Monday, January 28, 2019

A Sermon for the Third Sunday after Epiphany

Luke 4:14-21

January 27, 2019

I had an old man experience when I met with the youth group last week, one of those moments when I realize I am from another century if not a whole other galaxy.  We were playing a game that required us to put the names of movies stars or musician, well known people in a hat.  We would then draw names and have to act out our person for others to guess. I think most of my offerings were unknown to the group, but the one that really got me was John Wayne.  Not one kid had heard of John Wayne. I’m feeling really old after that.  So please tell me you know field of dreams……Kevin Costner, Amy Madigan, James Earl Jones, baseball, shoeless joe Jackson….corn field? 

I’m hearing this story about Jesus today and thinking of the movie but I’ll get to the movie in a minute.  First let’s look at the story.  In our story, Jesus reads a passage from the prophet Isaiah in the synagogue, a passage about the end of oppression, and recovery of sight, and release of prisoners, about the year of the Lord’s favor. And then Jesus tells his audience that this prophecy has been fulfilled in their presence.  The scripture Jesus reads is Isaiah telling Israel that he has been sent to proclaim the good news of God’s activity in and among and for the people of God.  Isaiah was speaking about his own day and about an end to the misery of a people scattered into slavery and exile who longed for a return to their homeland and the promise of a life blessed by God.  Surely some of those who heard Jesus read the passage heard it as a promise about their future, about a time when Rome would no longer be in charge and they would be free again. 
This familiar story about Jesus suggests that Jesus will be the one to solve the problems still plaguing Israel.  

We western Christians with our strong work ethic easily hear that Jesus is the answer to the world’s woes and that peace, freedom, and reconciliation will come about if we just work with him to help make it happen.  But here is something worth noticing about this little passage.  Jesus doesn’t say he has come to fulfill the hopes of Israel.  He doesn’t say the promise will come about in time.  He says, quite clearly that the fulfillment has already occurred.  “This passage has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  It has already happened. The promised new life is available right now.

Jesus is proclaiming a new reality, a new way of seeing life and of being in the world. The salvation he announces is already here. So maybe our work has to do with becoming aware that the kingdom of God is already here, not out in the future somewhere, but here and now.  This moment is the moment of new sight, release of captives, good news.  This is the time of the Lord’s favor.  This story comes early in Luke’s gospel.  Jesus will spend the rest of the gospel narrative calling people to open their eyes and hearts to the presence of God which is all around us, and in which we all swim.

And that’s what brings me to Field of dreams.  Kevin Costner plays Ray Kinsella, a novice corn farmer who tears up part of his corn crop to build a baseball diamond.  I’m thinking of that great scene at the end where Ray’s brother in law finally sees the ball players that have been there all along.  He looks up and asks when did these guys get here.  In that moment of his new awareness of an unexpected reality, everything shifts.  His priorities change and he is willing to take risks to support what he has come to see. He is no longer worried about the impracticality of having a baseball diamond in the middle of a corn field.  He now believes in the baseball players, yes, but it is more than that.  He isn’t just a believer, he is living in a new reality.  So the question for us this morning is how do we open ourselves to the fulfillment of the promise that Jesus says has taken place?  How do we live into this new way of being.

I find an answer to that question, not in some new aged, orthodoxy-questioning, emerging view of Christianity, though I know that is where you would expect me to go on this.  No.  I find an answer in the writings of one of the most respected thinkers in the Orthodox world, Christos Yannaras, who says faith is not about a set of intellectual convictions or beliefs, but is a mode of being.  Being a Christian means being in the world in a particular way.  This mode of being involves an awareness of the immediacy of God’s reality within us and between us and around us. 

How do we enter into, become aware of and live in that mode of being?  That is our work, it is a life process.  Yannaras says we enter into that new mode of being by surrendering our cogito and desidero.  Now generally, I have little use for the latin and greek terms slipped into sermons, but these two words are worth a look.  The words have to do with thinking and desire, but Yannaras puts them in the first person to make his point.   He says the new life involves surrendering our “I think,” and “I want.”  Not thinking and desire, but the very particular personal “I think,” and “I want.”  He suggests that loosening our attachment to our way of understanding reality,  surrendering our desires and expectations is the beginning of  opening ourselves to a new way, a new possibility.  He would say that we can only do that letting go by being part of a community of those who are also trying to live into that mode of being. He would say that the Church is our salvation, not because it points us toward God, but because in the church we are freed from our own stuck-ness regarding our desires and opinions and we come to understand truth to be held by and revealed in community.  

Maybe the easier way to say that is that if we can let go of our assumptions, just a little bit, in a good community of fellow travelers, we may notice amazing things that others can see that we can’t.  We may learn that we have our own piece of the truth puzzle to contribute.  

Jesus talked about this all the time. Expand your thinking, he said.  Give up your assumptions about those who are in and who are out of your community and learn from Samaritans and sinners and Romans.  The kingdom of God is all around you.  Love your neighbor and you will begin to see it.  

So….back to the ball field.  Ray’s brother-in-law comes to see what is true and yet unseen when Ray’s daughter falls and is choking.  In the crisis of the moment the brother-in-law lets go of his agenda for a moment, shifts his “I think” and his “I want,” and is filled with concern for the child.  It is in that letting go that he sees the real.  It is also in that moment that he truly enters into community with his sister and with Ray.  He becomes alive in a new way and is filled with awe and amazement at what he has discovered.   Life is changed.

I am thinking today also of that great Verna Dozier quote where she says the institutional church is where life is lived differently not just for the church, but always in order that life may be lived differently everywhere.

Maybe that passage too has been fulfilled in our hearing.  We just have to live it.  JB  


Thursday, January 24, 2019

A Sermon for Second Sunday after Epiphany

January 20, 2019


Many years ago Mary and I took a group of church folks to Greece to follow in the footsteps of Paul and learn about the early church.  A group of us ended up just wandering around Athens one morning and stumbled upon a cathedral where a service was in progress. The church was on  a large plaza and all the doors were open.  People were coming and going and music was coming from inside so we wandered in.  It was amazing.  Gold and icons were everywhere. Chanting and incense filled the air, and the players in the great procession winding its way around the nave wore vestments as ornate as the rest of the sanctuary.  We stayed and watched for quite a while and finally figured out, when someone started reading, that all that glitter was the gospel procession.  Ten minutes of elaborate liturgy to read a two minute story about Jesus. Just like at St. Aidan’s.  Right. 

In the adult class we are looking at the difference between Jesus as he came to be known in doctrine and dogma, and Jesus the first century rabbi.  It is only in the last century that scholars have tried to separate those two ideas of Jesus, and many of us have found the expanded view of Jesus very helpful.

With only the church’s Jesus in mind, we easily imagine a God-become-human who knows exactly what he is about in life, what his mission is, one who is surely up to the task of fulfilling that mission.  The Church’s Jesus focuses us on the idea of God’s son, the savior, a part of the Trinity.  When we hear stories of Jesus like the one we have today, it is difficult to hear anything besides a story about God.  Jesus was God, he must have known he was God doing what God would do in the world.  The Church’s story is laced with words about Jesus like “fulfillment”, and “as it had been written.”  Jesus is seen as God moving among us.  It can be difficult to imagine Jesus as just another human being trying, like we all do to figure out his life and find his calling.  And yet that is in our stories and our tradition too.  It is the stated heart of the tradition—that Jesus was fully human—but we have crafted so much doctrine around Jesus, that it can be hard to imagine Jesus as one of us.  

We hear Jesus’ story in sacred settings, places of worship filled with sacred music and holy books and ancient rites designed to make us aware of God…..we hear the stories in settings like this and it is no wonder that we end up hearing them as God’s story and not our story.  But the story of the God-become-human only works if it speaks to lives like ours, if we can find our lives in the human life of Jesus.  

The story of Jesus turning water into wine is a good example of a human story overpowered by the God side of the story.  It is a miracle story, so of course it has to do with God.  It is told today as the first miracle Jesus performed, and therefore as an early sign that there was more to Jesus than meets the eye.  It is told in the season of Epiphany because the season is all about the world discovering that God has come among us.  This story has all the glitter of a good church story.  And….it is the very human story of a guy who has to be nudged—by his mother no less—to take up his calling, to step into his life’s work. 

I am interested in how Jesus didn’t think it was his time yet.  He had to be encouraged to start doing what he was to do.  I am thinking about how he responded to the need of the moment and the needs of those around him. How many of us find our lives in community, in response to the needs of others, in being encouraged by others to bring forth what we might offer the world……..our gifts, our contributions.  Our people draw us out.  It is true for kids and colleagues in all kinds of settings.  Most of us have stories of someone who helped us find our way, our calling.  Maybe a teacher or parent or friend who saw something in us and helped us believe in ourselves, helped us believe that we had something in us worth sharing, someone whose vision of us made us want to be worthy of that vision by living into it.  

I was in Memphis this past week and I had a good visit with the junior high art teacher who encouraged me and helped me believe in myself in a time when that was not easy.  I was able to tell him that.  I needed to tell him that, to thank him.  He heard what I said but didn’t engage there.  He moved on to another story about some other part of life.  I came away from that exchange with the understanding that what I had thanked him for was nothing special.  It is just the way life is meant to work.

Epiphany is a season of “church” stories.  Last Sunday we heard a voice from heaven saying Jesus was God’s beloved son.  This week get the first miracle.  Next Sunday Jesus reads from Isaiah and tells the people in the temple that the reading has been fulfilled in their presence.  You can expect a great haul of fish and preaching on the mountain in the coming weeks.  

Epiphany seems to be all about God being revealed among us in awesome deeds and mighty acts. But it is about so much more.  It is about God being revealed as present in the daily work of just being human, of listening and discerning and being called again and again in community, through those around us into the fulfillment of our lives.  It is about our work in helping others find their gifts, their lives.  None of us becomes who we are meant to be on our own. We grow, become; we  are “saved” or made whole in community.  We need each other.  Just like Jesus needed his mom and all those people at that party hoping he’d come through or them. 

Today’s story isn’t the only one in which Jesus needs a little help from those around him to find his way into what he could be, what he was meant to be and do in the world, and that gives me great comfort and hope.  

It is worth remembering too that this season where the sparkle and magnificence of God is on display, follows the short season in which we celebrate the birth of a very human, fragile, vulnerable child. This season seems at times to be all about the magic, but it is also about the mundane.  In fact, one could say that it is about the magic in the mundane.  That give me hope as well. Amen



Tuesday, January 8, 2019


Sermon for the Feast of the Epiphany

January 6, 2019

So I want to begin this morning by having us do something we should maybe do more often around here.  I want us begin by giving each other other a blessing.  We will use a very ancient blessing.  I want you to turn to the person next to you and look them in the eyes and repeat after me. “May you be covered in camels.”  That blessing is embedded in our reading from Isaiah this morning and I just couldn’t leave it alone.  Being covered with camels may seem a little strange so far out of its moment and context, but Isaiah saw it as a really good thing.  It must have been a good thing for somebody sometime, so may we all be covered with camels.  

As recently as this Friday we had a camel in the neighborhood. Some of you may know Aladdin, the camel that comes to Mount Vernon every year at Christmas time.  The Baker clan walked down to visit Aladdin on the day after Thanksgiving and found him just recently arrived and still settling into his holiday shelter.  In fact, when we arrived, there was just a simple fence, no warning signs, no one around to tell us not to, so we made friends.  The kids fed him leaves and everyone marveled at the softness of his big nose which he was happy to rub against a friendly face.  Daughter Margie got a couple of good selfies cheek to cheek with Aladdin before he got too playful and decided to nip her on the shoulder as she tripped the shutter.  If we had a projector here in the church I would be sharing a great picture of a surprised photographer and a laughing camel.  Hanging out with Aladdin was certainly a high point in our holidays.  We felt connected with George’s camel.  May you be covered with camels.

And I was surprised just two days ago, so long after Christmas, to find Aladdin still around when I took a walk down to Mount Vernon for a little exercise.  There he was in his shelter, guarded by two fences and lots of “no touching signs.” No one talking to him or interacting with him.  It was clear and kind of sad that shortly after our Thanksgiving visit the powers that be had gotten their fencing finished and their signs up and thousands of people had passed by that camel and seen nothing but a mangey looking hay eating machine.  They would never know the softness of his nose, or the smell of his cheek or his love of stealing the show in a selfie.  Some things you just have to experience.  They can’t be appreciated from a distance. 

Ah well……I really didn’t mean to talk so much about camels this morning.  What I really wanted to talk about was the experience of God, what it can be like to have an encounter with the divine, what it is like to be reminded in a moment that there is more to the universe and the cosmos and our lives than we are normally aware of.  I want to talk about epiphanies on the feast of Epiphany.  So I’ll move from Isaiah to Matthew, from camels to wise men—who may well have been riding camels, but enough about camels.

As I think about Epiphany and epiphanies and those wise men discovering Jesus, I am thinking we don’t talk much in church about what it is like to experience the divine breaking into our world.  We certainly don’t talk much about what are often called “religious experiences,” which if we have them we tend to keep to ourselves, and if others start talking about them, we are not sure what to think of such intimate information.  Some Christian communities thrive on sharing and seeking and celebrating such experiences, but Episcopalians and most main-line protestants, and Catholics tend to shy away from any public airing of extra-normal or mystical experiences.  We participate in a religion that grew out of those sorts of experiences—life changing encounters with the numinous or with angels or with the risen Christ—but if such things are still happening, we don’t hear much about them.  We’re not sure we want to hear about them because we haven’t been taught to expect them.  Religious experiences can be messy.  They can change our direction, our focus, they can make us ask new questions and altar us in ways that might make the people around us uncomfortable.  I’m thinking of the oft repeated movie scene where the two pilots in the cockpit encounter a UFO and look at each other and say, “I didn’t see anything did you?”  “Nope. I didn’t see anything either. Let’s go home.”  I could ask us to look around the room at each other again, and wonder who has a story they aren’t telling.  What does it mean, all these years after Moses and the desert and after Jesus, what does it mean to experience God?  Is that even possible in our time so far removed from the original stories?  Can we really expect to have some sense of what started this whole God thing anyway?  I think we can, and we do experience God all the time.  And noticing that experience has to do with how we think about experiencing God.   

I have been talking just now about what are commonly called religious experiences, and yes, people still have such experiences, but those are not the the most common experiences of God.  We don’t all follow a star to a once-every-other-millennia show of God’s light shining from the hay.  We aren’t all knocked off our horse on the way to Damascus, we don’t all get licked by the camel.  If those were the only kinds of real connection with the divine most of us would walk away sad for having missed our chance.  Those experiences, when they happen, are a total surprise.  They can’t be forced, or made to happen.  They may happen once and never again, or not at all.  John says the Spirit comes and goes as it pleases and we don’t know about that coming and going.  What we can know about, what we can encourage in our lives and train our hearts to notice and appreciate are the everyday experiences of God that are available to all of us, the ones Jesus talked about when he said the kingdom of God is all around us.  

Many of our experiences of God are fleeting and fragile, sometimes no more than deep intuitions.  They are experiences of the possibility of God, or the otherness of God mingled somehow into our everyday lives.  They have to do with feelings, the feeling of being touched by love, or by a greater reality, by truth, by feelings of awe or of participation in nature and the cosmos.  They are reported as moments of vision, insight, glimpses into another reality.  We don’t have to be mystics to have such experiences.  Where do those qualities of the God experience surface in your life?  The reality of love.  The feeling of connection to something more.  The surprise of being lucky enough to notice something that brings a smile and makes you forget yourself for a moment.  We don’t have to wait and hope for those fleeting moments of connection.  Jesus suggests that an awareness of God’s presence is possible for all of us and is very near to us. And, we can practice listening and watching and being attentive to that presence in our lives and it will make a difference.  
We’ve all had the experience, I suppose, of having a subject in mind, or being involved in a particular bit of life journey that we begin to notice all around us just because it is on our minds.  The realm of the divine can be like that. The more we hold open the possibility of noticing God’s presence, the more we will notice that presence.  Liturgy, silence, meditation, long walks, sitting on a porch and watching the birds, listening to music, being around art, can all open our hearts to the possibility of God’s presence.  We can make time for any of those things in our lives.  The more we notice the experience of God among us, the more we will notice the experience of God among us.  I mean, sure, I’m glad the wise men didn’t know this, but the place to make ourselves available to God, to meet God,  isn’t on some mountain top, or across some far desert, but right in our own back yards.    

So I leave you with the you with what I hope will be some helpful advise. Never pass up a chance to rub noses with a camel…..and I leave you also with this reflection from one of my favorite preachers, Mary Oliver.

Every day 
   I see or hear 
      something 
         that more or less 

kills me 
   with delight, 
      that leaves me 
          like a needle 

in the haystack 
    of light,  
       It is what I was born for—
            to look, to listen, 

to lose myself 
    inside this soft world—
        to instruct myself 
             over and over 

in joy, 
    and acclamation.  
        Nor am I talking 
            about the exceptional, 

the fearful, the dreadful, 
     the very extravagant—
         but of the ordinary, 
              the common, the very drab, 

the daily presentations.  
     Oh good scholar, 
         I say to myself, 
             how can you help

but grow wise 
     with such teachings 
         as these—
             the untrimmable light 

of the world, 
     the ocean’s shine, 
          the prayers that are made 
              out of grass?