Category: Sermons

It Takes All Kinds

Kyle

The Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul

(Ezekiel 34:11-16; Psalm 87; 2 Timothy 4:1-8; John 21:15-19 )

Image source: Wally Gobetz via Flickr

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“It takes all kinds,” my mothers says from time to time. To be a family. To be a team. To be the Church. It takes all kinds.

My mom should know. Her ministry in two very different parishes has always emphasized the full spectrum of their diversity. She taught me that it takes all kinds of people to be the Body of Christ as she participated in ministries with preschoolers, middle schoolers, the sick and elderly, and the homeless and urban poor. And she taught me that it takes all kinds of viewpoints to keep a church moving forward in healthy ways. In a time of deep division and conflict in their parish, I watched both my parents hang in there through the pain and strife and to help with the healing when the congregation turned a corner. The faithful message I heard from them throughout the ordeal was that we can’t let disagreement be a barrier to belonging. I’ll probably always think of that time and their quiet witness when I hear these words from 2 Timothy: “be persistent[,] whether the time is favorable or unfavorable” (4:2).

“It takes all kinds” may well be the principal message of our half-patronal feast today. Sure, Sts. Peter and Paul have good reason to claim the top spots in the ecclesiastical power rankings and to share a big summer celebration. But part of what makes today poignant is the study in contrast these two provide. Cue the orchestra, it’s time for the sermon equivalent of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” I’ll spare you my Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald impressions.

Peter, it seems to me, says po-tay-to. He’s a bit of a jock, has the rugged outdoorsman thing going. He doesn’t think twice about jumping in the water—fully clothed—to swim to his Lord on the shore. He’s a little more set in his ways, as rural residents tend to be; it took some convincing on God’s part for Peter to warm up to the idea that “What God has made clean, you must not call profane” (Acts 10:15). But Peter can also be perceptive—or is it impulsive? Either way, he’s the first of the disciples to confess Jesus as the Messiah.

Paul, on the other hand, says po-tah-to. He’s cosmopolitan, an urbanite, more of a bookworm, weak in body—and content with his weakness. He has a city-slicker’s tidy understanding of nature, lacking the sense of wildness we get from the imagery in, say, Mark’s gospel. And if you’ve ever gotten tired of the phrase “by no means,” then you know Paul is someone who knows how to “think slow” and carefully work through a complex argument.

So it takes all kinds not just to be the church, as my parents showed me, but to build the Church, as today’s saints helped do despite differences and even chafing between them. We could go on all day about the differences between Peter and Paul. But there’s more to this feast than ee-ther and aye-ther. A look at their similarities ought to bring us up short too, ought to remind us that we need each other not just because we complement each other but because we need all the help we can get on a journey that will beat us up along the way. It’s no surprise that as we celebrate the lives of two early Christian martyrs, we hear readings that understand the cost of their apostleship.

From John’s resurrected Jesus, Peter gets some sobering words in today’s gospel passage: “‘Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go.’ (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.)” (John 21:18) [Pause] And from the Epistle, our patron saint speaks for himself: “As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come” (2 Timothy 4:6). There’s a gracefully accepted road-weariness alongside the celebration in these readings. The Christian life is like that, isn’t it?

So it takes all kinds of companions on the journey. Companions who see the obstacles in our path just a bit differently from how we do, perhaps even seeing them as blessings. Companions who remind us that we ourselves are no picnic some of the time. Companions who love us anyway, and need our love too.

Two things happened on that walk of faith this week, within a couple hours of each other on Wednesday morning. The first was the Supreme Court’s decision that the Defense of Marriage Act had served “to disparage and to injure those whom the state, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity” and that the law was therefore unconstitutional. The second was the announcement that Fr. Humphrey has accepted a call to help lead the Church of St. John the Evangelist in Newport, RI in the next stage of their life together. To be honest, I didn’t know which lead to bury.

Regarding the former, suffice it to say that the Supreme Court Decision was a source of great and long-awaited rejoicing for many, including many in this parish. It was also an unwelcome source of trepidation and disappointment to plenty of others, including some in this church and many in the wider Church. It’s not the last decision that our legal jurisdictions will have to make about same-sex marriage, and our theological conversations in the church catholic, the Episcopal Church, and St. Paul’s Parish will all continue for years to come.

It happens to be my opinion, by which I mean my own opinion and not an official position of this church or its clergy,* that it takes all kinds of marriages, including same-sex marriages, to testify that “all [persons] are created equal” and to signify “the mystery of the union between Christ and his Church” (Book of Common Prayer, 423). But I believe it’s a fact that no court, no country, and no church can function in a healthy way without a willingness to talk honestly and lovingly about disagreement and to resist the urge to declare the other, any other, to be beyond the pale. St. Paul’s Parish, and Anglican Christianity on the whole, has a long tradition of being a safe place for as wide a cross-section of people as wish to be here. I pray that that God will continue to show us the way to live faithfully into this vocation.

Regarding Fr. Humphrey’s departure, there will be opportunities to say thank-you and goodbye in the coming weeks, but let me for now share this one story. Last spring, Fr. Humphrey wrote to me and said “You’re about to learn that life is a series of transitions.” These transitions are not always easy, but they are always an opportunity. An opportunity to give thanks for what God has done for us, and to wait in hopeful expectation for the blessings that will surely continue to flow by the Spirit. If it seems like we’re confronting more than the usual share of transitions around here lately, I hope we can also remember the great privilege of our years of fruitful ministry with Fr. Humphrey, with Deacon Eric, with Melva Willis, and with Josh Stafford, and to be grateful for their presence among us a bit longer.

Phew. A lot happened on Wednesday, and in the last few months. And a lot will happen as we continue on. The times will be favorable and unfavorable. Especially amid continued transition and change, it will take all kinds to be the human family, to be the Church, and to be St. Paul’s K Street. It will take all kinds because the Father has created all kinds. It will take all kinds because the Spirit has sanctified all kinds. It will take all kinds because Christ will draw all kinds unto himself.

Our task as disciples, as “heirs through hope” of the Kingdom and of the Church Peter and Paul helped build together, is to place ourselves on the foundation of Christ’s love. And on the days when we’re feeling that road-weariness the saints know all too well, we can turn in our weakness to these words from, of all people, the prophet Ezekiel: “I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord GOD. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak.”

Believe it, my sisters and brothers. Believe it.

*Preacher’s note: I gladly added the italicized clarification at the 11:15 service at the instruction of the Priest in Charge.

The story of a name

Kyle

Trinity Sunday, Year C
(Proverbs 8:1-4, 22-31; Psalm 8; Romans 5:1-5; John 16:12-15)

Image source: Felix O CC BY-SA 2.0* via Flickr

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“O LORD our Governor, * how exalted is your Name in all the world.” Amen.

For those of you who might be new to liturgical churches or to Christianity, let me start by saying that this is an odd day. Today is Trinity Sunday, so our celebration is guided by a belief that is at the center of our faith and yet does not appear in the bible in any easy-to-point-to form. Perhaps as a result, there’s been a lot of debate during two thousand years of Christianity about how we should talk of the beautiful and peculiar character of the God revealed and experienced as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Lots of debate, as I’m sure you’ve experienced in this town, leads to complicated decisions. The result, in our case, is a lot of fancy Greek and Latin words to describe the church’s shared discernment of the nature of the Divine, lots of dos and don’ts for our Christian God-talk. We also have lots of jokes about how hard those words are to understand, how complicated and abstruse the doctrines associated with them.

If you ask me, that all gets in the way. I’d like to invite us to set this baggage aside for a few moments, if we are carrying it. The doctrine of the Trinity is a far more interesting and vital thing than the jokes about accidental heresy would lead us to believe. In a sense, this doctrine is a story, the story of God calling out to us in dynamic ways, and our inspired but inadequate attempts to give that God a name. Let’s all take Trinity Sunday as an occasion to boldly tell the story without fear that we might say something theologically questionable. Let’s just tell the story, and if you’d like to discuss any heresies I’ve committed, speak to me after the service.

[Pause.] It begins with the people of Israel and their faith in the God who chose their ancestor Abraham. At the core of belief and practice in the faith from which Christianity developed, and that our Lord claimed as his own, is the ancient statement of faith we know as Deuteronomy 6:4 and Jews know as the Shema, from the word with which it begins:
שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָֽד
Hear, O Israel! The LORD your God: the LORD is one.

The LORD is one. It sounds obvious enough to us, and it’s now a common enough belief in this world shaped so strongly by Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. But it was a radical notion when the people of Israel first heard and proclaimed it. If the LORD is one, then the world is not a capricious playground, much less a violent battleground, in which a pantheon of gods jockey for position. It is reliable, after a fashion, subject to a unified purpose–governed by the Lord GOD. The tone throughout today’s psalm is of majesty and awe in the presence of so great a Governor: “What is man that you should be mindful of him? * the son of man that you should seek him out? … O LORD our Governor, * how exalted is your Name in all the world!” (Psalm 8:5,10)

How exalted is your Name. That name was so exalted for the people of Israel that they never actually spoke it, just as modern Jews do not speak it today. The name of God in the Hebrew Scriptures is four letters that were not meant to be pronounced. In fact, the text in Hebrew includes nonsensical vowels that indiciate what to say instead; sometimes the vowels are from the word for Lord, sometimes they are from the word for God.

Whenever you see LORD or GOD written in all caps in an English translation, you’re encountering the unspeakable name of the God of Israel, the name of the God who called out to Moses on Mt. Sinai, the name that means “I AM WHO I AM” or “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE” (Exodus 3:14). So the story begins with a people and a proclamation: The LORD is one. Exalted is the Name of the LORD our Governor, who led us out of Egypt and claims us as God’s** own.

But Christians believe that the story of the name of God doesn’t end there. The founders of our faith had an experience that added something to their notion of God’s exalted name, and of God’s oneness, something they struggled to make sense of but that they knew would change everything. They met a peculiar teacher from Nazareth.

We’ve been telling his story since the church year began at the beginning of December. He was born and grew to be a man. He healed the sick. He brought hope to those in need. He preached a message of repentance, of purity of heart, of relationships mattering more than rules and customs. He said he came that they might have life and have it abundantly. He told them to begin their prayers with these words: “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.” He seemed to radiate a certain presence and power. He knew his disciples better than they knew themselves. He began as their teacher. By the end he was their Lord.

And then he died. It seemed like all hope was lost, like it had all been a fantastical dream. But word started to spread, first from the women who had gone to the tomb to finish preparing his body. “He is not here, he has risen!” Soon he had appeared to them all, and they started to make sense of the things he had said about himself. Years later, followers would write about his life on Earth, connecting the dots of his proclamation and their experience of him. So we hear from Peter: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16); from Thomas: “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28); from Jesus himself: “Before Abraham was, I AM” (John 8:58). The Lord is one, they said, and yet we have seen the Lord made manifest in Jesus of Nazareth. The Lord is one. The Son shows us the Father.

Of course, something else happened amid all this, and that’s the part of the story we celebrated last week. On the night before he died for them, the Son of God made a promise to his friends, the promise we heard this morning: “I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (John 16:12-14).

The last gift of Jesus to his friends and the first gift of Christ to his church was the Spirit. The Spirit guided their ministry in the days to come, and guides it still. The Spirit poured the love of God into their hearts, and pours it still. The Spirit was faithful to the promise of the Son and is faithful still: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (Matthew 28:20). [pause] And so the story continues ever on: The Lord is one. God’s Spirit is among us.

It took us a long time to find some precise language for what this all meant, 400 years or so to reach something resembling an agreement about the Lord who is one but whom we experience in these different ways. Truth be told, that’s an interesting story too, a story that suggests other points to emphasize and clarify. But it’s not the essential part. The essential part is the story of God reaching out: reaching out to deliver the people of Israel, reaching out to teach and heal the disciples and so many others throughout Galilee, reaching out to unite the followers in Jerusalem with Gentiles all around the Mediterranean and all around the world. Here’s how my favorite theologian sums it all up:

“That which is believed in is not a certain scheme of divinity, but a name … [And through our speaking that name] we claim our spiritual position, we assert our union with that Being” (Maurice, F.D. The Kingdom of Christ [New York: D. Appleton, 1843]: 240-241). We claim our part in the story by speaking the name as we have learned and experienced it, the name that was spoken when we were adopted in baptism. We bind unto ourselves today the strong name of the Trinity, and we do it in just a minute with these words: “I believe in one God, the Father Almighty … and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God … and I believe in the Holy Ghost, the Lord and giver of life.”

When you sing those words today, remember that you are part of God’s great and ongoing love story, a story we are blessed to be helping write. As the Father reaches out to us with the gift of the Son, as the Son reaches out to us with the gift of the Spirit, as the Spirit reaches out to us with the gift of the never-failing love of the Father and the Son, so may we reach out in love to each other and to all the world, in God’s exalted and hallowed name: Father, Son, Spirit.

* Therefore I share this post under the same license (CC BY-SA 2.0) instead of my usual license (CC BY 3.0).

Photo by Stephanie Watson CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

A parable of preparation

Kyle

Lent 5, Year C (John 12:1–8)

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Image source: Stephanie Watson CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

I was speaking recently with a teacher at a religious high school. She had been studying this passage from John’s gospel with her students and was both charmed and surprised by their reaction. The conversation had apparently become totally unglued by the class’s collective dismay at Jesus’s final words: “You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”

“How can he say that?” they asked. I think they sensed in his words either an indifference to a tragic fact or a hopelessness in the face of a challenge that Jesus could have solved. After all, he has just raised poor Lazarus from the dead; surely with a strategic loaves and fishes campaign he could have raised the poor’s standard of living. And that 300 denarii for the perfume could have been important seed money.

But I don’t want to pick on my friend’s students, because in many ways I agree with them. Like so many of my fellow Midwesterners, I have a pronounced cultural discomfort with luxury and ostentatious displays of wealth. Insert Garrison Keillor joke here. I’m very much the son of two parents who went out shopping for what they called “a midlife crisis car” but who came back not with the Mustang or Charger they’d imaged but with a Volkswagon Cabrio. It’s the world’s most sensible convertible.

And there’s nothing sensible about Mary’s action in this story, at least not at first glance. To even possess a jar of perfume worth a year’s wages is very strange for a woman we assume was poor, so strange that one commentator speculates that it must have been a “family treasure” (209).  Of course, Judas’s disingenuous suggestion still stands in that case: why not give this wealth away to those in need? And why squander it so wantonly on a sentimental act, especially toward someone who has carefully avoided the trappings of wealth and power?

The answer Jesus gives is all about preparation. “Jesus said, ‘Leave her alone. She bought it so that she might keep it for the day of my burial.’” We’ve all just had an encounter with the stench of death, he seems to say, and another death is coming. Let this fragrance fill the room and remind us that the next death will make possible the royal victory for which I have been anointed.

So my answer to my friend’s students is that Jesus is neither indifferent to nor hopeless against the plight of people who are poor—then or now. However, in this luxurious scene, he is being prepared for a task he must accomplish for the whole world’s sake. Mary’s prophetic action draws our attention to the nature and the gravity of that work. Perhaps it’s even necessary, in a way, that Jesus be anointed now rather than in the tomb, for in John’s gospel, Jesus reigns not just from beyond the grave but from the cross, not with an anguished cry but with a dignified declaration: “It is finished.” However you look at it, though, the perfume incident only makes sense in light of what is to come.

So I wonder if we might, with apologies to Blessed John, read this story as a sort of parable of the season of Lent, a parable of our own preparation for what lies ahead. Though many in the church are fasting, Lent is in other ways a season of indulgence. The act of examination and repentance is an inward journey, requiring an almost lavish self-focus, for a time. I’ve noticed that the brief homilies I give at daily masses have followed that pattern, dwelling on our inner lives and our life as a congregation. And I know my own Lenten practice has been less about giving alms than about resting in God’s arms.

They warn us at the seminary that inward focus is a recipe for stagnation, because disciples, to be disciples, must ultimately look outward. Indeed, that idea will probably sound familiar to those of you who attended Canon Joey Rick’s presentation on evangelism and congregational vitality on Wednesday. The point is, if we’ve been dwelling on ourselves a bit more than usual of late, then it had better be to prepare for something bigger.

What are we preparing for? If the answer is just our experience of the Triduum and the Easter celebration that follows, then we’re not hearing the fullness of Jesus’s call for us to live lives of service to those in need.

What are we preparing for? If the answer is just that outpouring of peace and thanksgiving that comes with the sure knowledge of our forgiveness, then we’re living large on God’s gift of grace, a gift that imparts its full meaning not just when we receive it, but when we give it away.

What are we preparing for? Not just to be redeemed and sanctified, although we surely will be. We are preparing as well to be renewed and sent out, to be vessels of grace in a world that needs it now as ever.

The more I’ve thought about it this week, the more I’ve believed that we’re preparing to be like that little jar of perfume. Could that be true?

What if we are God’s precious investment, bought for a costly price indeed, but ultimately worth it because of our sacred purpose? If that’s true, it reminds us of the importance of this period of discernment in the life of St. Paul’s and our need to answer anew our questions of God’s purposes for us.

What if we are the oil of anointing for the sick and the suffering, marking those we serve with a sign of their true dignity and stature in the kingdom of God? If that’s true, then visiting parishioners who are ill and feeding neighbors who are hungry will become, more and more, not just our duty but our joy. Jesus, and my friend’s high school religion class, would approve.

What if we are the fragrance that fills this house of worship and then spills into the streets, making it possible for our neighbors to encounter in us the beauty of holiness? If that’s true, then our amazing Ash Wednesday experience might mark the beginning of a new chapter in the story of our life as friends and neighbors in Foggy Bottom.

What if we are holy vessels, chosen and sanctified for carrying to others the grace of God in Christ?
My sisters and brothers I pray that Lent continue to be, for us, forty luxurious days of preparation, so that when the time comes, we may follow the Risen Christ from “What if?”s to what’s next.

Image source: Chris Wolff CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

Activation Energy & Spiritual Gifts

Kyle

Epiphany 2, Year C (1 Corinthians 12:1-11)

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Image source: jasonwoodhead23 CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

I wonder if Epiphany is easier in the southern hemisphere. “In your light, we see light,” was the phrase from this morning’s psalm that stuck with me all week. But this matra had to be almost purely metaphorical, since, until yesterday, Metro Washington seemed to have been transported to the Scottish Highlands, or maybe San Francisco in the summer. Short days, overcast skies, and regular blankets of fog interfered with our season of light. I’m guessing my colleague who traveled to Grahamstown, South Africa, this week had no such difficulties.

The gloom is distressing because it’s hard to be what you can’t see. Epiphany is about uncovering, about revelation, about enlightenment. We asked in today’s collect that we might “shine with the radiance of Christ’s glory, that he may be known, worshiped, and obeyed to the ends of the earth.” It’s hard to turn our spiritual imagination to the ends of the earth when we can’t even see to the end of the block.

But all literalism aside, there are real questions for us here: Can we believe right now that each of us, personally and corporately, manifests the divine light? And in particular, is that light a light for the whole world? Have we been empowered by the love of Christ incarnate and the baptism we share with him? Have we been equipped to serve God and one another in his name?

This morning, our patron saint responds with a resounding yes. This passage from 1 Corinthians is one we study often here at St. Paul’s, but to hear it during Epiphany is to discover the full force of its proclamation: “Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good” (1 Corinthians 12:4–7).

To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit. Despite our doubts, Paul asks us to trust that we have been shown and given what we need to be a light to the world; God has put that light within us. Sometimes we hide it under a bushel basket, but that is not its purpose and not our destiny. Our vocation is to shine, to become an ever-more-transparent window around the light of Christ within us. The potential is already there inside, yearning to be made manifest.

Adding to the beauty of Paul’s portrait is that the light shines differently in each of us, through a variety of gifts, services, and activities. Regarding that last word, in particular, our translators have been very clever. To say that there are “varieties of activities” and one God who “activates … them” signals to us that activities and activates translate words that share the same Greek root: ἐνεργέω (energeō), from which we get our word “energy.” Energeō means “to be operative, be at work, put forth power” or “to display one’s activity, show one’s self operative.”

So there’s a sense here both of work and of witness, of doing but also demonstrating. We might paraphrase that there are “varieties of works” but “the same God visibly at work in them,” or maybe “varieties of passions” but “the same passionate Spirit as their source and significance.” So to shine is to get caught up in the work of the Spirit by discovering and using the Spirit’s gifts. And because those gifts are varied, the process of their discovery and growth in us will look different for everyone. But let me take a stab at describing the process, with an analogy that I think Paul’s word choice supports.

You might remember from high school chemistry that certain kinds of reactions do not take place immediately upon mixing two ingredients. These transformations need a little kickstart, a boost of heat called activation energy. Often, it’s the flame of a bunsen burner that provides this requirement and activates the change to come. But whatever the source, some reactions simply will not take place without it. Yes there’s potential, but there’s also a barrier that must be overcome.

So I think about this concept when Paul talks about energeō, about spiritual gifts that God will activate (e.g., 1 Corinthians 12:11).

Some of our gifts don’t seem to require activation energy at all; God has given us the potential for a particular kind of work, and it bubbles and spills out into our lives like baking soda and vinegar mixing in a model volcano.

You probably know a lot about the spiritual gifts God has given you in this manner. They might be useful for the work you do every day, and they’re almost certainly on display as a light to others in your ministry at St. Paul’s. For example, the members of the choir, among many others here, have been given musical gifts. Most of them probably learned this at a relatively young age and have been shining in this particular area of service for years.

Some gifts, though, are still waiting for God to give them that little boost, and in many cases we increase the energy required through the chill of our own fears. For many of us, hospitality is a challenge in this way. I myself have often used as an excuse my shyness or fear of looking stupid or desire to avoid rejection. I let myself off the hook for introducing myself to someone, or learning more about them, or extending to them an invitation to church or some event.

And yet at a few points in my life, I believe God has really needed me to welcome a particular stranger in a particular situation. And so I’ve been given in those important moments, and I bet you have too, the activation energy to overcome the barriers that are a natural part of us and the barriers we have contributed through sin. I hope in those moments that the light of Christ has indeed been made manifest to the people we have encountered.

Let me extend this analogy just a little further. I believe God has given us another, complementary path of spiritual growth: The Spirit has called us into community here and elsewhere, and in community we encounter catalysts. Catalysts, you may recall, lower and sometimes remove the activation energy required for a certain reaction. So too can our transformations be aided by the people and situations we encounter in community. They catalyze us, lowering or even breaking down the barriers to our fuller discovery and exercise of the gifts we have been given. It is not always an easy process, though.

Again, hospitality may be a telling example: the person who recognizes in us the potential for offering welcome and asks us to join in some new role can be just the catalyst we need, helping speed up a process of spiritual maturing that might have taken much longer otherwise. To be accountable to a community is to be challenged grow in the Spirit.

I spent the week before last living at Richmond Hill, a convent-turned-ecumenical-retreat-center in Virginia’s capital. Richmond Hill is run by volunteers and by ten or so house residents who make a 3–5 year commitment to the ministries of hospitality, racial reconciliation, educational reform, and thrice-daily prayer for Metropolitan Richmond. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a more potent catalyst. You see it in the web of relationships among the  residents, between the residents and the wider community of volunteers, between that community and city, and between this whole matrix and the visitors who show up at their door for retreat.

In my week in Richmond, I was challenged and I hope changed by the residents in particular. Each one makes discernment of the Spirit a priority in their own lives and shares this gift with those they welcome and listen to so intently. If you visit there, and I hope you will, you’ll see the way their community shines for the city they serve, catalyzing change that manifests the reconciling love of Christ in classrooms, housing projects, council meetings, churches, coffee shops, and individual relationships. It is a sight to behold. As is any place where the Spirit is at work among the faithful—including St. Paul’s, K Street.

In this season of manifestation and light, and in the seasons to come, I hope we too can be on the lookout for signs of our individual and corporate gifts, especially the ones we have not yet discovered. I pray that God will provide the appropriate nudge in the moments when we need it. I pray that in our attentiveness to each other we can be catalysts for spiritual growth that will bear much fruit in this parish and in our communities. If we are faithful to this process, we can’t help but be a light to the world, no matter what the weather, and no matter how we are called to serve the common good.

Image source: Chris Wolff CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

When Advent gets away from us

Kyle

Advent 4, Year C (Luke 1:39-55)

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Image source: Chris Wolff CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

—

Three weeks ago, Bishop Steven Miller bid us to embrace the present moment and put on the splendid apparel that is ours in Christ Jesus. Two weeks ago, Fr. Humphrey helped us name the grief and loss in all our lives and to arm us with the only protection we have: love. Last week, Fr. Andrew turned our attention to John the Baptist’s message of repentance and our responsibility to examine the things that set us off in the wrong direction.

“Live in the now.” “Love even if it hurts.” “Leave your sin behind.” These are fine Advent exhortations, all. Filled with joyful expectation of Christ’s first and second coming. Filled with trust that this hope can make a real difference in our lives. I believe it can, and I hope you do too.

But how’d it go for us, this time around? How did we do, with these exhortations or with our own observances? It’s hard not to ask ourselves these questions on the final Sunday of Advent, especially in these years when week four isn’t much of a week at all. We are a results-driven society, a success-oriented society. As we approach the finish line, we want to take stock of the distance we’ve traveled. We have traveled, right? We’ve kept our holy Advent?

Maybe not. Not the way we planned to anyway. Or maybe we didn’t even get to the planning stage. Let me speak only for myself and say that, as usual, I have been spinning my wheels intermittently, trying too hard when I’ve tried at all. I feel like another Advent has gotten away from me. Perhaps you feel that way as well.

There is spiritual danger in Advent and Lent, these short seasons of repentance and preparation leading up to our joyous principal feasts. The danger for many of us is this: We start to worry that if we do not do our part, God will not do God’s part. We’re not worried that Christmas and Easter won’t happen, not exactly. We’re worried they won’t happen for us, that we’ll somehow mess them up, that our preparation will prove inadequate.

In this matter there is good news for us this morning, my sisters and brothers: Because that is not the way divine love and divine action work in our lives. God is not so easily thwarted. Luke especially among the evangelists is not shy about reminding us of this reality. Indeed, he makes the case in his very first chapter, in three stories about three divine visitations.

The first visit, of course, is to Zechariah, who meets the angel Gabriel while doing his priestly duties in the temple, duties he was chosen for that day by lot. But according to Luke, it was anything but chance that brought Zechariah to that place of divine encounter: “Do not be afraid, Zechariah,” the angel says, “for your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth.”

Luke doesn’t let us miss the parallels between Elizabeth and Zechariah on the one hand and Sarah and Abraham on the other, both couples apparently infertile and getting on in years. It’s as if God is saying, “Remember how I built a great nation from Abraham and Sarah? Well hold on to your hats, because I’m at work in the world still, and you and your wife are right in the thick of it.”

Does Zechariah’s hesitant disbelief derail the events God has set in motion through this family? Nope, God just makes it part of the plan: The angel says to Zechariah, “[B]ecause you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you will become mute, unable to speak, until the day these things occur.” His months of silence add greater drama to the prophecy he eventually speaks to his son: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, for he hath visited and redeemed his people.” In that moment, the first among those redeemed is Zechariah himself. His doubt was no problem for God.

The next and most famous visit is the angel’s annunciation to Mary, who proves more thoughtful and open, saying “yes” to the angel’s strange greeting and stranger plan. Despite her confusion, she accepts that “nothing will be impossible with God.” And we have to agree with that remarkable assessment as we hear Luke narrate the divine details: We learn that Mary is a fitting choice not only for her favor in God’s eyes, but because her husband-to-be is a descendent of the great King David, from whom Jesus will inherit his throne. Plus, Luke adds, almost in passing, like it’s no big deal, it turns out that Mary’s relative Elizabeth is none other than the wife of Zechariah, about whom, well, see above. By the end of this second visitation, we’re getting the idea that the events unfolding share a heavenly momentum indeed.

Our gospel lesson this morning, the third visitation, is the icing on this already very elaborate cake. Here a final unlikely sign precedes the singing of a stunning canticle that captures the spirit of all that has come before it. In this last scene, Mary and her unborn son are received by more than just Elizabeth, more even than Elizabeth and the prophet who leaps inside her. Luke tells us that Mary’s cousin is also “filled with the Holy Spirit.” Through that Spirit, she gives thanks for the visitation of “the mother of [her] Lord,” a woman who “”believed there would be a fulfillment of what was spoken to her.”

So we get the sense at last that the characters have been gathered: Mary, who will sing the song; Elizabeth, who introduces and hears it; Jesus and John, unborn but not unacknowledged; perhaps Zechariah, sitting quietly in a corner; and the Holy Spirit, who has been working overtime setting this scene and who has spoken through the assembled prophets. Then, finally, we hear the words we know so well:

My soul doth magnify the Lord, *

   and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Savior.

For he hath regarded *

   the lowliness of his handmaiden.

For behold from henceforth *

   all generations shall call me blessed.

For he that is mighty hath magnified me, *

   and holy is his Name.

And his mercy is on them that fear him *

   throughout all generations.

He hath showed strength with his arm; *

   he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.

He hath put down the mighty from their seat, *

   and hath exalted the humble and meek.

He hath filled the hungry with good things, *

   and the rich he hath sent empty away.

He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel, *

   as he promised to our forefathers,

   Abraham and his seed for ever.

 

This song is nothing more or less than the work the Almighty has been doing with us since the beginning, work renewed in a singular way in the events of this magnificent first chapter of Luke: showing mercy and strength, taking the powerful to task and the vulnerable to pasture, fulfilling the promise of salvation to and through the people of God.

And to think we thought we could screw it up by forgetting to say our prayers or getting overly busy with Christmas shopping. No, I stand here to say to you that the Spirit has been powerfully at work in our lives these last three weeks, even if we forgot to send an invitation and even if we didn’t notice. So if it feels like this Advent has gotten away from you, take a few minutes between now and tomorrow night to ponder what this might mean.

What were you expecting Advent to sound like? Did we skip your favorite seasonal hymn? Well, perhaps the voice of a friend or family member announced the theme that will be with you through the days ahead. What were you expecting Advent to look like? Were you seeking the luminescent countenance of an angel? Perhaps the Spirit visited in the simple lighting of an advent wreath when the night was dark and cold.

What were you expecting Advent to feel like? Are you left on this Christmas Eve’s eve with a sense of incompleteness, or anxiety, or confusion? Don’t let Luke’s orderly account convince you that God’s servants don’t, or shouldn’t have those experiences. On either side of the rejoicing that accompanied these visits and these births, surely there was worry and regret, a sense that everything was happening too fast, or too soon, or the wrong way. Just ask Joseph, or read the first couple chapters of Matthew.

No, the Advents that get away from us are the most useful ones of all, because they remind us that our preparation, repentance, and hopeful anticipation are not confined to any season and that it is God, and not we ourselves, who accomplishes in us the work of salvation. The birth, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus are pure gift, and as we tell the story one more time, the Spirit will open our eyes to new ways we might experience that gift.

So perhaps it’s appropriate for us to turn the collect for the fourth Sunday of Advent around, in grateful acknowledgement of God’s sure presence with us this season. Let us pray:

Almighty God, we thank you for your daily visitation, wherein our consciences are purified; our hopes, rekindled; and your intentions for our lives, revealed—in your good time and by your good grace. We thank you for fashioning within us a mansion for your Son, where we trust that he will dwell with us and order our lives in accordance with your will. Our spirits rejoice in you, O God our Savior, and holy is your name. Amen.

Source: idleformat CC BY 2.0 via Flickr: http://bit.ly/stonePhoto

Jesus Is Our (Metaphorical) Rock

Kyle

Thursday in 1 Advent, Year 1 (Isaiah 26:1-6, Ps 118:19-24, Matt 7:21-27)

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Image source: idleformat CC BY 2.0 via Flickr

—

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our rock and our redeemer.

In college, I worked as a writing tutor. As word of this avocation got out to my friends, they started asking me to help with resumes and with statements for various applications. Probably the most useful idea I shared with them was something I’d been told, and tried to follow, when I was writing my own statements. “To get the readers to remember you,” the advice went, “you have to get them to imagine you doing the things you mention.” In other words: show, don’t tell.

And so I might recommend adding a paragraph that, to take a particular example, drew a picture of my friend’s experience building concrete canoes for a civil engineering competition. Yes, it was great that in so doing he had learned to be mindful of the intricacies of mixing ratios, but that message was more likely to stick if his readers actually pictured him out on the river for that first precarious test-paddle. We both hoped that the image helped the idea become better integrated in the mind of the reader: “Oh, Mike So-and-so, yeah, he was the concrete canoe guy, right?”

Of course, the great power of pictures and symbols, of metaphor and imagination, is not news to the inheritors of a tradition shaped by the likes of John the Evangelist, Augustine of Hippo, and Ignatius Loyola. They each knew that forming and nourishing disciples is about much more than presenting ideas to us. It’s about helping those ideas gain some purchase within, in our minds, yes, but even more so in our hearts. They knew, and we know, that biblical and theological imagery can, if we let it, get inside us, becoming, in one author’s words “part of ourselves … absorbed into our very life” [Martin Thornton, Christian Proficiency (Cambridge, MA: Cowley, 1988): 77.].

If we believe the words of scripture can act upon us in this way, then liturgies like today’s present an embarrassment of riches for our spiritual nourishment. At the center are Jesus’s words from Matthew’s gospel: “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock. The rain fell, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on rock” (Matthew 7:24-25). Jesus and his teachings are our bedrock, our sure foundation—vast, dependable, and in an important sense unbreakable.

You probably noticed these images of rock and stone throughout our lections today, and each appearance offers its own richness, its own power to reach our inner nooks and crannies. My moment of intimate encounter came with the recapitulation of the image in our Communion Hymn: “On Christ the solid rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand.” When we drop the conceit of the house and put our own two feet squarely on that rock, or in that sand, it seems to change things.

“Sinking sand” reminded me immediately of my inbox, and my relationship with it, of how quickly the dream of tidiness and control slips through my fingers as requests, reports, and referrals pile up. My strategies are sinking sand, my plans for getting through the day on my own efforts rather than by trusting that I am supported and saved by a rock and redeemer who doesn’t care what my inbox, or even my resume, looks like. All other ground is sinking sand.

An image can do its full formative work on our hearts and souls only if we invite it in and bid it stay a while. That’s what these contemplative seasons are all about. What will your image be? Advent, of course, has plenty of worthy pictures for us to choose from and sit with: light in the darkness, a highway in the desert, hills toppled and valleys raised, strange messengers from earth and heaven. But I think, in what for us is a season of papers, exams, grading, shopping, and last-minute travel, we could do worse than to spend our time with the image of our “everlasting rock” (Isaiah 26:4). Our houses, and our hopes, can be built on nothing less.

Gathering with the Saints

Kyle 2 Comments
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Ephesians 1:11-22 (All Saints Day, Year C [long story], RCL)
“I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, and for this reason I do not cease to give thanks for you as I remember you in my prayers” (Ephesians 1:15–16). I hope the author of the Letter to the Ephesians won’t mind me borrowing these words. I share their sense of thanksgiving, though I direct them at a different church at a different time. You see, when I think of the saints and a city’s love for them, I think first of my pilgrimage to Rome.
I was there with a group of seminarians and clergy representing VTS at churches and events throughout the Eternal City, including mass at an English-speaking Jesuit parish and even a papal audience. We brought to Italy all kinds of questions on our syllabus. But perhaps most of all, we went to figure out what we might make of the saints. That was certainly the case for me.
“What do we make of the saints?” I see now that it was the wrong question, too concerned with forming a theological position. The better question for a pilgrimage is this: “What did God make of the saints?” Or, borrowing again from Ephesians, “What are the riches of God’s glorious inheritance among the saints?” What did God give to them? What does God give us,through them? These are questions for an encounter.
Our group’s most intimate encounter took place not in Rome but on a day trip to Assisi. That medieval town captures well, through juxtaposition, the power of God’s gifts to Blessed Francis, who was born into wealth but came to embrace a path of poverty. The people who built a basilica in his honor seem to have forgotten the humility of his spiritual heritage. So we pilgrims were drawn first and foremost not to the basilica but to the modest oratory of San Damiano, where young Francis once prayed and heard Christ on the cross tell him “Francis, rebuild my church.”
Several of my companions and I spent five or ten quiet minutes in the tiny, dilapidated nave. As we shuffled in awkwardly, we gave each other some space and slowly settled in to pray. I looked up at a replica of that painted, once-talking crucifix, and the moment took on a noticable weight. No, Jesus didn’t talk to me. But I was aware that I was soaking up … something.
When we exited, my friend Caleb asked “Did anybody else feel that?” He and I had not been alone. We didn’t know what that was, exactly. But I’m pretty sure the group had, together, a gentle but profound experience of the grace and presence of our Lord. Francis’s witness to the simplicity of the spiritual life became a window through which we caught that glimpse. Saints are like that: windows for beholding grace.
We were also fortunate to take a number of “vertical tours” of other important sites, descending through the layers of time to the streets of Rome in the first few centuries of the Church. The most dramatic of these was our tour of the Vatican necropolis. Several stories below St. Peter’s Basilica, these excavations uncovered in the 1940s the site that many believe to be Peter’s final resting place. Our earnest tour guide made a compelling case for their authenticity, but the significance for me wasn’t about whether the several visible bones we saw belonged to St. Peter or not.
What was moving to me was both the tenacity and the tenderness with which these Roman Christians, like their forebearers, claimed Peter as one of their own. The same was true of other saints at the major churches around the city. “Here lies St. Agnes,” we heard later in the week on her feast day. “She was was one of us.”
So our trip painted an interesting picture of our “inheritance among the saints.” We saw them serve as windows for grace, their gifts enlightening our hearts to see the power of God and the persistence of Christ’s call. We saw them serve as links in the great chain of the Christian faith, binding us one to another across both time and place. Today we give thanks for those links as we bind ourselves in the Spirit to Michael Sebastian Freeland in the sacrament of baptism, and as we sit with the news that Fr. Andrew will be retiring as rector of St. Paul’s at the end of January.
Such is the liminal nature of the Church God has made of the saints. God has called us to pay particular attention to comings and goings because we witness to a kingdom that has come and is yet to come.
There’s a fatigue that can set in, living this way. It’s the fatigue of Francis and his homeless friars, called by Christ into the countryside to tirelessly preach the gospel. It’s the fatigue of building church on top of church in restless tribute of saints striving to saints in joy. It’s the fatigue of running a church like this one, of filling the rotas and planning the budgets and always saying hello and goodbye to people we love.
But there is more to the story of our “inheritance among the saints.” There is good news that energizes both the Eternal City and the Letter to the Ephesians. It’s one of the things that sets this letter apart from the ones we know for sure that Paul wrote. It’s the fullness of what this writer means by the word “inheritance.”
Our inheritance is that we are to be gathered up.*
Our inheritance is that we are being made a part of the great “fullness of him who fills all in all.” Listen to the verse that immediately precedes our passage from this morning: “With all wisdom and insight [God] has made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure that he set forth in Christ, as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.”
So our inheritance with the saints is not just our salvation through Christ, which is how St. Paul usually puts it. It’s not just the treasury of past and present witness to that good news, which the saints so boldly proclaimed with words and with their very lives. Our shared inheritance is that we will be made a part of a cosmic unity with the saints and with the one who has already gathered them up. The saints are for us a sign of this inheritance, like the seal with which we are marked by the Holy Spirit in baptism–but easier for us to see, because the saints are dynamic, concrete, human.
I remember the first time I saw the Roman skyline. I was on my way to the stunning Galleria Borghese, north of the central city and up the kind of hill that you’d have to have Borghese money to live on. I was overcome by the number and variety of cupolas and crosses below, every one marking a central point in the life of a real community giving and living their lives to Jesus Christ.
But the next day I discovered an even better place to take in that tableau. So if you find yourself in Rome, and if you can keep it from going to your head, head over to St. Peter’s. Don’t ascend all the way to the cupola, the great dome, or you’ll lose the effect. Head for the rooftop gift shop, but keep walking past it, back toward St. Peter’s Square. You’ll find that you’re approaching, from behind, the statues of the saints that stand on top of the basilica’s facade.


Pick your patron saint, or perhaps head for the statue of Christ himself in the center. Get as close as you can, joining the ranks of those who witnessed to our Lord in life and witness to him still. Then gaze out at the city with them, a city that has the saints in its very bones. What you might experience, by the grace of God, is something like our inheritance in Christ. Not just because it is grand or beautiful or triumphant, but because in that moment you too will be gathered up with those who have been gathered already. Sadly, for now, it will be a fleeting thing.
We went to Rome looking to see our inheritance with the saints, but Ephesians tells us we cannot find it there or anywhere else, because it is a future reality. Our inheritance is, at last and forever, to be gathered up in Christ, with the saints and with all creation. So perhaps, for now, it is enough just to be gathered, gathered around Christ, gathered here, gathered with each other, gathered to celebrate All Saints’ Sunday. May it be, to us, a foretaste of the gathering to come.

* I am indebted here to Paul L. Hammer’s article on “Inheritance” in David Noel Freedman, ed., The Anchor Bible Dictionary, Volume 3 (New York: Doubleday, 1992): 415–417.

Sermon on Mark 6 from Sunday, July 22: “Discipleship when life happens”

Kyle

I’ve recently started work as a part-time assistant for pastoral care at St. Paul’s Parish on K Street in Washington, DC. As I say in this sermon, “life happened” (and also death) early Friday morning in Aurora, CO. So my first sermon in this new position took an unexpected turn. Please continue to pray for all those affected by Friday’s shootings.

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Mark 6:30-34, 53-56 (Proper 11, Year B, RCL)

Our gospel passage this morning is more than a little confusing. I think our first task has to be just figuring out what’s going on. The gospel writer Mark can be hard enough to follow, and today the job is made more difficult by the designers of the lectionary. So take a deep breath and think back with me, if you can, to our readings from the last two weeks. Recall that Jesus had sent out the twelve two by two, to cast out spirits, heal the sick, and proclaim repentance. Next came last week’s strange interlude about John the Baptist, Herodius, the dance, and the head on the platter. And then, just like that, we’re back to the apostles without a word of warning. So the first thing to remember is that the apostles have “gathered around Jesus,” as we heard in the first verse today, because they’ve returned from their journey and want to tell him how it went.

They give what must have been a rather fabulous report, considering the nature of the work Jesus empowered them to do. And then Jesus says this: “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.” It must have been like music to their ears. After all, they’d traveled days or maybe weeks with no supplies. So imagine the disciples’ surprise and frustration when they arrive and find that a crowd had seen them going and rushed ahead to their formerly deserted place. They’d been promised a retreat alone, and they ended up hemmed in by a crowd full of sheep without a shepherd. But filled with compassion and apparently tireless, their master rolls up his sleeves and begins to teach them many things.

So how did the disciples handle it?  And what did Jesus teach the crowd?  Here’s where things get really confusing. The next line we heard this morning was this: “When they had crossed over, they came to land at Gennesaret and moored the boat.” What?  First they get out of the boat and watch Jesus start teaching, and now they’ve crossed over to the other side of the lake?  Notice that we’re missing almost twenty verses here. At first it seemed to me that whoever chopped this story up got a little overzealous. Indeed, the part they removed was hardly insignificant: it’s the feeding of the five thousand followed immediately by Jesus walking on water. These are important details that help us understand the flow of the story, however familiar they are to us and however long they would take to read, or chant.

So why the huge jump?  I thought. How could the designers of the lectionary screw up a Sunday reading so badly?  Surely it’s not too much to ask that the story make sense. But then I read on ahead from the line about having crossed over: “When they got out of the boat, people at once recognized [Jesus], and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. …[They] begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed.” Now this is sounding familiar. I think we’re starting to hear a theme of faithful service amid frustration and fatigue. Part of what the lectionary emphasizes, it seems to me, is that after having their retreat interrupted, Jesus and his disciples attended to the needs of those who interrupted it. And then, yes, they headed off somewhere else to attend to still more people in need.

Disciples, I am sorry to say, are always on call. The apostles weren’t told, “Put down your nets and follow me, except on weekends, federal holidays, and three personal days that do not carry over to the following year.” No, our baptismal promises do not come with blackout dates, and the needs of the world are stubbornly indifferent to how much overtime we’ve put in lately.

Those of you who are parents probably understand this reality better than anybody, and those of us who remember or are still living what we put our parents through can probably come to a second-hand understanding. I’m thinking in particular of a summer afternoon when my family pulled into our Florida home after two days on I-95 returning from a trip to New York. I was seven, and my sister was four, if that gives you some idea of what kind of days these had been. But despite the terrible timing, I chose that day to throw an absolute fit about wanting to go see our local minor league baseball team. For reasons I still do not fully understand, my father relented. Now that’s a pretty tame example, but you parents can all name much more inconvenient or even desperate instances of when, as they say, “life happened.” You can’t control when your child gets sick, fails a test at school, breaks up with that first boyfriend or girlfriend, wrecks the car, or worse. Life happens, and you respond the best way you know how whenver you have to, because that’s what it means to be a parent.

Maybe that’s the lesson Jesus teaches his disciples in this morning’s piecemeal passage and that its addled editors are trying to teach us. The twelve got into that boat with every intention of caring for themselves for a while, but they got out knowing that Jesus and they had a job to do and that the grace of God and the presence of their master would carry them along. Life happened, and they responded as well as they could, because that’s what it means to be a disciple.

I was with a group of St. Paul’s parishioners this week who have learned this lesson far better than I have, learned it over years of faithful, Christ-centered service. Reflecting on the shape of their ministry, they named the frustrations of DC metro traffic, the difficulty of finding volunteers for certain work, and the sense we all get that the ministry Jesus calls us to is simply unrelenting: “no respite” was a common refrain. But they also spoke of the ways they were refreshed by “seeing delight in others,” by “the opportunity to stimulate excitement,” and by “watching others grow and develop” in faith and service. The abundant grace of God is such that sometimes the Holy Spirit breaks into our dreariest moments of tedium and exhaustion and helps us find peace and light among it all.

Now, none of this is to say that the disciples in today’s lesson didn’t genuinely need that retreat time. They did, and we do. But our call, it seems to me, is to be open and discerning when life happens. Sometimes, we really do need to push that boat back from the shore and find a new, genuinely deserted place to recharge our batteries. There may be no blackout dates for disciples, but there are some days when we won’t be of much use anyway. At other times, though, the need is so overwhelming that we can feel the risen Christ walking beside us, nudging us into service as his strong hands and compassionate heart in desperate times.

Yesterday morning, I visited the website of St. Martin-in-the-Fields Episcopal Church in Aurora, CO. “Summer time and the living is easy,” the home page read. You better believe that’s because the people of St. Martin’s have more pressing things to do right now than update the parish website. Congregations throughout the area have thrown open their doors to those whose shock and grief at Friday’s murders have drawn them out to stand vigil with their neighbors. The wounds to their community, and to the whole human family, are deep. We will all be tending to those wounds for some time, especially Coloradans, who have also been battered by the recent wildfires and who still carry scars from killings all too similar in Littleton in 1999. The images of smoke and gunfire, the harrowing stories of fortunate survivors, and the laments of the bereaved are painfully familiar. No, the living won’t be easy in Colorado for quite some time, regardless of what the calendar says, regardless of who is on vacation.

Where do they find the strength, and where will we, in the face of this senseless act, and in the face of the more mundane changes and chances that threaten each day to sap our energy and hope in God’s promises?  Well, we’ll find it in each other, to be sure, which is why we heard over and over again this weekend that mental health workers, pastoral caregivers, and concerned citizens everywhere are reaching out to those who need it. During another recent crisis, my seminary Hebrew teacher used this expression to describe what we do in our most desperate times: “we huddle.” I hope you’ll take some time this afternoon to huddle with anyone you think might be particularly confused, hurt, or frightened by Friday morning’s terrible, sickening attack. If you’re one of those people, please know that you are not alone and that your response is nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to be taken lightly. Please don’t be afraid to ask for the help you need. We’ll all find strength in each other.

But we Christians witness to another power stronger still, and it’s what brought many of us here this morning. As one pastor, who happens to be speaking right now to a congregation in Colorado, said Friday, “Obviously, the affected families don’t need a theological treatise right now; they desperately need the very real presence of Jesus in their lives, and that’s what our church and many others are helping them experience.” When life and death happen in the worst ways, we huddle with each other, and we huddle around Christ. “The apostles gathered around Jesus,” Mark tells us, and so should we. We huddle in this familiar place, we bring our sadness and confusion, we pray, we break bread.” In so doing, we invite the Holy Spirit into our lives, allowing the living Christ to breath his life into us anew. We reach out and touch not his cloak but his very body, and we receive in some way the healing power that flows from him. Gathering around Jesus is how the apostles received the strength and courage to keep on getting out of that boat despite fatigue and frustration. And it’s how the grace of God will get us through these times and worse. If you don’t believe me, look around you in this holy huddle. There are people in this church who have been to hell and back. Life and death happened to them at the worst possible times, and they are disciples still, serving the Lord of Life who heals and strengthens all of us, come what may.

So pray for the people of Aurora this week. Pray for James Holmes. Pray for each other. And pray for the church whose mission is to bind up the broken-hearted and help share the healing love of Christ with everyone who waits for him on the shore.

Sermon on Glory and Mercy, 2 Lent

Kyle 3 Comments

Between field ed, the VTS chapel, and class, I have preached seven times in the last six weeks. That’s all in six weeks’ work for the average parish priest, but this seminarian is definitely ready for the break ahead. In the meantime, here’s my final effort, from Sunday’s readings (and collect!).

Many, many thanks to David Schlafer, who talked through it with me on Thursday and basically gave me all the good ideas.

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“O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy …”1 So begins the collect for this, the second Sunday in Lent. It’s characteristic of our liturgical tradition that such a profound insight into the Christian faith and life—and indeed into the divine life—be relegated to the role of dependent clause in one of our common prayers. But perhaps that’s the charm and power of sticking our best theology in as asides in the sacred syntax, because it allows us to be surprised in the Spirit when we do stumble across them. That’s what happened to me this week when I read those words: “O God, whose glory it is always to have mercy.”

I was surprised because glory and mercy are two words we use a lot in church but seldom use together. Let’s spend a few minutes thinking about what they might mean. When I hear the former word, I think immediately of something like “fame and glory,” the glory of renown, of being thought of highly by others, of possessing admirable and perhaps enviable fortunes. Plenty of God’s servants possess this kind of glory in our Judeo-Christian tradition, especially the great kings David and Solomon. Of course, the biblical witness also speaks to the spiritual danger that accompanies such glory: the temptation to forget that we can possess it only partially. We learn, sometimes the hard way, that whatever glory we may come into should ultimately be ascribed to God, the source of all good gifts. The kings of Israel lost touch with that important truth, to their own detriment and, we are told, to their nation’s.

So there’s a second, related sense of glory for us to consider then: God’s own glory, to which Solomon’s temple and our modern-day cathedrals and basilicas are meant merely to point. Indeed, the image of God being worshiped for all eternity in the heavenly temple by choirs of angels and the communion of saints is the ultimate expression of this idea. We need “sounding trumpets’ melodies”2 to wrap our hearts around this idea of glory, plus the best poetry we can muster. My fallback association, perhaps somewhat modest by St. Paul’s standards, is Calvin Hampton’s shimmering setting of Canticle 18, a text that reads, in part:

Splendor and honor and kingly power

are yours by right, O Lord our God, …

And so, to [you] who sit[] upon the throne, …

Be worship and praise, dominion and splendor,

for ever and for evermore.

Another song of God’s glory is the well-known hymn by Walter Chalmers Smith:

Immortal, invisible, God only wise,

in light inaccessible hid from our eyes,

most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days,

almighty, victorious, thy great Name we praise.

Hopefully one of these associations puts a glorious melody in your head. If not, rumor has it there’s a music lover or two in this parish, and perhaps they can help you out with another possibility. But they might hesitate if you asked for their help today, wouldn’t they? These aren’t exactly Lenten melodies we’re talking about. Surely this notion of glory is the stuff of Easter and Ascension. In our current season of examination and repentance, we’re not too likely to sing anything triumphantly, jubilantly, or—here’s my favorite, from a poem by Edward Taylor—“seraphic-wise.” It somehow wouldn’t feel quite right, all that glory. Not right now.

Mercy, on the other hand, is never far from our thoughts this time of year. We heard of it in Genesis and Romans this morning. Though Sarah’s womb was barren and Abraham’s body “already good as dead,”3 these two great ancestors nevertheless “hop[ed] against hope”4 for the mercy of God’s deliverance. And God, in turn, promises them bounty beyond their wildest dreams. Part of Paul’s point in our reading from Romans is that Abraham and Sarah’s story is our story too. By God’s mercy, we Christians too claim an inheritance in God’s promises of covenant loyalty. Of each of us, then, can it be said, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.”5

Of course, the mercy we receive from our Lord is wider by far than just this sense of deliverance from need and despair. Probably the aspect of God’s mercy that is most with us in this season is mercy as regards our guilt from “dust and sin.”6 And more often than not, we reflect on our state in a minor key, and the emotional tone of our reflection is the humility of a “troubled spirit” and a “broken and contrite heart.”7

In that vein, I’m grateful again for the musical witness of Calvin Hampton in a different composition. He re-set a profound meditation on God’s mercy with a dignity of melody and tempo that better matches the emotional character of Lent than the more well-known tune it replaces:

There’s a wideness in God’s mercy like the wideness of the sea;

there’s a kindness in his justice, which is more than liberty.

There is welcome for the sinner, and more graces for the good;

there is mercy with the Savior; there is healing in his blood.

If you know it, you know it’s an almost haunting tune, insistent but understated. And indeed, mercy as the gospels understand it is a very humble thing, seemingly disconnected from the grandeur and the splendor and the trumpets. Quietness and trust are the name of the game in this forty-day celebration of God’s loving mercy. Perhaps most of all, the saying that springs unbidden to my mind on the subject of mercy is from the calling of Matthew. The disciples are taking some flack for Jesus’s habit of associating with tax collectors and other riff-raff, but Jesus overhears them and says this: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’’’8

Go and learn what this means. It’s an odd thing, really, telling them to go when the best place for them to learn the lesson would seem to be that very meal, with those very sinners, from the very man who said, “Blessed are the merciful.” But maybe his telling them to go has a different meaning. That’s the sense I get from our gospel reading today, on this day when we celebrate the God whose glory it is always to have mercy. The story comes from the great pivot point of Mark’s gospel. Immediately before our passage from today, we hear Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Messiah. And so the curtain falls on Mark’s Act I, because finally even the thick-skulled disciples get it. When the curtain comes up today, we first hear this: “Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.”9

It is simply not in Jesus’s vocation to hang around reveling in the glory of messiahship. Once the disciples understand that he is the Christ, he strikes out toward Jerusalem on his final journey, his great errand of mercy. In case we don’t get the point, Mark says practically the same thing again in the next chapter in the story of the transfiguration. “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings.”10 No, Jesus says, it is not yet time for me to reign in glory. Or, if you prefer, from today’s lesson: “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”11

You can’t understand glory until you understand mercy. That’s what Jesus says to us again and again and again. And so he tells us to “go and learn what this means,” just like he went and showed us for himself. I love trumpets and temples and the transfiguration, but I am also convinced that the glory of the Almighty and Everliving God cannot exist apart from the humility of the ever-merciful one who became obedient to the point of helplessness and death.12 And so at the heart of Mark’s gospel lies the paradoxical truth that is at the heart of our faith and the heart of our God: blessed are the merciful, exalted are the humble, worthy is the lamb. We can’t understand glory until we understand mercy because there is no greater glory than to have mercy. This Lent, as we follow Jesus on the road to complete his glorious act of mercy, may we listen to his charge: “Go, and learn what this means.”

1Book of Common Prayer, 166.

2Edward Taylor, “Meditation Twenty,” Sacramental Meditations. See also the stunning Gerald Finzi choral setting.

3Romans 4:19.

4Romans 4:18.

51 Peter 2:10.

6George Herbert, “Love,” The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.

7Psalm 51:18.

8Matthew 9:12–13.

9Mark 8:31.

10Mark 9:5.

11Mark 8:33.

12See Philippians 2:6–8.

First Sermon on … Sex and Beer … ?

Kyle

I’ve complained a lot in seminary that we don’t talk enough about sex. We talk around it a lot. We talk about its implications (or rather, sexuality’s implications) for church polity a lot. But we don’t actually talk about sex, about desire, about pleasure. At least not very much, at least not in the Episcopal Church. This is a shame, I think, because I think we have a word of good news to speak on the subject. At the same time, there are pitfalls. The things that “charm us most” are the hardest gifts for us to use responsibly, to have a healthy relationship with. So when I had the chance to preach on James 1:12-18 for my VTS senior sermon, I had to take it.

I usually try not to introduce sermons like I’m doing here, but I wanted to give the background because this was a very special (for me) sermon given to a community that knows me and knows I’m generally not a puritanical or finger-pointy person. But I wasn’t sure if the words on the electronic page would communicate that the same way my in-person words to my friends and colleagues hopefully did. So to be clear: My point in this sermon, is that, on the one hand, the things that give us pleasure are good gifts from God that we can and should enjoy. On the other hand, as we mature by God’s grace, we can and should expect to be changed, to experience life’s gifts in healthier and more positive ways.
So, without further ado …
PDF | Audio | Text:

Allow me to share a song with you. I heard this strange little nursery rhyme at a National Gathering of Episcopal Young Adults in Estes Park, CO, during my junior year of college. It goes like this:1

There are no Episcopalians down in Hell

There are no Episcopalians down in Hell

They’re in Heaven up above

Drinking beer and making love

There are no Episcopalians down in Hell

It’s tough to know where to begin with that. I myself can’t help but imagine someone like John Wesley’s utter disbelief at hearing this particular “spiritual song.” Presumably the Methodists up above have given themselves over to worthier pursuits under his continued guidance, and so perhaps he would take some comfort in that.

Now I’m no prude, and certainly no teatotaller, but even this Milwaukeean was a little taken aback on first hearing that song. More shocking still was the way this mentality was espoused that week by some of the best and brightest Episcopal young adults in the country. Indeed, when I arrived back at the dorm on New Year’s Eve after a lovely but sparsely attended Taize prayer service, my reverie was broken by the revelry of a much larger and rowdier crowd; let’s just say that this group had started in on the song’s idea of the heavenly banquet a little early. I felt like I was back in Madison at the nation’s top party school.

I kid because I know no other way of beginning to reflect on these stern verses from James: “Blessed is anyone who endures temptation …One is tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it; then, when that desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and that sin, when it is fully grown, gives birth to death.”2

On the one hand, there’s no doubt that my friends in Colorado were reacting against a certain kind of puritanical Christianity that they encountered among many fellow college students back home, a Christianity all too happy to cite verses like these. I think they were partly right to react against it. We Christians have to stop demonizing desire if we’re to have a healthy relationship with it.

On the other hand, surely we cannot think that the author of the Letter of James is wholly on the wrong track. Surely there are temptations we are to endure rather than submit to. If C.S. Lewis is right that God is “a hedonist at heart” and that we are called to live into that heavenly vocation,3 then surely we and the Holy Spirit still have some work to do figuring out how exactly we should experience life’s pleasures, how we can rightly order our desires for beer, sex, the perfect cup of coffee, our favorite TV show, the companionship of family and friends and partners and spouses and sweethearts, or that job that will challenge and nurture and delight us. Surely we are being tested. And as Lewis points out in The Screwtape Letters, we’ll fare worse if we believe it isn’t so.

I think it’s the idea of never-ending testing that scares us off from these kinds of New Testament writings and leads us to respond with these kinda fun but kinda childish jokes about whiskey-palians or sex and beer in heaven. It’s not primarily some inability to speak the word “sex” or “alcohol” or “lust” or “pleasure of the flesh” that speeds us on to the next pericope. No, what really doesn’t preach in an Episcopal pulpit, I believe, is this language of the ceaseless test, the cosmic battle of good and evil taking place in microcosm in our every moral deliberation. I think we’re afraid life might really be like the street-corner preacher says it is. We’re afraid sometimes that not even that table, not even that cross, can give us a rest from the shackles we call striving.

But I think we’re wrong if we choose to either run away from these passages about desire and temptation and struggle or to treat them as if they were the whole story. After all, James knew that the Christian life is more than striving in the face of temptation. James knew that the devil and the angel are there on our shoulders, but he also knew that by God’s grace and by training in righteousness we learn to tell the difference: “Every generous act of giving, with every perfect gift, is from above, coming down from the Father of lights …In fulfillment of his own purpose he gave us birth by the word of truth, so that we would become a kind of first fruits of his creatures.”4 By God’s grace, we come to know the good gifts God has given us, to use them as God wills, and to give them to one another. By God’s grace, we become part of a new creation.

So maybe James knew what C.S. Lewis knew, that “Out at sea, out in [God’s] sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure.”5 As the demon Screwtape laments, “everything has to be twisted before it’s any use” to the cause of evil.

So I submit to you that our task as faithful Christians is not to pretend that we don’t get ourselves good and twisted up from time to time. Nor, I think, should we make light of that twisting in act or in song. Nor should we let what sometimes feels like a cosmic struggle to stay untwisted convince us that the struggle and the twisting is all there is.

No, our task is to have faith that the Father of lights is there illuminating our path, that the Holy Spirit is leading us to a more perfect love and a keener sense of discernment, that Jesus is walking with and redeeming us even at our most twisted and confused. Now that’s a vision that James, John Wesley, C.S. Lewis, and—I hope—those friends I made in Colorado can all get behind. So cheers to them and to all the faithful, who in Christ are becoming the “first fruits of [God’s] creatures.”

1To the tune of “If you’re happy and you know it.”

2James 1:12, 14.

3C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters in The Complete C.S. Lewis: Signature Classics (New York: HarperOne, 2002): 249.

4James 1:17–18.

5Lewis, 249.