The Feast of James the Greater

The Feast of James the Greater (transferred from 25 July)

29 July 2012 

Saint James’ Episcopal Church, Arlington, VT

One can hardly say that the readings for the feast of James the Greater are cheery — but then, again, James the Greater is remembered as the first martyr of the church.

We know that James was son of Zebedee and Salome, and one of the first of Jesus’ companions. The Synoptic gospels tell that James and John, along with Peter and Andrew, also brothers, were called away from their nets by Jesus. (John’s gospel never mentions James.) As we go further in the gospels, we see how James, John and Peter are the most prominent among the apostles. They are the only ones to witness the resurrection of Jairus’ daughter, the Transfiguration and Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane.

Jesus gives James and John the nickname Boanerges (Sons of Thunder) because of their zeal (one might call them ‘hot heads’) which drives them into action before thinking: he rebukes them for forbidding a man from casting out demons in Jesus’ name because the man was not one of them. They ask Jesus to call down a rain of fire on the Samaritans who refuse to receive Jesus. And, in the gospel reading for this feast, they don’t seem to understand that Jesus’ kingdom will not be here on earth when they ask him for places of honour at his side when he sits on his throne. The other disciples get angry and Jesus predicts their martrydom.

The reading from 2 Corinthians ties in with martyrdom when it speaks of the paradoxical nature of servanthood: the cup that Jesus says the disciples will drink is described by Paul as: ‘We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed.’ Pretty challenging stuff.

On the other hand, the violence described in Psalm 7 and Jeremiah remind us of James’ and John’s zeal to punish the Samaritans. (1) Sometimes we misunderstand discipleship and wander in the wrong direction with a sense of misplaced righteousness.

From the readings, one can extrapolate the following themes: servanthood and power, the downside of zeal, and persecution, suffering, and martyrdom. But that is not where this sermon is going to go this morning. Instead, I want to talk about pilgrimage because James is so associated with it.

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When I first came here, I noticed hanging from the celebrant’s chair on the left a scallop shell. I don’t know who gave it to the church or whether they had walked the Camino de Santiago de Compostela, the Way of Saint James, but the shell is precisely that which pilgrims on the medieval pilgrimage route carry with them. Having walked this pilgrimage all the way from France, some 900 miles, I have what one might call an intimate connection with Saint James (alongside growing up in a family that has generations of men named James).

Tradition has it that Saint James travelled to Spain to preach before returning to Jerusalem where he was martyred. It is said that disciples brought his body back to Spain after his death. If you want to enter the fantastic, other traditions say that after his decapitation, angels took up his body, placed it on an unmanned and rudderless boat which sailed to Spain. Even more fantastic is the idea that a rock sprang up and enclosed his relics.

Fast forward to 829 when a man followed a star to a field (hence the name Compostela from the Latin, campus, field, stella, star) where he found the relics. In the eleventh century, Bernard the Old and Robert began the construction of a large Romanesque structure which was consecrated a century later. That cathedral lies behind a gaudy Baroque façade made out of granite that seems to change colour with the ambient light.

Soon the pilgrimage became one of the major three pilgrimage routes in Christianity, Jerusalem and Rome being the other two destinations. The 12th and 13th centuries saw a spike in pilgrims walking what people also called the Milky Way and then the route fell into disuse. By the 19th century, few people knew it existed. Gradually in the 1990s and this century, the pilgrimage route has seen a great increase in walkers, especially since UNESCO declared it a World Treasure in 1987. Today over 140.000 people set out to walk it.

This certainly is a far cry from Saint James the apostle who accompanied Jesus. Yet the people who walk the Camino do so for a multitude of reasons. Some are spiritual not religious, or disaffected Christians (often Roman Catholics). Others walk because it is good exercise. Others walk because they are in between jobs and think it would be a good idea. Others walk it to figure out some pressing life question. Still others walk to get lost in nature and find God. Most people head west, though there is the occasional pilgrim walking east.

Once one sets out on the Camino, one becomes part of a flow of humanity, a stream of people who have walked this historic route for centuries. One can feel the presence of the Communion of Saints, all those souls who have walked ahead, as one takes step after step after step after step….

As with any other activity, the pilgrim experiences moments of transcendence as well as moments of pain. Seeing a fox run in the evening mist counters the stabs of pain from deep blisters. Staying in a hostel with pilgrims from all over the world provides a contrast to the silence of heart and soul one experiences while walking alone, deep in thought.

Perhaps this pilgrimage talk is too remote. How many here really want to walk nearly 500 miles? One does not have to walk the Camino physically to make a pilgrimage of the heart.

The Episcopal Church has been walking a pilgrim’s path. In 1974 on this day, the feast of Martha and Mary, three bishops ordained eleven women to the priesthood — the church had yet to change the canons for ordination but the bishops and women felt that the birth of women’s ordination could not be held off any longer. While most dioceses came to embrace women’s ordination, it was only about three years ago that all dioceses offered it to women and that came about only because of splits in the diocese. A friend of mine was consecrated bishop yesterday in Virginia. She is the 19th female bishop in the entire church (TEC); only 14 are active today. For women who are called to Holy Orders in all levels, we are still walking a pilgrimage.

Think about the wanderings you have taken in your life, the times down paths that don’t seem to make sense until much later when you have the full picture. Think about those moments when you felt a zeal to follow God, perhaps as impetuous as that of James, and how you lived with it. Think about the moments when you felt as though you were walking down a path — spiritual, relational, emotional, vocational — that made absolutely no sense, one that you were not even sure you wanted to walk, but there you were. How did you end up? How did you get to wherever you were going? And think about those moments of sheer stillness while you were walking the pilgrim’s way when God’s voice came to you in a gentle and soothing way, giving you some guidance and direction.

The pilgrim’s prayer from the Pilgrims’ Mass from Santiago de Compostela can apply to us as well:

O God, who brought your servant Abraham out of the land of the Chaldeans, protecting him in his wanderings, who guided the Hebrew people across the desert, we ask that you watch over us, your servants, as we walk in love of your name to Santiago de Compostela.

Be for us our companion on the walk,

Our guide at the crossroads,

Our breath in our weariness,

Our protection in danger,

Our inn on the way,

Our shade in the heat,

Our light in the darkness,

Our consolation in our discouragements,

And our strength in our intentions.

So that with your guidance we may arrive safe and sound at the end of the Road and enriched with grace and virture we return safely to our homes filled with joy. In the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

END NOTE
(1) The analysis is taken from New Proclamation: Commentary of Feasts, Holy Days, and Other Celebrations, David Lott, Ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 151-55.

Feast of Mary Magdalene

Feast of Mary Magdalene

22 July 2012 • Saint James’, Arlington, Vermont

When Scott and I met to discuss my supplying here, I asked if instead of using the appointed propers for today, we could use those for Mary Magdalene, whose feast actually is today. In fact, we will skip two weeks of the normal lectionary because next week we will observe this congregation’s patronal feast of Saint James.

Why focus on Mary Magdalene? I have several reasons — some liturgical, some personal. Given her close association with the resurrection, celebrating her feast is a good mid-season corrective, a reorienting of ourselves until the next unmistakable Easter reminder, All Saints’ Day, which seems a very, very long way off, just as Easter seems a long time ago. Her feast is sort of a halfway point in the Christian year. Second, it is always good to remember that Mary Magdalene’s story is far more complicated and rich that some threads of her tradition leave us. Finally, on a personal level, when I was rector of Saint Mary’s in Northfield, I liked to celebrate all the feasts connected to one Mary or another.

One of the two collects for Mary Magdalene in the New Zealand Prayer Book focuses less on her need for healing and more on the relationship between Jesus and Mary:

Sweet is your friendship, Saviour Christ;

Mary you accepted,

Mary you drew to the foot of the cross,

Mary you met in the garden;

grant us a like redemption.

Like many strong women in Christian scripture, Mary’s life is caught in an aura of confusion. People wrongly associate her with the ‘repentant woman’ and the ‘woman of the city who was a sinner.’ Instead, she is from the town of Magdala in the Galilee, important enough to be identified — a very uncommon thing for women in documents for the time — and she is mentioned fourteen times, even more astounding. So you can erase the image of Mary the prostitute and all the weirdness that has been cast upon her by time and Hollywood, such as how she is portrayed in The Last Temptation of Christ.

Instead, we celebrate Mary Magdalene as the apostle to the apostles, in the words of Saint Augustine, the first one to announce the news of Jesus’ resurrection. Her encounter with Jesus echoes one from the beginning of the gospel according to John, bringing us around full circle.

Remember that Jesus addresses his first words in this gospel to two disciples of John the Baptist: ‘What do you seek?’ Andrew and the person with him are incapable of articulating a direct response, but instead address Jesus as ‘Rabbi,’ and ask where he is staying. He responds, ‘Come and see’. The prologue and the testimony of John the Baptist have identified Jesus for the reader as the true light coming into the world, ‘the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world’, one on whom John had seen the Spirit descend from heaven and remain, the ‘Son of God’. Jesus begins his work in the world by inviting the two who have followed him to ‘come and see’ where he is staying.

Near the end of the gospel, Jesus encounters Mary Magdalene weeping outside the tomb in which he had been laid and asks her, ‘Whom do you seek?’ Believing Jesus to be dead, she does not recognise him as the risen lord until he calls her by name, and she responds, ‘Rabbouni!’ He charges her to tell the disciples that he is ascending ‘to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ The work in the world of the earthly Jesus has ended, and Mary is chosen to announce the resurrection.

And what exactly is the message of this resurrection? Roberta Bondi, in her Memories of God: Theological Reflections on a Life, sums up the resurrection message in one sentence: ‘The joy of the Resurrection renews the whole world.’

The joy of the Resurrection renews the whole world. Mary Magdalene, who went to the garden that first morning, had no idea that the joy of the resurrection renews the whole world. She only knew that she needed to tend to the last rites for her master’s corpse. She went with oils, and her love for this itinerant teacher who walked the roads of Galilee and Judea for three years. She went, because women were the ones who usually prepared bodies for burial. She went, most of all, because she believed in what her teacher, Jesus, had to say. Of all the prophets, he taught about God’s love and actually demonstrated this love. He listened to her, he believed her, and he respected her.

The joy of the resurrection renews the whole world. Mary still didn’t understand that when she talked with the man at the tomb. Thinking him to be the gardener, she pleaded with him to tell her what the authorities had done with her master’s body. Only when he called her by name, did she recognise him to be Jesus. Even as he told her to let go of him, he also told her to spread the good news that he had risen, that the resurrection had happened. And, so, Mary Magdalene, the marginalised, became resurrected, too — the first apostle, even to the apostles.

[not written but added extemporaneously at the 10.00, therefore not the exact words but the idea remains the same. The joy of the resurrection renews the whole world. The hymn we are going to sing for the offertory (‘Sing a New Church’, Delores Dufner, OSB) was one we sang at General Convention after the House of Deputies voted unanimously to restructure the church. It can be scary stuff, we are talking about changing the way we do things, understanding that we just cannot continue to do things as we always have — things have to die to be reborn, to be resurrected. It will take time, but we are people of the resurrection and so as we let go of the past, allow things to die, we will be reborn.]

The joy of the resurrection renews the whole world. How do we, if ever, make sense of events such as what happened in that movie theatre in Aurora Colorado on Friday night? How do we, as Easter people, proclaim the Easter message when we live in a Good Friday world that is full of senseless and random acts of violence as well as state-sanctioned violence? How do we acknowledge such brokenness without drowning in it while also not denying that it is very real? Yet we have to proclaim that hope.

The joy of the resurrection renews the whole world. We proclaim this message through the many anonymous acts of self giving, especially in the solidarity that faithful women and men live with friend or stranger, among those in any need or trouble. . . not counting the cost, not needing applause or recognition.

The joy of the resurrection renews the whole world even in the struggling hearts of people who try to believe, but can’t, and yet who keep at the struggle for meaning and purpose in life, with truthfulness and compassion.

The joy of the resurrection renews the whole world when we forgive, when we offer healing to another; when we share what we have with those who have less; when we help hope to be born among those who feel abandoned; and when we give our lives for justice and peace among all people.

The joy of the resurrection renews the whole world. That is why we have gathered here this morning. We come with our own heartbreaks, our own sense of failures, our own brokenness and our own deaths. They are part of who we are, but they are not the whole picture. Never. Resurrection overcomes them.

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Where are the places in your lives today that need resurrection? What are the relationships that need resurrection? What are the concerns that need resurrection? With the knowledge of God’s forgiveness, how can you live fearlessly, vulnerably, dedicated and joyous? Where can you find new freedom that comes from this resurrection? Where will you find renewal?

Even if you are like Mary, standing peering into the empty tomb this morning, remember that she was greeted by her master and saviour who called her by name and then directed her to share that good news with the rest of the world.

The joy of this resurrection renews the whole world and it will renew us, too. One of our Easter hymns (190) says, ‘Life is yours for ever, Mary, for your light is come once more and the strength of death is broken; now your songs of joy outpour. Ended now the night of sorrow, love has brought the blessed morrow. Let your alleluias rise.’

While we may live in a Good Friday world, may our heart’s first inclination be to share the good news of God reconciling the world in Christ and always to let our alleluias rise.

Proper 10B

Proper 10B • 15 July 2012
Preached at Saint Mark's, Springfield, VT

You know it is going to be an interesting week of sermon preparation when you open a commentary on the Gospel lesson and read this, ‘The story of the beheading of John the Baptist is hardly a text one would spontaneously choose for a sermon.’

No kidding. But it is what we have and I usually like to go with the hard reading because it is a good challenge.

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Just a brief road map for this sermon as it is one that builds one thought on another and the connections might be a bit too intuitive — you will have to forgive me as I am coming off ten days at General Convention. The sermon begins by reflecting the gospel reading, which leads to thinking about the worst of humanity and divine compassion. That leads to musing about our brokenness which then moves to a thought about what it means to be a reconciler alongside being a prophetic voice that challenges the status quo and where we might land on that continuum. So, with road map in mind, here we go.

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Hearing the story of the beheading of John the Baptist a week after hearing Jesus say to his disciples how a prophet is without honour in his own homeland also is a bit sobering. It’s not as though the lectionary is trying to drive home the point; it is just the way the gospel flows.

The story of Herodias’ daughter asking for John the Baptist’s head is chilling. It represents the worst of humanity — that part of the human soul that I cannot understand, the part that has so lost touch with its God-created being to the point that it can knowingly and willingly kill another creature or human being, that part of the human soul that no longer respects the internal checks-and-balances that most of us observe.

But Herod’s behaviour isn’t much better because he caves into the request to save face rather than make a principled stand against such an outrageous demand. The gospel wants us to know that up until that point, Herod has protected John the Baptist (albeit by putting him in prison). What should have been an ordinary night spirals into a nightmare, culminating with an unnecessary death that will haunt Herod, a petty figure in Roman politics, and an even smaller person because of his failings.

How out of such a tawdry story can we find anything positive?

Perhaps it helps to note that the story of the beheading of John the Baptist — the longest account in the gospel of Mark about someone other than Jesus — is nestled in between two accounts of Jesus sending out the disciples for mission. On either side of this sorrowful account Mark’s gospel details the works, healings and teachings of the disciples.

Then, just five verses after we hear about the demise of John, the gospel tells us that Jesus finds himself in the midst of a hungry, lost crowd and looks upon them with compassion.

Knowing of that divine compassion, I think, enables me to confront the worst of humanity. I cannot allow the brokenness of soul and spirit, in some cases, evil, which drive people to destruction, harm and cruelty to be the last word about people. I have to believe that while each person is ultimately responsible for his or her actions and must be accountable to them, that God’s mercy and forgiveness are there… even when the person is unable to open his or her soul to God.

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I admit, however, to utter bafflement as I read the news about the never-ending conflict between Israel and Palestine. I cannot understand how two peoples can so hate one another that they wish to destroy each other. I don’t much understand, for that matter, the on-going conflict between forces in Syria or Egypt or Sudan or any of those ‘hot spots’ in the world. I don’t understand how humanity has managed for all of its existence, it seems, to engage constantly in war. How have we, as God’s creation, the only ones created in God’s image, the creatures to whom God says we are good, managed to lose sight of the beloved that lies in every other human being?

It’s pretty clear that we are broken creatures. Admitting so to one another could be one of the most prophetic, and healing actions we could engage in. Think about it:
What about when we also fail, we were to show our brokenness to one another? When we have come to terms with wrongs we must right, we could trust in divine forgiveness. Could we trust that we have been loved from before the beginning?

If we were to engage in the prophetic action of reconciliation, we would not end up with our heads on a platter the way John the Baptist did. But that is just half of the story.

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Even as we are reconciliers we must also be truth-tellers. Being both reconcilier and truth-teller may lead us into stormy waters and might seem to some contradictory ways to live one’s discipleship to Jesus. But our expression of faith believes in both/and and not either/or propositions.

It was only on the last day of General Convention that tempers got frayed in the House of Deputies (I can’t speak for the other house). Up until that point, debates had been intense, but not angry... On the last day, however, a block of resolutions from one of the legislative committees, National Concerns, came to the floor and suddenly the house was thrown into debate about things such as fracking, racial profiling, wage equality and fair labour practices. A deputy from Florida stood at a microphone and angrily said that she was going to vote against every single one of these resolutions because they were ‘political.’ A deputy from Texas declared that he did not know what the words, ‘racial profiling’ meant. A deputy from Arizona responded by describing how she had been pulled over four times in the past month because she has dark hair; she now carries her passport with her at all times. The debate continues on a list-serve about where does one draw the line between being ‘political’ and being prophetic, challenging the injustices of the day? Last night I received an email from a former parishioner declaring that General Convention looked like the progressive party at work and that the church should lose its tax-exempt status.

We all land in different places on the spectrum in our attitudes toward proclaiming Christ’s reconciling love to the world and engaging in prophetic action and words that will shake up the status quo. I land more on the end that maintains that challenging the unjust laws and practices that continue in Jesus’ tradition of overturning the tables of the money-changers. I can’t explain totally how I landed there, coming from a traditional Republican family, I just know that by junior high, I was aware that things were not fair or just and I couldn’t let them be. Perhaps a question during my ordination process, ‘How will you use your prophetic voice as a priest?’ also has guided me these many years. I draw strength from exemplars such as Desmond Tutu challenging aparteid, Oscar Romero decrying the massacre of his own people by their military, Rigoberta Menchu speaking out about the massacre of her indigenous people in Guatemala, Aung San Suu Kyi fighting against military oppression of her people of Burma and other prophets.

But, just because I live out my understanding of the prophets this way does not mean it is an either/or proposition. Each person finds his or her way through. An acquaintance writes: ‘I once had a spiritual director who, in response to my grumbling about someone having “rubbed me the wrong way,” used to talk about “Divine Sandpaper”. “How do you expect your authentic grain to shine,” she would ask, “if God didn’t send people to ‘rub you the wrong way’ every now and again?”’ The prophets in our midst are that divine sandpaper. And even with such sandpaper, the act of reconciliation helps us to shine. We maintain that the Holy Spirit gives us gifts and so we need one another as some agitate and others reconcile.

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The good news, then, out of this troubling gospel, is that God loves us despite ourselves in all of our complexities and divisions. God has compassion on us — the hungry, seeking people that we are — just as Jesus did that day long ago. There is a wideness is God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea… and for that, my soul will bless the LORD.

Proper 5B

10 June 2012
Preached at 
Saint Mark’s, Springfield, VT

To one extent or another, all the readings for this morning (Genesis 3, Psalm 130, 2 Corinthians 4, and Mark 3) touch upon our mortality with its attendant issues of finitude, both physically, mentally and spiritually. The Genesis text reminds us of humanity’s fall into consciousness, that is, when the human creature realised for the first time that it was not God. We find echos of our burial rite in both the psalm and epistle as they are often-chosen selections.

The gospel, however, is the most curious text of the day. We rarely hear this extract from Mark’s gospel because most years, we do not start with Proper 5 which usually gets lost in Trinity Sunday. One might be tempted to say, ‘Thanks be to God,’ because it is such a bizarre passage. It starts mid-sentence, mid-story with Jesus’ family declaring that he is crazy and possessed by Satan. Jesus has come home to rest and instead, his family is coming to snatch him away from his ministry because they think he has lost it. In modern-day terms, they are coming to do an intervention.

Richard Giles portrays the situation this way:

Jesus’ mother was of course one of the best. Dad had died some years back, and she had had quite a struggle ever since. Never once did she abandon this strange son, even though he remained a mystery to her. She could never understand him, but knew from the beginning that he was different.… she loved him to the end, right up to Golgotha….

Her heart was big enough, not only for Jesus, but for all those he brought home with him. She became mother to them all.…

His brothers were altogether different. Jealousy was their main problem, and you could see why. … When he didn’t have his head stuck in a book, he was out on the hillside behind the house, practicing sermons to imaginary crowds, hearing voices and talking to God.

On this occasion related by Mark, the family has had enough. Mother is worried sick, and the brothers are fed up with him causing all this commotion and distress. They come to interrupt this highfalutin talk of Satan and the Holy Spirit, this spiritual circus, to talk some sense into him and get him to come home.

Of course they cannot get near him, but a message is relayed to Jesus, telling him that his mother and brothers are waiting outside. We now witness the first-ever use of the classic “in conference” evasion strategy. Jesus is “in conference” healing and teaching and changing the world, and he cannot be interrupted, not even for his beloved mother and exasperating brothers. (1)

Jesus scandalises his neighbours and his own family by his talk of liberation and the Kingdom of God. His family really thinks he is crazy because he violates laws and argues with the authorities about the ancient customs of his people. In their eyes, he has gone off the rails. His mother fears for him and anguishes as she sees what danger his actions create. (2)

To grasp the severity of the situation, one must realise that Jesus’ own kin were labelling him a deviant. Today, they might be calling him an ‘extremist,’ or some of the more negative labels people throw at others. In Jesus’ time, to say that someone was possessed by Satan and, therefore, capable of sorcery was the utterly worst accusation that could be lobbed at that person. It was dangerous because not only was one now considered to be a deviant, but the label was very difficult to lose. Such a label could destroy a person’s reputation overnight.

Jesus’ immediate response to his accusers is to accuse them of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. He deflects the accusation in his riposte and therefore preserves his honour. (3)

Yet even as he turns things around in that regard, he says something that lands him back outside of social norms again. For all of Mary’s concern and love for her son, Jesus rhetorically asks, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ He breaks with his family of origin to form a new household, an oikos, one made up of those who follow him. Even that concept is foreign. He purely and simply operates outside the social norms, looking from the outside in.

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‘Family’… that is such a loaded word. Sometimes it even goes with ‘crazy.’ And one kind of crazy family comes to mind… the family as depicted in ‘All in the Family,’ the 1970s sit-com with bigoted Archie Bunker. If you remember, the comedy revolved around Archie Bunker, a working-class World War II veteran and a very outspoken bigot, seemingly prejudiced against everyone who is not a U.S.-born, politically conservative, heterosexual White Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, and dismissive of anyone not in agreement with his view of the world. He longed for simpler times when people sharing his viewpoint were in charge.

Who can forget his wife Edith who was a sweet and understanding, if somewhat naïve, woman who usually deferred to her husband? She often would nail things, making Archie look like a fool.

They had one child, Gloria married to college student Michael Stivic, a hippie-type guy. He and Archie represent the real-life clash between two generations. They constantly clash over religious, political, social, and personal issues.

Sound familiar? While this show may be thirty-plus years old, its premise, the tensions within one’s family of origin in comparison to one’s family of choice are ever present. In some ways, that is what is going on in this gospel reading. Jesus asks his followers to question to which family will they belong: their family of origin which may well hold bigoted and old-fashioned views, or their family of choice, the oikos, household, which may well be the group that will lead them into the Kingdom of God.

Sometimes we can manage to stay within our family of origin and work through the cultural differences and sometimes we have to admit that our family of origin just is not in the same place we are and it is better to form a family of choice that will advance God’s kingdom. Jesus rejects his immediate family, a harsh choice, to form one that is much larger and broader.

For those of us who are heavily involved in the institutional church, we may well say that the church is our family of choice. In this case, we understand the word, ‘family,’ not to mean mother, father, two children, a house and dog, but rather the broader sense of household: an intergenerational community of single and married, straight and gay, young and old, rich and poor, healthy and not-so healthy, and all the permutations that our physical, mental and spiritual limitations impose on us. That constellation is the oikos, the household of which Jesus speaks into which we welcome the baptised.

For those of us who inhabit both worlds — a family of origin and a family of choice — we need to consider just where our loyalties lie. There will be times when they must lie with our family of origin — e.g., taking care of our parents or siblings. But there will also be times when our following Jesus will demand that we look to the household that gathers around the altar, breaks bread and shares it, that carries its members in prayer and challenges the powers that be.

Those of us who follow Jesus may well be called by our culture and society crazy and, if so, I pray we will wear that name proudly… our actions may well land us in trouble, but in the long run, we will be carrying out God’s mission in the world. As Jesus says in the Gospel of John, ‘You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last… (John 15.16).




END NOTES
(1) Richard Giles, Mark My Word: 40 Days with Jesus Through the Eyes of St. Mark (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1995), 29-32.
(2) José y María Ignatio López Vigil, Just Jesus: A People Starving for Love, Vol. 1 (NY, NY: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 2000), 222.
(3) Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh, Social-Science Commentary of the Synoptic Gospels, Second Ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003), 353.

Trinity Sunday

Not a sermon per se… just a few thoughts on the Trinity brought on by a conversation about mutual ministry, the ministry of all the baptised.

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One of the most revolutionary, yet historic, understandings of the Trinity is the idea of perichoresis. I first ran across this concept in Patricia Wilson-Kastner’s Faith, Feminism and the Christ, which our Ministry-Study group in the Diocese of New Jersey had to read in 1989. Her discussion of an egalitarian, rather than hierarchical Trinity, turned everything upside-down for me. She wrote of the Trinity in these terms: God is ‘a unity of three centers of awareness and centeredness who are also perfectly open and interdependent on each other. The “persons” of the Trinity are three centers of divine identity, self-aware and self-giving in love, self-possessed yet freely transcending the self in eternal trinitarian interconnectedness’ (FFC, 126).

John Damascene used the term perichoresis in the eighth century to highlight the dynamic and vital character of each person. Wilson-Kastner took this concept of the divine dance and applied to her theology of the Trinity. There are neither leaders nor followers in this dance; everyone is equal, contributing and receiving the same amount of energy, engaged in a dance of reciprocity. What a relief from the notion that the Father leads to the Son which leads to the Holy Spirit, a stern father-figure peering down at the Son on a cross (or holding the Son on his lap!) with a tiny dove at his feet — not uncommon in medieval iconography and seen even as recently as on the outside wall of the high altar at Trinity Episcopal Church, Princeton, NJ.

Still, the best way to express the Trinity, the Three in One, and the One in Three, is to use the language of community and relationship. In the Trinity, we encounter God: the God who creates, the God who speaks and the God who calls us and enlivens us. The energy flows equally among the three persons of the Trinity, as there is no hierarchy among them. I have used Meister Eckhardt’s image of the Trinity over and over again because the image is so delightful. ‘When God laughs at the soul, and the soul laughs back at God, the persons of the Trinity are begotten. To speak in hyperbole, when the Father laughs to the Son, and the Son laughs back to the Father, that laughter gives pleasure, that pleasure gives joy, that joy gives love, and that love gives the persons of the Trinity of which the Holy Spirit is one.’

The God of the Trinity is profoundly relational. The Trinitarian God is not solitary. A 15th century Russian icon by Andrei Rublev, simply called, ‘The Holy Trinity,’ depicts the Godhead as three persons—really, three angels—seated at a round table. Each person holds a staff, indicating that no one person has more authority than the other. In the middle of the table is a wine-filled chalice. As they sit at table, they converse.

For God, being so profoundly relational, is the Divine Communicator, who dwells in community. Within ourselves we have moments of shedding light on the mystery of the Trinity, as we relate to one another as God’s created beings. We human beings, created in the image of God, therefore, are also relational. In our interactions with those around us, we live out the essence of the Trinity.

Thus, in a community that wants to become one that accepts everyone and invites each person to offer up his or her gifts for the common good, the Trinity as perichoresis gives us the perfect image of how we should relate to one another. The ordained can hold out a vision, provide order to holy chaos, but ultimately, the enactment of the vision lies in everyone’s pitching in.

In the icon I described before there is an empty fourth place at the table. That place is for us. Our relational God, set a place for us so that we, too, might join in the life-giving dance and joy of the Trinity.

Each time we come together to eat at God’s table, we sit down at that place. So come feast and delight in the energy and love of the triune God whom we will find again and again at that table. The Three in One and One in Three are with us and fill our being. As they dance together, their energy flowing from one person to the next, round and round until it is indistinguishable, let their example fill our souls with their joy and love, so we may also share in the holy dance.

The Feast of Pentecost

Preached at Saint Thomas, Brandon, VT

Come Holy Spirit, take our hearts and set them on fire…

Nineteen years ago in a cathedral in Trenton, NJ, eight people knelt before their bishop to be ordained to the transitional diaconate. As is customary in the ordination rite, the congregation sings the Veni Sancte Spiritus, ‘Come Holy Spirit, our souls inspire and lighten with celestial fire.’ As the soon-to-be deacons knelt and the congregation sang the ancient hymn, a person standing midway back (in a crowd of about 500 people) said that all of a sudden the whole centre aisle began to shimmer with heat and energy. The shimmering, like pavement on a hot summer day, lasted for a moment, like a rainbow, and then disappeared. But the person who noticed the energy change remains convinced it was the Holy Spirit whom the congregation had beckoned through prayer.

With youth and adult baptisms, I have taken to singing that same song (it’s a bit long for an infant’s baptism), whether in its ancient form or in the Taizé chant because I believe that baptism definitely is worthy of our calling the Holy Spirit to come close. But do we know what we are doing when we bid her to come close? And do we really know whom we are beckoning? Who is this Holy Spirit beyond that mysterious third person of the Trinity?

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We have a hard time putting into words what we mean by the Holy Spirit. The Caffeinated Priest, a blogger, wrote this poem about the Holy Spirit characterising it as the wind. The images work well in moving us toward a theology of the Spirit and its works.

In the beginning was the Wind.
And it whispered, whispered a Word to Mary,
whispered a Word to Joseph,
whispered its way through Bethlehem.

The Wind wandered into Galilee
where it found a few fisher folk and whispered a little louder,
splashing water on the rocks,
to put down the nets
to be foolish enough to follow
as the Wind whipped itself along the Galilean sea.

The Wind whipped along the way
mixing with spit and mud and causing the blind to see
moving the leaves aside so that the light would shine
meeting the woman at the well and moving through her hair,
making her bold enough to ask
“may I taste this water of life?”

The Wind whirled into Jerusalem
following the Word
following the twelve
following the women
whirling and twirling, whispering and yelling
“Hosanna! Hosanna in the Highest!”

And then the Wind was silent.
From noon til three on Friday
Silent and still
The Wind did not whip, did not whirl, did not whisper.
The Wind did not blow.
And the world was silent and alone.

Three days later the Wind began to blow again
First a whisper, then it whirled and whipped,
in tongues and fire, in water and light
and the Word made flesh inhaled
and breathed on the disciples
and the Wind rushed out
never to be silenced again.

But we still falter at trying to describe just who and what this Holy Spirit is.

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Our readings this morning all describe some aspect of the Holy Spirit’s impact on our lives. The reading from Acts, probably the one we know the most well, depicts the Holy Spirit as a violent wind that fills the house where the disciples are sitting. The outward visible sign of the Holy Spirit’s arrival is the appearance of flames, divided tongues. The outward aural sign of the Holy Spirit’s arrival is the capacity given to each disciple to speak the native language of all the devout Jews who were present in Jerusalem. Indeed, their surprise is understandable: Aren’t they all Galileans? How can it be that they speak my language? And how can it be that they are speaking about God’s mighty acts in our lives? The capacity to witness and know of God’s acts points to the inward gift of the Holy Spirit.… Truly a transforming moment in the lives of the disciples, those gathered and in the nascent church.

Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians focuses on a more diverse assortment of gifts that the Holy Spirit gives to each one of us. Just as we are many and different, so are the gifts that the Holy Spirit accords us. Maybe our gift is wisdom. Maybe it is knowledge. Or faith. Or gifts of healing. Or working miracles. Or a prophetic voice, one that calls us to do the common good. Or tongues, or the interpretation of tongues, that is, the ability to speak in a way that others might understand God’s deeds. The Holy Spirit, the giver of life, the animator or agitator in our lives, an agent of action, discerns which gift is most appropriate. These gifts are all here. We just need to take some time and serious prayer to discern them. They are waiting for us.

What does it mean for us to live into the Spirit? Is living in the Spirit always associated with tongues of fire and rushing wind? Would we be able to handle that intensity?

Mercifully, there is another side to living in the Holy Spirit and that is one of constancy and faithfulness, as natural and ingrained as taking a breath. The reading from the Gospel of John depicts a much calmer, though just as miraculous, scene, one that we always hear the Second Sunday of Easter—then its focus is on Thomas and his doubts; now the gospel focuses on how Jesus bestows the Holy Spirit on the disciples. Jesus arrives the evening of the resurrection. He finds his disciples cowering, locked up in a room, afraid of the world outside their doors. Their world has been turned upside-down. Jesus’ first words are: ‘Peace be with you.’ Be whole, be restored, be in that state of well-being with God. The disciples rejoice, perhaps not realising that with Jesus’ appearance comes two mandates. The first is that Jesus sends them out to do God’s will. The second is to forgive. In between telling the disciples what to do, Jesus gives them the wherewithall to do these things: Jesus breathes on them.The fearful community, hiding in the dust of its shame, is infused with ‘holy spirit’ from the mouth of Jesus.

It is important to note that the text does not suggest that Jesus is giving them an entity, ‘the holy spirit,’ but rather a share in his relationship with God that flows and blows like the wind. Each of us, and each and every other part of the body as well, owes our existence, breath by breath as we inhale, to God. We ‘live and move and have our being’ in God (Acts 17.28).

God creates and then animates and the Spirit that enables us to breathe is also that which enlivens us. The Spirit is the source of life, the breath of creation; at the same time, the Holy Spirit is the source of the renewal of life. And so, I think that living in the Holy Spirit can be as dramatic as seeing tongues of flame and hearing different languages and as simple as the breath we take in and out every day of our life.

How do we live in the Holy Spirit in those non-dramatic moments, those moments when more trust and faith in the unseen God are more needed?

Living in the Spirit can be as simple as being aware that each breath we take comes from God and is a gift from God. Some might even want to remind themselves of that when things get wild, by breathing in and out and saying, ‘I am yours, O God.’

Living in the Holy Spirit means being faithful to God. Not being afraid, trusting in God’s direction. Being steady in one’s prayers, participation in the faith community. Being a person of forgiveness. Being a person that is intentionally relational, that is, aware of the deep connections between oneself and those around oneself.

Living in the Holy Spirit means saying each morning: I am today, and asking further, How will I live this day out in God? Then, having asked that question, we must be still to hear the small still voice of God directing us.

Directing us to use the gift that we have been given by the Spirit at the moment of baptism.
Directing us toward that inquiring and discerning mind and heart always ready to hear God in our daily lives.
And directing us back to that relationship amongst one another and with God that God has given us by the infusion of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

If we are steady and faithful with our daily living, then we can be ready for those moments of the inbreaking of God’s kingdom when the Holy Spirit bursts into our lives in a flash of light or clap of thunder or even as something as subtle as shimmering energy in a cathedral. Then we can exclaim with certitude, Come Holy Spirit, set our hearts on fire!

Easter 5B

Easter 5B • 6 May 2012

 Saint James’, Arlington Vermont


For years I have had on my office door a photograph of a penguin colony. Thousands upon thousands of Emperor penguins mill around as far as one can see. Under the photograph, I have written, ‘Life in Community.’

Clearly we hope the communities in which we live are more compassionate than penguin colonies, where they steal one another’s pebbles and stones — worse, where they steal one another's eggs — mark their territory, make an awful mess and a lot of noise and lose their chicks to the cold.

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The gospel this morning invites us to consider what it means to live in community, the Christian community as well as the larger community. The critical thematic word, ‘abide,’ dominates the reading from the Gospel according to John. For John, it is through that abiding that Christ lives in us and we live in Christ, and it is through that abiding that we form community.

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We have covered a lot of ground between last week’s and this week’s readings from John’s gospel. We have moved from Chapter 10 with its well-known words about the Good Shepherd, to the Last Supper section. We hear the first part of chapter 15 this week and next week will hear the second half. Both halves focus on being disciples who abide in God’s love and communicate that love to others.

This portion presents yet another one of the great ‘I am’ statements that only John’s Jesus utters. This time, Jesus likens himself to the real or authentic vine. As the vine, he is the source of our nourishment and our growth. Only Jesus can be the vine; only we can be the branches. If we are of Jesus, then we will flourish and produce fruit.

If we are not, according to John, we will wither. This gospel challenges our understanding of what it means to be inclusive and recognise that other faith expressions might also lead to abiding in God. Today I am not going to address that challenge, but I do acknowledge it. Instead, today, I am going to focus on how the vine suggests living in mutuality as disciples of Jesus.

This image of the vine implies a more organic, level way of living as disciples. This image calls us to act in mutuality. Instead of having one person in charge, the many members branch out, bear fruit and prosper. Yet, pruning is essential. Anyone who has grown raspberries knows to cut back the dead cane so that new cane can grow. We cut away those parts of our individual lives that impede our growth so that we can be more fruitful even more later.

Of the eight times this word, ‘abide,’ appears in John’s gospel, five of them are in this passage. The Greek, meneo, is the same word that shows up in the previous chapter of John in which Jesus speaks to Thomas about preparing an abiding place for the disciples to which Jesus will lead them. This abiding place is that famous ‘mansion’ about which those of us who grew up with the King James Bible used to wonder (what was this mansion in my Father’s house anyway?) — the word, mansion, comes from the same Greek word, meneo.

The image of abiding loops back to the very beginning of the gospel’s prologue where it describes the Word that became flesh that abides with us in human form. That Word, Jesus, and the word, abide, both of which say that we should love one another, are entwined in John’s thought. Shortly Jesus in John’s Gospel will declare, ‘You will abide in my love if you keep my commandments.’

The notion of abiding in God’s love or having Jesus abiding in us is lovely but fairly abstract stuff. Is there another way of expressing such an important idea?

From a visual point of view, one of my favourite icons by Robert Lentz is his ‘Tree of Life.’ The cross has even-length arms. At the centre of the cross is Jesus’ head. From north, east, south, and west spring branches of rich vines and fruit. We are those branches and fruit, taking root in Jesus to flourish.

D. Moody Smith writes, ‘The metaphor of vine and branches represents the unity of Jesus and the disciples. The unity is a given, but it does not exist apart from the disciples’ own participation. Jesus is both the one who commands them to abide and bear fruit and the one who enables them to do so. Their bearing of fruit is proof that they are Jesus’ disciples. Jesus has linked discipleship with mutual love…. The abiding and bearing fruit of which Jesus speaks is the mutuality of love among the disciples.’(1)

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These days we hear about anything but love or abiding in one another. We are overloaded with information about one disaster after another. Keeping up with the news becomes an all-consuming task that ultimately risks paralysing us from the sheer volume. Most of us are tangentially affected by all the news of disaster, but it still wears us down. One effect of this barrage of information causes us to hunker in, close ranks and even suspect our brothers and sisters.

Another effect is evidenced in the decrease in our reaching out to others as our scarcity mentality increases. Maybe what affects us sometimes more is whether our wallets are flush or empty. Our anxiety over money becomes a worry. It seems hard to love anyone beyond our inner circle. Despite our own lean moments, if we have internalised the words of this gospel passage, we still understand that we must love people because we abide in them and they in us because God abides in all of us. Put in other words that seem more current, we are all in it together and we are all part of a community somewhere.

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What, then, does it mean to live in community?

Yesterday, in the small town of Plymouth, a town of about 500, about three dozen people gathered for Vermont Green Up Day. Many of them had pulled together in the first days post-Irene when Plymouth also was cut off from the rest of the state. Now, eight months later, they were reconnecting to keep picking away at the mounds of debris that still line the road and hang in the trees along the streams. One of the workers lost everything she owned in Irene. As her friends picked up bits and pieces of her life — a broken CD, a flashlight, a chair, parts of her kitchen cabinet — she thanked them. The people of Plymouth have raised over $100,000 to help flood survivors like her.

Other remarkable communities came into being post Irene last fall. Many, many Vermont Episcopal congregations formed partnerships with their local communities. Gethsemane, Proctorsville, despite the destruction of their parish hall and significant damage to their church, reached out to Cavendish. Saint Stephen’s, Middlebury, was one of the few congregations to make it into the isolated towns of Hancock, Rochester and Stockbridge. Saint Paul’s, White River Junction, initiated the freeway relay that connected congregations up and down Rte 91 and Rte 7 to ferry food and cleaning supplies to those in need. Saint Michael’s, Brattleboro, was one of the first groups to arrive at the badly flooded senior housing, Melrose Terrace. And so it continues.

Within a congregation, other communities form as needed. In each, Christ abides. Here are some snapshots of this more intimate sort of abiding.

— A young person in the congregation has been diagnosed with cancer. The congregation chips in to buy her a laptop so she can stay connected during the lonely hours of chemo and overnight stays in the hospital.

— Both Saint James’ and Saint Stephen’s have massive fund-raisers that raise significant funds for outreach through Uncle Norman’s Attic and the Peasant Market respectively. It takes hours of preparation and even more hands to make them the success that they are.

— A vestry struggles with the financials and invites the congregation into an honest conversation about how each person can think of new ways of being church that might lessen the pressure on the budget.

— A congregation wrestles openly with a divisive subject and even though people hold genuine disagreements, they still manage to find ways to keep one another in prayer and come together at the altar rail for communion.

— If far away, the priest still abides in prayer with the suffering and sick of the congregation in ways that they feel the distance has been bridged. For the past six months, Saint James’ rector, Scott, has abided in prayer with me and his presence has made a world of difference.

Abiding is not just on a congregational level. It also expresses itself through you and me. That thought leads to these questions:

How have you experienced abiding?

How do you abide with another in presence and prayer?

How does God abide in you?

How might you convey God’s abiding to someone else?

If we understand that God, through Christ, already abides in us, we are equipped to communicate God’s presence to those in our communities, our networks, our friends and even our families. Through that abiding, we have the power to form stronger communities, ones that are based in God’s abundant and unfailing love.

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So, yes, really, we are much, much better off than a colony of Emperor penguins., because as those who have been washed in the waters of baptism and marked as Christ’s own for ever, we already abide in love and in God.

So, when you leave church this morning, look at the lilacs and all the other trees and flowers ready to burst forth into bloom, think of their strong root systems and then realise that we are like those flowers, ready to bloom, ready to bring forth good works, nourished in the vine that is Christ, fed with the eucharistic feast, and rejoice, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.

END NOTE (1) In Imaging the Word: An Arts and Lectionary Resource, Vol. 3, Susan Blain, ed. (Cleveland, OH, United Church Press, 1996), 210.