being based on events that actually happened. The fact that John records it as well as the other three gospels suggests that the incident was sufficiently important for the story to have been very widely known – not just from a single strand of tradition about Jesus. But it is also possible that John simply knew of it from the works of Matthew, Mark and Luke.
But it is difficult to imagine exactly what happened. The temple mount in Jerusalem encompasses about 35 acres. At the times of the great Jewish festivals there would have been thousands of people engaged in all kinds of activity within that area, and people constantly moving in and out. One man’s action, however heartfelt or disruptive could not bring every bit of activity an area of that size to a halt. But there are so few stories of Jesus that are recorded with the consistency of this one across all four canonical gospels. It is contrary to the evidence to imagine that Mark created it from his own imagination for his gospel and the other three simply liked it well enough to carry it on into theirs.
It was typical of the Roman government to use local authority to establish control of conquered territories. The empire would give the locals enough latitude to keep their people under control to minimize the expense and effort required to hold the territory. The local authorities would be rewarded for doing what the empire wanted done. In Jerusalem, the high priests and other temple authorities were in collaboration with the empire. Rome appropriated the resources of conquered territories, allowing the local authorities a small measure of it in exchange for their cooperation. This system left about 98% of the population in a condition of economic hardship. And they lived in fear of violence from the Roman authorities who tolerated no challenges to their power or that of their local collaborators. The temple authorities may very well have believed that they were helping to assure the faithful religious practice of their own people. But at what cost?
The logical conclusion is that Jesus’ action in the temple was a challenge to the high priests and other temple authorities who had profited from collaborating with the empire at the expense of their own people. Jesus’ behavior would not have escaped the attention of the Roman army and it may well be that this incident in the temple, whatever, it really was, is the event that motivated his arrest.
Regardless of the details that underlie this story, it is timely to understand it as a criticism of our human tendency to let the pursuit of money and privilege creep into our lives and distort their real meaning. We have made a religion out of money in this country for the last three decades and now we are seeing the results. Earlier this week the NY Times re-ran a column by Judith Warner that had originally appeared last fall. In that column she describes the experience of coming of age in the 1980s and choosing a career doing something other than just making heaps of money. She and her husband live near New York with their two daughters. She writes about the two of them wondering whether the decision to work in creative fields rather than finance was irresponsible because of the limitations it places on the resources they are able to provide for their children. She notes the daily grind of living in that rarefied economic subculture where anyone who isn’t (or wasn’t) fully engaged in the pursuit of money for its own sake was considered a fool. Now we’ve discovered that what they were chasing was only an illusion. Many of them probably told themselves that they were doing it in order to assure the well-being of their families – to give their children everything they needed for a good life. But at what cost? Judith Warner writes about expecting to feel vindicated when the financial services industry collapsed. But it didn’t turn out that way. There was so little meaning there that even seeing them get their just deserts offered very little satisfaction. The effects of the economy’s rise and fall may not have been quite so extreme around here, but as I talk to all of you, you are feeling it. Your work hours limit your time with your children and families. Households in our church have been affected by layoffs and the diminished value of retirement savings. During the last several months, people seem exhausted and depleted – not wanting to do anything but get through the next day.
I’ve been trying to get a sense of what all of this could end up meaning. The belief that we would be better or happier if we just had a little more money in the bank or a few more things in our possession was a distraction from dealing with the reality of who we truly are – human beings who cannot perfect ourselves and our lives through our own efforts and accomplishments. Now, that illusion has been shattered. There is nothing left to chase; nothing to distract us from the real work of being human: honoring our God, making sense of our lives, building relationships and living well in community. Today’s Old Testament lesson is a time-honored starting point for that effort and this is a good a place as any to undertake it.
This week, even if you are feeling exhausted and fearful, connect with someone else who is worn out with worry or fear. Take action in support of someone who has been hurt by the economy. Watching millionaire swindlers being hauled off to jail on television was never going to give anyone a sense of justice being done. What could make things right is the reality that underlies the commandments and today’s gospel lesson: our ability and willingness to engage our sense of who and how God created us to be – here and now, in the wreckage of a culture and an economy that worked very hard to convince us we were or should be something very different. When you go out from here today, do it resolved to live in a manner that expresses your love for God and neighbor.