Sermon for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 30, 2015
St. Aidan's Episcopal Church

In my first Sunday back from the beach, I was caught by the readings for this Sunday which all speak about the changing, growing nature of faith.  

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Sermon for the Eighth Sunday in Pentecost

July 19, 2015
St. Aidan's Episcopal Church

Ephesians 2:11-22

Remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called "the uncircumcision" by those who are called "the circumcision" -- a physical circumcision made in the flesh by human hands-- remember that you were at that time without Christ, being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. So he came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near; for through him both of us have access in one Spirit to the Father. So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone. In him the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling place for God.

The writer of the letter to the Ephesians caught me this week with the line about Jesus "creating in himself a new humanity" that includes us all.  

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Sermon for the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

July 12th, 2015

St. Aidan's Episcopal Church

Amos 7:7-15

This Sunday, after finding that my great idea for a sermon had left the room I ended up saying what I really wanted to say without worrying too much about the readings.   
"Call" is for everyone, not just prophets and preachers.  

Thanks for stopping by.  John Baker

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Sermon for The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

July 5, 2015
St. Aidan's Episcopal Church

Mark 6:1-13

.........Then Jesus said to them, "Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own kin, and in their own house." And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief.
Then he went about among the villages teaching. He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. He said to them, "Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place. If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you, as you leave, shake off the dust that is on your feet as a testimony against them." So they went out and proclaimed that all should repent. They cast out many demons, and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.

For a couple of years now I have not been using a manuscript for sermons so I haven't posted here very often.  I have been looking for a way to post recordings of sermons and think I've figured it out.  The link below will take you to my site at Soundcloud.  Once you are there, just click the arrow on the left to listen to this week's message.  

In addition to the gospel lesson above, we heard Ezekiel being sent to the exiles in Babylon.  God tells Ezekiel he is to go and speak the truth to the people who will "know that there has been a prophet among them." 

The "prophet" theme caught my attention this week.  JB

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Sermon for the Fourth Sunday after Pentecost
June 21, 2015
St. Aidan's Episcopal Church
Job 38:1-11

I have a dream.

I have a dream today.

I don’t know if I could ever have uttered those words from a pulpit until today.  Until today, I would have thought those words coming from a white, privileged preacher in a mostly white, privileged church to be at least disrespectful, if not outright arrogant, words certainly that didn’t belong to the likes of me.  But then I caught a glimpse of this thing and I now have to tell you that I have a dream.  Here it is……

I have this imagining that somewhere, out in the future, a distant future maybe, an old man, a white man, walks into an auditorium filled with people of all colors and all ages and people come to their feet to welcome him to the stage.  He very humbly acknowledges their applause with a gentle bow of his head and brushes his hand across his eye as this now-familiar connection between audience and speaker opens up his insides yet again.  Over the course of the next hour, the audience listens spell bound to his story, a story that has somehow, miraculously captured the hearts of so many across the country, a story that has fallen on parched souls like rain from an at last friendly sky.  It is a story parents have brought their children to hear.  

He speaks in a gentle tone of what it is like to be transformed by forgiveness.  His message is that simple, but it takes the whole hour to tell the story. He speaks of redemption and being unmade and then reassembled inside by nothing short of love.  He speaks of an intractable hatred that seemed to be his whole life and he speaks of that hatred eroding over time under the unrelenting pressure of what he came to recognize as love.  It came at first in the stinging voice of forgiveness speaking from the center of unimaginable pain, pain he had inflicted.  His story goes on to tell of those who not only spoke their forgiveness, but of those who wrote to him and a few who eventually visited him over a lifetime in prison.  In this dream, the speaker tells his hushed audience the story of how the people of Emanuel AME church took him on as a project, about how they came to understand very early in their grief that the best way to pull themselves out of the hell of anger and bitterness was to take up the work of leading—of inviting—him out of his hell.  That’s how it started, and fifty years after that terrible day the letters were still coming, these days, mostly written by those who were not even born when he did what he did.  

His story fills halls with people captured by the hope of a world transformed.  Yes, at times someone in the audience still stands up and hurls old pain in bitter words, and when that happens he simply puts his head down and gets quiet and apologizes yet again for the pain he has caused the speaker.  In those moments the rest of the audience recognizes that he responds not out of what he has learned about handling hecklers, but out of who he has become as a person.  His salvation has been deep and thorough, his is a story only he can tell, it is a story that fills a deep hunger in those who flock to hear it.  

I have a dream.  

And I know that dreamers are easily dismissed.  

But here’s the thing.  We would be lost without our dreamers.

And here’s another thing.  Following Jesus means casting your lot with dreamers and taking up the dream. Even when the dream seems too impossible for the kind of right thinking, pragmatic realists we think we are supposed to be.  Dreaming is for dreamers we say.  We live in the real world.  Dreamers live in their heads, in pleasant visions of heaven where a little love and a few angels make everything ok.  Let the dreamers dream, and while they dream, the rest of us will have to get the real work done.  That kind of thinking is familiar, but it is not what we have been seeing in the news this past week.  What we have been watching, what has become apparent in the middle of the tragedy in South Carolina, is the promising fruit of dreams taken up long ago, dreams preserved and advanced through what is sometimes, like in the declarations of forgiveness we heard from the victims families, gut wrenchingly hard work. I marvel at the voices that were able to speak forgiveness in that courtroom.  I am humbled and convicted by their faith and their ability to hold tight in such times to the dream of God.  And yes, I can imagine that kind of faith and commitment, and love, working its way over time even into the tangled heart of someone as twisted as Dylann Roof.  We’ve been given signs of transformative dreaming all week.  

Forty seven years ago when Martin Luther King was killed, Memphis, my home town was split apart.   Last week when nine people were killed in Charleston, the city came together in ways that have inspired the world.  One of the bright lights in this past week has been the story of Joseph Riley, the white mayor of Charleston.  The story of his commitment to the dream of racial harmony and equality in Charleston over the last four decades, often in the face of ridicule and resistance from some white citizens, is a story of triumph.  Part of the reason the killings were so painful for all of us is that they remind us of a time we thought we had outgrown, moved beyond, and they make us wonder if the progress we thought we had made is real.  Well I’m here to tell you the progress is real. It is progress.  

The work isn’t finished, not by a long shot, but we have come a long way, thanks to the hard work of dreamers, dreamers who have slogged through the hard times protecting and nurturing a vision of what might yet be.  They have been laughed at, hated, even killed, but we see this week that their work has changed the world, not by ending evil, I don’t know when that will happen, but by changing our response to evil.  What stands out this week in words of forgiveness, in a mayor’s tears, in the black and white arms entwined in prayer and support of each other is the living promise that under the storms of this life, beneath the trials that threaten us, the dream of God, a dream of living, transforming, creating love runs strong.  Our call….our work..like the work of all these good people we have heard of this week, is to share in that dream, to embrace it, to hold it and live it in the world in such a way that others come to believe in its power.  The hard work to be done in our time is the work of dreamers.  We all have a voice in what is going on here.  Every one of us can say,  must be able to say, 
I have a dream.    

JB

A Poem about Jacob and Thoughts for the Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

St. Aidan's Episcopal Church
Alexndria, Virginia
July 20, 2014

Angels and Ladders
July 20 for a sermon at St. Aidan’s

So, Jacob had a dream.
Everyone has dreams. 
But Jacob’s dream?
Who gets angels and ladders from heaven in their dreams?

I get that hooded stranger….lurking.
I get faces.  
Examining faces, hungry faces, 
unknown faces I think I might have seen somewhere but can’t quite place, 
all pressed against the windows of my little house. 
Wanting something.

I wake up with, “Oh my God, what was that?”
Jacob wakes up with, Oh my God…..that was….(gasp)”

Angels and ladders.
Who gets angels and ladders in their dreams?

And God?  
Who gets an audience with God in their dreams?
I get a fat baptist preacher.  
I’m riding my my bicycle past an old girlfriend’s beat up Datsun convertible which is sitting on blocks in the middle of a field.  
The preacher is sitting on my handlebars, riding along as I pedal down the road.  
A fat baptist preacher is not God.

Jacob gets angel choruses and heavenly hosts, all assembled for his benefit.
A grand liturgical production.
I get showing up for my ordination 
an hour late 
only to find that everyone’s gone home except the bishop.
And yes…….I am naked.

And it’s not just angels and ladders and God. 
Jacob gets a look at the plan.
Who gets to know what it’s all about?
Who gets that?
All those details, the promises, all that information
bright future all spelled out so clearly.
I, sometimes, get brilliant insights that expand my heart with hope…..and then 
disappear around the corner of consciousness with a quick, backward-looking wink 
and a wide grin to say, 
“Ha! You missed me again.”  

And maybe the hardest part is this.
Maybe the hardest part is this…..
All over the world this morning, 
in churches from Poughkeepsie to Paris 
preachers are explaining to their congregations 
exactly what Jacob’s dream was all about.  
Cherubim, seraphim, celestial light.  
With carefully drawn verbal lines and arrows, 
with references to ancient Hebrew, Aramaic, Ugaritic maybe, they go on.
The world is filled with experts, 
eager to explain the meaning of Jacob’s dream.  

With me it’s, 
“Hi John.  Good to see you.”  
“How’s the week been.”
“Any dreams?”
“Yes?”
“Really.”  
“Interesting.”  
“Oh, I don’t know John, it’s your dream.”  
“What do you think it means?”

Maybe I’m just not ready for angels and ladders.  
Not ready for the big picture.

I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for the little hints.
Maybe glimpses, puzzles and on-going projects are the better way.
It is kind of fascinating, really, 
mining the night for what we have probably known forever and have only just forgotten. 

Honestly.  It’s not so bad.

Sometimes there are smiles 
and jokes 
and old friends, 
and green fields stretching toward forever.  
Sometimes I can fly.  
And streams run there, streams that flow up and down over hills.  
How can they do that?   

Maybe I have seen an angel. 
Maybe a footprint in the morning of that ladder
pressed into the sod outside my door. 

It’s the little sparks that make me wish for Jacob’s fireworks
that leave me hoping there is more.
Knowing there must be more.

I will lay my head upon a feather pillow tonight 
and pull its cool softness up around my face. 
I will close my eyes…

and maybe, just maybe dream of Jacob, 
whose pillow was a stone.  JB

I’ve been interested in dreams for a long time.  If you had asked me a few years ago about my spiritual director, who it is who helps shepherd my soul, I would have told you about a friend, a Jungian analyst who helped me with my inner path for many years.  I still see her once in a while, and she always greets me with the same question, “any dreams?”

My interest in the Jacob and Esau story began long before I had started working in my own dreams, probably before I knew that Jung was pronounced with a “Y” and not a “J” sound.  I was intrigued by Jacob who struggled with a part of himself from which he had been separated since birth.  Even before I had any concept of the shadow self, I was drawn to this Father of many nations who ran in fear from the wildness of his red, hairy brother to travel an event-filled road that would eventually bring them back together.  I think I sensed that such an arc might have something to do with my life.

The theme of estrangement and the journey toward reunion runs through all of our stories.   It is the journey from that trouble in the garden at the beginning of our scriptures to the great gathering around the heavenly throne at the end.  It is the journey of Israel through the desert and of Israel into and out of exile.  It is the path of the prodigal son.  

I love the dreams in the Jacob and Esau saga because they spell out that the journey from separation to reunion has to do with an inner journey.  
We don’t always speak about our inner work, maybe because we are all still daunted by the scope of the project, I know that is true for me, but that good work is the stuff of life.  We have pointed our telescopes at the sky and numbered and mapped the stars….our inner worlds are still a mystery to us, as ripe for the instruction of powerful stories and myths as the constellations once were.  Becoming our best possible selves is what we were put here to do.  The longer I live in this tradition of ours, the more I realize that it has little to do with belief.  Believing/offering our hearts is just the beginning of walking this way of ours.  The real work comes into focus as we learn to listen to that inner teacher who speaks to us in ritual, in our dreams and quiet moments, and in rich, symbolic stories like this story of Jacob and his angels. 

The Jacob and Esau story is not always pretty.  It begins in selfishness and greed and deception, and moves through fear and struggle.  Maybe that is why I find it compelling. Like any good story, it moves……from its very human beginning…..through the fear….through the struggles….toward its resolution.  It is that ending, I think, that first drew me to the story for it is the ending that gives us courage, that turns all the rest into promise.  We get the Jacob story for four weeks this year, but we don’t get the best part.  Let tell you how it all turns out.  After a lifetime of running in fear from his brother, after all his dreams and adventures, this is what we hear…….

The messengers returned to Jacob, saying, “We came to your brother Esau, the one who promised to kill you, and he is coming to meet you, and four hundred men are with him.” Then Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed;……  And Jacob divided his family and his herds so some part of what he had might be saved, and then Jacob went out to meet Esau.  But Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.

Tears, reconciliation, the healing of what was broken, rejoicing, surely these are the hope of all our best stories.  Surely that is what is meant by salvation.  It is certainly my favorite part of this story.  

And you know…. as I think about it now, maybe this story is one of those ladders into heaven we heard about.  Maybe it is in stories faithfully lived to their finish that we hear the angels.
Who gets angels and ladders?
Maybe everyone does.
  JB

A Sermon for Easter

St. Aidan's Episcopal Church

Alexandria, Virginia

April 20, 2014

John 20:1-18

Alleluia, Christ is Risen!
The Lord is risen indeed!

Really?  What exactly do you mean by that?  Are you sure?  Would the people around you agree with your take on what this day is about?  Of course, I’m just tossing those questions out there so we can all acknowledge that they’re in the room today.  I’m not really asking them.  If there is any day in the Church year when you shouldn’t have to worry about believing the wrong thing, or not believing enough, it is Easter Sunday.  When it comes to Easter, we are all in the same boat, floating on a sea of tradition and mystery whose changing surface reveals only some of the great depth beneath us.  Consider the story we just heard.  

In this story, Mary and Peter and the beloved disciple all go running out to see what has happened.  The three who went to the tomb each approached the tomb in their own way.  One ran eagerly and got there first but didn’t go in.  Peter, as soon as he arrived, went inside.  Mary waited outside.  That first disciple looked into the tomb and saw the linen wrappings.  Mary looked into the tomb and saw angels, but it took her while and she needed some help to recognize Jesus when he showed up.  We are told the one who arrived first eventually did go in, and upon entering, saw and believed, “for as yet, he did not understand.”  What an interesting little snippet about understanding and belief.  Does understanding make belief difficult?  Are they opposed?  Do they come at different times?   Apparently you can have one without the other.  This is a wildly inclusive story.  There is something in this story for everyone.  

Maybe you saw the Washington Post yesterday and the articles in the B section on faith, one article about belief in the resurrection and one by Sally Quinn on belief in God.  The article on the resurrection quoted a James Martin, a Jesuit priest and author who said belief in the actual physical resurrection of the body is essential, that there can be no Christianity without that core belief.  That same article quoted the retired Episcopal bishop, Jack Spong, who has been writing and teaching for years that it is quite possible to be a faithful Christian and understand the resurrection in a metaphorical way.  He says “Jesus was raised back into the life of God……and it was out of this, not his body, that his presence was manifested to certain witnesses.”   Sally Quinn who writes regularly in the Post on faith and religion says she used to consider herself an atheist, but no longer does.  Speaking about her belief in the resurrection, she says simply, “I don’t know.”  

Here again is a group of people with different experiences, different backgrounds and upbringings, people each with their own temperament and ways of perceiving the world, all looking into the empty tomb and seeing something different.  There is something in this story for everyone.  

The disciples went looking for Jesus.  I recommend that, looking for Jesus.  That was the beginning for them of experiencing him in a new way.  And they even looked for Jesus in different ways, some rushing in hopeful, some holding back, maybe not wanting to be taken in by some kind of hoax.  They each approached the story in their own way.  They did not all have the same experience.  And, they all became part of the story.  

This story only gets better with more perspectives and more voices.   Jesus can come to life in some new way for us as we receive the version of the story only our neighbor could tell, or only our friend, or even that person over there whose version of the story seems so different from our own.  Remember, another part of this story-for-everyone today is the part where Mary has to come to terms with a new Jesus, one she didn’t even recognize though she had loved him as much as anyone.  The Jesus she had known died, and the Jesus who came to life in his place kind of was and kind of wasn’t that same Jesus.  He became new to her.  New for her.  

It can happen that way with us.  It has happened that way with me.  There have been times when the Jesus I have known has faded, died even, and been replaced by a Jesus who is new for me in some important way.  

I was eating breakfast with some clergy friends the other day, and the priest next to me asked me something about the atonement…..(yes, we do sometimes talk such heady subjects over breakfast.  Pray for us.)    Anyway, I told my friend that I didn’t have much use for the doctrine of atonement any more and he asked me how I could call myself a Christian and say such a thing.  I have practiced the answer for that sort  of question, so I just smiled an told him I was baptized and I loved Jesus and I figured that was enough.  “Love Jesus?!” he asked.  “What?”  I do confess that I probably enjoy those little exchanges a bit more than I should.

I haven’t always been able to say I loved Jesus.  A few months ago I began meeting with a spiritual director, something I haven’t done in several years.  I had trouble finding someone I thought could put up with my spiritual vicissitudes.  A few weeks ago, she asked me how I imagined God and as I tried to explain, without noticing, I began to talk about Jesus.  She pointed out the shift and asked me about it and I said I was a little surprised too.  I told her that most of my life I hadn’t been very comfortable talking about Jesus.  I had wanted to be a priest because I loved God, but I had been raised around people who spoke of Jesus often, and in ways that made me not want to be among them.  I told her that only in the last ten years or so, and only by consciously working on it had I been able to begin to imagine the God I love and talk to regularly as Jesus.  That it had been a real shift. 

She asked me why I had wanted to make that shift.  I told her I figured it was my job to talk about Jesus and I should probably learn to do it.  She too is a parish priest, she laughed and said, “if our parishioners only knew.”   I have to tell you, there have been times in my life when I was afraid my belief in Jesus wasn’t certain enough, or I didn’t believe deeply enough, or that I didn’t believe the right things about Jesus.  There is nothing like a bit of accepting laughter to scatter the clouds of that kind of self doubt.  It is even more recently that I have learned that worrying about the quality of my faith has always had more to do with doubting myself than with doubting God.  

I am here this morning to tell you the good news about the resurrection.  I’m here to tell you about Jesus coming back from the dead.  I know there are probably as many takes on what those words mean as there are people in this room.  I can only attest to what I have experienced.  Jesus has become new for me many times.  I have, once or twice, thought Jesus was gone, dead, only to find myself recognizing him in a new form and with a new face, familiar, but still new.  I don’t understand that process.  I’m sure it has much to do with me and what I am open to at different times in my life, and I am also becoming more convinced that it has to do with this God-as-companion that I have finally learned to call Jesus.  One of the new faces of Jesus coming into focus for me is that of trusted guide. 

My message today is that Jesus, even though he may seem, dead and gone, can……does rise again, not just in ancient story, but in the lives of people like you and me. May it be so for all of us in this Easter season.  Amen

JB