Sermon The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 29, 2010

Luke 14:1, 7-14

I want to call you attention to what has happened so far this morning and to what will happen in the next few minutes. Let’s take a look. We arrived. We gathered our intentions for the day in a prayer. We have heard the ancient stories; readings, a psalm. Now you are being encouraged to consider some part of the message of the story or stories of the day. In a few minutes we will remember the tradition of belief that developed after Jesus as we recite the creed shaped by the early community of believers. Then we will pray for the church and for the world. We will confess our sins and receive forgiveness.

All of that can and regularly does happen in the part of the service we call the liturgy of the word. That is everything that takes place before the offertory sentence, you know, the one that says, “walk in love as Christ loved us….. or let us offer our life and labor to the Lord”….something like that. What follows that sentence is the liturgy of the table and we’ll get there in a minute, but for now I want to focus on the first part of the service.

We arrive. We come here from all the different corners of our neighborhoods, from the individual arenas of our homes, our families, our work, all of the parts of our lives that define us, that tell us who we are. We greet each other coming in the door as people arriving to share a part of our individual lives that happen to overlap. We all go to the same church.

We sing and say a prayer or two and then we hear the stories held sacred by those who have been gathering for “church” for three thousand years. That’s how long ago our Hebrew scriptures were written. Maybe as we hear these stories we begin to get the sense that they are our stories too in a way, that they have something to do with us. The liturgy of the word focuses our attention on the fact that we are part of a community. We are people who belong to the stories about Israel, to the stories about Jesus, Paul and the others may even be writing for us.

After the readings the preacher calls us to consider some message that might be taken from what we have heard. The sermon is usually an attempt to help us take the stories very personally. The stories of the faith community are our stories. Something we have just hear has to do with us.

We move on from there usually to the Creed………We are part of a particular community that wrestled in its early years with how to understand and speak about its belief. Some of us may still struggle with some of the ideas in the Creed, but it is the family document going way back and it has helped define the community called Christians since the fourth century.

So far, the liturgy of the word brought us together, reminded us of our common interest in an ancient story and suggested that the tradition has something to say about our lives--about our goals and how to live. Hopefully the liturgy has led us to reflect on who we are and how we want to be in the world.

Having recalled who and whose we are in the sacred stories of the community, we take on a bit of the work of Christ as we look on the world with compassion. We lift up in prayer our neighbors, our leaders and all who are ill or are in any kind of trouble. Just as Christ did for all of us, we ask God to be present in their lives in ways that will transform them, make them whole and serve the good purposes of creation.

So far, we have arrived from our separate little worlds. We have heard the stories of a great community. We have been reminded that their stories are ours also. And then in our prayers we participate in the work of that community.

Having done all of those things we may be aware of some part of the work we still need to do in ourselves to be able to serve and live faithfully in this community. We may be ready to note some of our own failings and ask for healing and forgiveness in our own lives. So we ask in our confession to be made new, to be set right once again. In response, we are told that our sins are indeed forgiven. We then as equals, as common beneficiaries of the grace of God, we greet each other in the name of the Lord as we exchange the peace.

I wanted to highlight what goes on in the liturgy of the word for a couple of reasons. First, in two weeks you will see a few changes in the service designed to help mark the transition from the liturgy of the word to the liturgy of the table. I wanted to speak about the two parts of the service in anticipation of those changes.

The other reason is that as I hear Jesus talking about the liturgy of the table today….surely that is what all that banquet etiquette talk is about. As I hear Jesus talking, I understand better and give thanks for the shape of our worship. I give thanks in particular for the liturgy of the word. I don’t know how I would get near the table without this great liturgy of ours.

I hear Jesus saying that we are to arrive at the banquet--the one that will begin in a few minutes with the offertory sentence--that we are to arrive with a realistic understanding of who we are. And I hear him saying that if we come with a proper sense of who we are that we will not really be thinking much at all about ourselves, about how worthy OR unworthy we might be. We are encouraged to approach the table with humility and gratitude, not focusing on any aspect of ourselves, but on the generosity of our host. The liturgy of the word that locates us in the vast community of humanity and believers and helps us take stock of our lives and sets us to work praying for and caring about others--that liturgy prepares us to approach the liturgy of the table with the kind of attitudes Jesus calls for this morning.

I am particularly glad that we circle the table here at St. Aidan’s. That means that as we arrive at this weekly banquet, any and all of us might well hear our host saying, “Friend move up higher.” and as we look around the circle we might understand every possible place in the circle to be the place of honor. And…..if we can find ourselves hoping that is true for everyone we see, then we will certainly have arrived well prepared for the banquet. JB

Sermon

Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost

August 22, 2010

Luke 13:10-17

A funny thing has happened in my life in the last year or so. And in a nice turn of events, the same thing has happened in Mary’s life as well. We have, here in the somewhat advanced middle part of our lives, discovered baseball. Of course we’ve always known about baseball, but these days we keep up with the scores, we know who the home team is playing and where, we watch games on TV and we get out to the park from time to time to eat junk food, drink a beer and cheer for the team. And the team isn’t just the team, but a a bunch of players whose quirks and talents and foibles make the game interesting. Part of the joy of an Adam Dunn home run is watching him blow bubbles with his gum as he runs the bases. You gotta love the way Nyjer comes up all smiles out of the cloud of dust that represents yet another stolen base, and you have to wonder how some crazy ump in Atlanta can throw an all American nice guy like Ryan Zimmerman out of a game. I’m even a fan of Ian Desmond who’s got more errors to his credit than just about anyone in the game. I think he’s gonna be remembered as a great player. I’m pulling for him. How can I not have known the joys and pains of baseball before now.

Oh, it isn’t that I never knew about baseball or that I never paid any attention to game. I had a glove, I played sand lot ball as a kid. I had a transistor radio in my pocket and was listening at my post as a crossing guard in the sixth grade when Tim McCarver’s grand slam won the Cards the fifth game of the World Series in 64. I was listening to the game that day because I lived in a family where the Cardinals were the law. St. Louis, just 250 miles from Memphis was the closest major league team so they were pretty popular in my town, and my father’s home was in Missouri so the Cards being our team always made sense. Dad would watch the game on Saturday and yell at the players as if he was at the park. He was et up with em, and I never questioned they were THE team to pull for.

Since those days though, I haven’t paid much attention to baseball. Maybe it had to do with the way sons sometimes pull away from their fathers, which I know I certainly did. Anyway, I haven’t been serious about baseball in all the years since then until now. My faithfulness to the sport has been sort of a Christmas and Easter kind of participation. If the Cards have a shot at the pennant or are in the series, I might look at the sports page to see how they’re doing, but that’s been about it. Until now. Now I have gotten caught up in the doings of the Nationals and I have become a fan, which brings me to the point if all this baseball talk. Next Thursday evening, I expect to find myself right in the middle of some serious tension between ancient teaching and current practice. I’m sure I will feel pulled in one direction by the law with which I was raised and in another by a deepening understanding of the good that law was meant to serve. Mary and I have tickets to see the Nationals play the Cards. It should be an interesting evening. I’ll try not to picture my father, sitting there, staring aghast in open mouthed disbelief that I could be cheering about Pudge getting another RBI.

“Don’t you know, Jesus…..don’t you know,” ask the leaders of the synagogue, “that you aren’t supposed to do any work on the sabbath? Healing this woman looks like work to us. The people are coming to you for spiritual guidance and here you are breaking the law.” I wonder if Jesus every got really disheartened--frustrated sometimes at how difficult it could be to teach his simple lesson. How often in the story do we hear Jesus trying to open and soften the hearts of those around him only to run into the stone wall of law. “Imagine what is possible,” Jesus seems to say. “That’s not the way we’ve always done.” it comes the answer.

Again today we find Jesus at odds with those who are responsible for teaching the faithful how to behave. For those leaders, the answer is simple. Our calling is to observe the law. That is how we will know we are in right relationship with our God. God gave the laws. We follow the laws. What could be more clear? For Jesus too the answer is simple. Love God and love your neighbor. Strive to make sure that everything in your life, even the laws you cherish, serve that end. What could be more clear? Today the question is raised as to the intention of not only the law about keeping the sabbath, but all the laws by which the people of God are guided.

I speak sometimes about Christianity being not so much about following the rules as it is about being in relationship with Jesus. I have long been drawn to that message when I hear it in the gospel story. I admit that in part, some of my agenda in that discussion has been to separate myself from the parts of the faith that I found troubling. I resonate at times with Jesus’ challenge to the institution of religion and to the authorities. Yet even as I recognize my desire to pull back from some of the rigid-seeming teachings, I know at the same time that I want something more substantial in their place. Rules can seem cold and hollow unless they are grounded in the warmth of love and community. All laws worth following are created to serve the cause of love. I hear Jesus saying as much today as he asks those leaders, “how could I not free this woman on this day or any other?” Jesus’ standard of love trumps the law about the sabbath.

There are times when we have to choose between the law and love. We see it in civil law: civil disobedience, revolution, writers protecting a source, whole villages that broke laws, lied, stole and more as they hid Jews from the Nazis, times when the Church has provided sanctuary to those outside the civil laws. But what about the laws given us by our ancestors in faith. They came to understand in their early experience of God that some lessons are so important they should be carved in stone and passed on from one generation to the next forever. Should we ever question those laws? Jesus did.

Honor your father and mother, we are told. In the service of love--that is in the service of spreading the news that God has entered the world in a new way to bring new life--Jesus calls poor old Zebedee’s boys to leave their father and follow him. Seems like a poor way to honor one’s father. I wonder if Zebedee ever understood.

And today’s story is not the only one about Jesus upsetting the righteous by doing good works for others on the sabbath. And his breaking the rules about the Sabbath isn’t always in the service of others. When his disciples are caught picking corn on the sabbath because they are hungry, Jesus basically tells his detractors that the question is a no-brainer. The sabbath, says Jesus, was created to enhance human life. What then could possibly be wrong with feeding oneself on the sabbath?

And then there are those long lists of laws from Moses. Jesus sometimes tumbles those like the tables of those money-changers outside the temple. “You have heard it said you shall give and eye for an eye, says Jesus, but I tell you love those who hurt you and treat them well.

Living well into the relationships the rules were meant to serve is much more difficult--and much more rewarding--than simply following the rules. It would be much easier for me to be a Cards fan. I wouldn’t have to spend money on games, I enjoy cheering from the comfort of my easy chair. Being a Nats fan is messy--crowded trains, eight dollar beer. For forty five years I told people I was a Cards fan. What that really meant was, “in my family, growing up, I was taught that we were Cards fans.” What I’m learning is that being a fan involves cheering for the team even when they are down ten to nothing. Sometimes it means sitting in the sun on the first base side in July. It means believing in the hitter and hoping for a run even though he has been in a dry spell for weeks.

We’ve all hear that keeping the sabbath is a good thing, the law, even. But we don’t keep the sabbath. We are all busy on Saturdays, cutting the grass, shopping, driving kids around. We do show up here fairly often on Sunday--which is not the sabbath or seventh day, but the first day of the week--we do try to remember God mark a few moments in our week as holy. But the good that the law about sabbath was meant to serve too often gets lost in our busy-ness. Maybe real sabbath happens for us in many little ways throughout our week, not on any particular day. Sabbath is about restoration and family and grounding, and being renewed. Those good causes may be served in a few moments of quiet at the end of the day, or maybe listening to music in our car while stuck in traffic or texting a child who is away at school. Maybe you find sabbath during an exercise class, or a meal, or a conversation in which you remember that our life is part of something much larger.

Maybe in this way at least, sabbath is a bit like baseball . For me, these days, the joy of baseball lies in what I am discovering and what I have yet to discover, not in staying with what I was taught about the sport as a kid.

Sermon for the Sixth Sunday of Pentecost

July 4, 2010

Readings

Well, here we are in church, not just on the fourth of July weekend, but on the fourth of July, and though your bulletin for today says clearly that we are celebrating the sixth Sunday after Pentecost, you will hear in a few minutes that that is only partly true. First some background.

One of the trickiest paths for church folks--and by that I mean all of us, clergy lay, everybody--to negotiate is the path running between the two entities of church and state. The historical line between the two is marked by areas of friction in which church and government rankle each other by claiming authority in the same area, and by times of such complete cooperation that the lines between church and government seem to disappear. In our own generation, we have seen people of faith marching in the streets to challenge laws that clash with basic tenets of their religious tradition and we have seen politicians rise or fall on their record of response to faith based causes like outlawing abortion or ending a war. People of faith do not tend to agree on what they would have their government do because people of faith, often reading the same scriptures, come up with different interpretations. The ability to hold those different opinions is part of what the fireworks will be about when they burst over the city tonight. But those different opinions about what faith should ask of government are a part of what makes the intersection of government and religion so fraught.

One of the debates church folks can get into has to do with whether the American flag should be displayed in church. I googled the subject a while back and came up with some interesting history. It seems we Americans are unique in displaying the national flag in church sanctuaries. The practice began about a hundred and fifty years ago in Catholic churches when Catholics were suspected of serving a foreign ruler, the pope. The pope was, until the 1870s the leader of a group of states that included most of Italy and his power outweighed that of the local national leaders. The flag stood in the sanctuary to show that American Catholics’ first loyalty was indeed to the U.S. The question of loyalty being cleared up by the presence of the flag was between pope and nation. The question was still alive in 1960 when John Kennedy became the first Catholic U.S. president. In 1978 the Catholic church issued a ruling that the flag should be removed from all churches because nothing in the sanctuary should distract worshippers from the central purpose of worship, which is to draw closer to Jesus. I ran across one posting in my flags-in-church search that started out, “if you want to get fired all you have to do is…” I had to open that one. It was by a pastor somewhere in Georgia who had tried to remove the flag from a church where it had been part of the service for a hundred years.

Over the years, in different times and places around the U.S. the line between loyalty to God and loyalty to country have often become blurred. They are seen as being similar, if not the same. The Boy Scout God and Country award seems to sum up the equality of these two components; that is until you do a little scratching and find that the award emphasizes loyalty to God first and country second and that all of the work done to achieve the award centers on God and faith, not country. The name is a bit of a misnomer. It makes me wonder if they had to attach the word “country” to the award to get people interested in it.

The line between church and state can get messy. Some people just avoid the problem by declaring politics and religion to be oil and water. They don’t mix, end of subject. Others see implications in the gospel that require some kind of engagement with the secular powers that be. There are strong feelings on both sides.

The subject of how to manage God and National issues is so challenging that it was one of the questions on the General Ordination Exams in my senior year at seminary. We had three hours to write a Fourth of July sermon that we knew would be read by graders who either had very strong opinions of how such things should be handled or who were looking for ideas in dealing with the question in their parishes. I told a story about some people in a small rural town setting up early in the morning for the day’s celebration. I don’t remember how or if I tied that story into the story of the Church.

So when Barbara contacted me about which readings we should use today, I realized that it was time once again to try bringing together the celebration of our nation’s birth and the primacy of our life in God. The task seemed to involve calling us to give thanks for this nation, its pioneers, it defenders of freedom, its dreamers, its great possibilities and potential--to give thanks for all of those and at the same time to do that with humility, a humility that we won’t see on the mall tonight or hear in the celebratory speeches on the steps of the capitol. It seemed to me that we needed to focus on some part of this nation’s heritage that won’t be addressed by fireworks and bands, by candidates and drums. I wondered for a while what “other” side of this great day I might find to hold up for you this morning, and the answer was sitting right there on my desk all the time in the lectionary readings for Independence Day.

I told you in the beginning that we were only kind of celebrating the sixth Sunday of Pentecost. Even though today is the fourth, the church calendar of seasons takes precedence over a national holiday, but we are allowed to transfer some of the readings for another day into the Sunday service. So, all the readings today are those appointed for the fourth of July. And the readings appointed for the fourth may just be worth posting on your refrigerator, or folding up and taking into the city tonight. They speak of why and how great nations are built and they point not to what we have become, which will always be a work in progress, but what was being sought by those who established this land we celebrate today. They speak of what it takes to create such a land. They speak, not about country, but about seeking a country. Listen.

The Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords. the great God mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the stranger, providing for them food and clothing. You also shall love the stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

They confessed that they were strangers, foreigners on the earth, for people who speak this way make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.

And about Abraham…..he looked forward to a city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

And this one, maybe most important of all in these times…..“You have heard it said,” says Jesus, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy, “but I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, for if you only love those who love you, what good is that?”

Today, on the day we celebrate our nation’s independence, the church would remind us that our ancestors--that some of us here today-- once sought a homeland. We are reminded of the hopes that all humans have, the hopes that bring people together. We are reminded that our dream has always been to live in justice and that the way to that better place involves caring for and even forgiving others. The national anthem you will hear today speaks of our persevering and triumphing through battle and that is certainly a part of what has brought us to the place we are today. The church reminds us today that the road ahead involves learning to love our enemies. Church is probably the only place you will hear that message on this day. We are still strangers in search of that better homeland.

Maybe one reason why celebrating our nation and worshipping on Sunday are not an easy fit is that on the fourth we celebrate having arrived at a kind of promised land. In the Church, we understand ourselves to still be on the way to such a place. Our ancestors made it clear that they were strangers and foreigners seeking a homeland. The trick for us on this fine day is to not let our celebration of what we have received quench our fierce longing for that better homeland.

JB

Sermon for the Second Sunday after Pentecost

June 6, 2010

Readings

Last weekend, Mary and I went to the American art gallery. We hadn’t been in a few months and it is one of the places we try to visit often so we hopped on the metro and spent a couple hours looking at art. In the hall of presidents, I noticed for the first time a quote from Martin Luther King written large above the portraits of some of our recent leaders. It said, “Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, it comes through continuous struggle.” That seemed apropos for most of our nation’s history, and certainly for the times I can remember, but the quote kind of struck me and I ended up writing it down because I thought it might have something to say about the healing stories we have heard this morning. Does change come quickly, or does it come through the kind of struggle that can take a lifetime? That seems to be a worthwhile question to ask about the kind of miracle stories we have in the readings from Kings and Luke.

Does new life--rebirth--come upon us all of a sudden or might we have to struggle for it. The question is important because if we hear in these stories that divine restoration and healing are characterized by happening quickly, then we may not enter into the kind of collaborative, life-long work of being made new to which Jesus calls us. We may not recognize that slower, more complicated process as resurrection or even as divine. If we think being raised from death into new life happens in a flash or not at all then we may discount or dismiss all the little ways in which we are invited daily to become new people, more alive than the day before.

I am asked sometimes if one has to believe the miracle stories in our tradition in order to be a good Christian. My answer is always, “no,” of course. I hear religion’s detractors go on about miracle stories, wondering how anyone could believe such things. I read such stories and I wonder what to make of them, how to take them and where they came from. How did these stories begin? Did such things really happen in those earlier times? I generally deal with my own questions about the miracle stories by choosing not to spend much time trying to come up with the answers. I don’t think we have to be able to believe them literally; we may someday, but we don’t have to begin there. In fact, I think we are in greater danger of missing the point when we treat such stories literally than when we take them metaphorically. Literally, they seem to function as signs of the greatness and power of God, but they also leave us with the problem that such signs are not present, or at least not common in our time. Metaphorically, these stories speak of the nature of God and of the relationship between God and creation. God creates life, restores life, raises us up into the life for which we were created. That is taking place even now. Literally, these stories are about a few particular individuals. Metaphorically, they are about all of us. Literally, the miracle stories are about fixed moments in time. Metaphorically, they speak of what is happening throughout our lives, and about what has been taking place since the beginning of creation.

So what does it mean then to be brought back from the dead? What does it mean to be alive? What might it mean for a community, a nation, a culture, humanity itself to be raised into life from the way of death? The questions go way beyond the stories of a couple of people who lived in another time?

Last week, as we celebrated Trinity Sunday, we heard God described as “Wisdom.” In his book, Original Blessing, Matthew Fox writes about a Native American understanding of wisdom. He says wisdom means: that the people may live. He goes on to say, “Wisdom wants the people to live. What does that mean? Obviously to not die before their time, yes, but to live is not merely to survive. Living implies beauty, freedom of choice, giving birth, discipline, celebration. Living is not just shopping. Living is not building a nest to protect us from the suffering of others.”

Fox’s words startle me in their truth. They stop me with their truth and sadden me because, like Ezekiel in that great story about the valley of the dry bones, I find myself looking around at so much of what is taught and valued in our time and in our culture and I ask, how can these bones live? Our marketplace and economy are based on making people want to shop, on making us want to have whatever is bigger and better and easier. The voices of those who have been telling us for the last forty years that we have to end our dependence on oil, those voices have too often fallen on dead ears and now that oil has come back to haunt us. As a culture we celebrate the accumulation of wealth as if there will always be more of everything for the taking and as if wealth for one doesn’t mean poverty for another. I know that I am, in some respects, preaching to the choir. Some of us are struggling with these issues and trying to turn things around in our little corner of the world.

Foxes words about life being more than shopping and insulating ourselves from the need of others startle me and they give me a glimmer of hope. They speak on the one hand of what is wrong in our world while at the same time holding out the promise of something else…..a new way of living. The place to begin that new way of living would seem to involve taking stock of what really is important. It must involve asking, what does it mean to live? Besides breathing and being above ground, what does it really mean to be alive. Fox offers a partial list--beauty, freedom of choice, giving birth, discipline, celebration--but that is only a beginning. Each of us can assess what it would mean for us to be truly alive and to struggle in whatever way we have to live the life to which we are called. Yes, I am speaking of call. I don’t think we can make our lists--describe what it means to be alive--in isolation. If being alive is living out the possibilities that our creator has imagined for us, then deciding what our lives can still be about must involve listening and interacting with our creator. As we meet God in prayer, in the community, in the ancient stories, in nature, in family, who knows? We may discover what really constitutes life.

By going beyond the literal story of Jesus raising the dead and asking what that would involve in our lives we can begin to see ourselves as part of the ongoing work of creation. We have a role to play--a witness to provide to the world around us. You may recall that Jesus said his friends would do the kinds of amazing things that he did and more. In the literal version of today’s story from Luke, we might expect to have to come up some kind of quick fix for the problems we se around us. In the version where transformation and the call to life is an ongoing work, maybe our most powerful response to the world’s pains can be our lives. We can live lives that are unexpected, lives that are a little out of synch with the general movement of our culture. We can witness by living lives that make others want to know something about their source. JB

Sermon for Trinity Sunday

May 30, 2010

Readings

So, you may have noticed that we have the flags up front this Sunday. A parishioner wrote and asked if we couldn’t have them up front on this Memorial Day weekend to honor those who gave their lives in the service of their country. Seemed like a good idea, so here they are. There are a lot of good reasons why the national flag is being moved away from the altar in churches. The Catholic church called for their removal over thirty years ago, but it still seems very appropriate that we show these colors on this weekend, so I was glad someone made the request.

My father piloted a flying boat in world war two picking up downed pilots in the Pacific. I’m guessing he had lots of stories about friends who didn’t make it back from that war, I just never heard them. He didn’t tell stories about the war. Sometimes he’d catch a battle scene in some movie on tv and either say, “it wasn’t like that,” or just get quiet. I learned more about his service in the war from commendations and letters I found among his papers after he died than he ever told me in all the time I knew him. What he did talk about though, what did kind of light him up as a he spoke were stories about being a cadet in flying school. He talked about his friends in the good times, the “safe” times right before the war. He occasionally told a story of something that happened to a friend during the war, but only if that friend made it back. My Godfather flew with my dad as a tail gunner, and it amused me as a little kid more than it should have that he had gotten hit in the backside on one of their runs. I didn’t get any real sense from my father of what the war and being in it was like. What I did get was the idea that in those awful times and in some pretty terrible situations a community formed and life-long friendships were created. At the end of the day, what my dad wanted to remember was his connection to the people who had been there with him, a community that in hard times sustained and gave courage to its members. And it is that community message I got from him that now turns me back toward the message of this Trinity Sunday in which we celebrate the God who begins as community.

Some of you may know that I joke at times about this Sunday. I joke about trying to get out of preaching the deep and unfathomable concept of the triune God. I have had seminarians preach on Trinity Sunday, I have been on vacation or sabbatical on this Sunday. Two years ago I even managed to get the bishop to visit on Trinity Sunday. I suppose I could just stick with Memorial Day and skip the Trinity this morning but the truth is, I like the richness of Christianity’s understanding of God. So I am glad that every few years I am pushed to spend some time thinking about this three-in-one God of ours.

That really is the way to approach thinking about the Trinity. Come back year after year and see what you notice, see what new vision of God is visible at this point in your journey, what new understanding of God might be possible because of recent experiences in your life. The three readings today each emphasize a different person of the Trinity but they do it in a messy kind of way that sort of mixes the three up. The Proverbs reading speaks about creation. The Creator, the first person of the Trinity is brought to mind in this reading, but is named Wisdom, a name more commonly associated with the Spirit of God. Then Paul in his letter to the Romans points to Christ, the second person of the Trinity as the one through whom we receive access to grace. He then goes on to say that he can boast about his hope in Christ only because the Spirit has been poured into him. Finally, today, we hear Jesus in John’s gospel telling his disciples about the Spirit, who will guide them in all things.

Creator, Christ and Holy Spirit. They are all here, and in the readings they seem a bit scrambled. Anyone familiar with the beginning of John’s gospel, you know--in the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God and everything was created through the Word--anyone who has heard that will here hear the voice of that creating Word in Proverbs today. For Paul, Christ and the Spirit are a party of the same answer. In John, Jesus speaks of the Father and the Spirit. What stands out for me this year as I approach the Trinity is not the distinction between these three faces of the one God, but their connection, interrelatedness and interaction with each other. I am reminded that very early on in its life the Church began to speak about the God who is community, the God who begins as community and would draw us into the community that already exists between Creator, Christ and Spirit.

Everything we really need, the good for which we were created comes to us through our association with others. Community is where we learn and grow and discover our true selves. Looking at any part of our own stories, life is what happens between us; it is what takes place between people. In relationship with others we learn who we can be, we find ourselves wanting to be more, to give more, to care more deeply, to be more courageous, to be better parents, spouses, children, friends. Who doesn’t have memories of long conversations in which the world outside the words falls away leaving only the reality and solidity of another? Who hasn’t been changed and discovered hidden resources because of the needs of another? Who hasn’t wanted to change in order to be more accessible to another? Community calls to us, draws us in. I read somewhere recently the statement, “love is community.” I’m pretty sure it would work the other way too, to say community is love. It forms us and creates us.

I’ve enjoyed live music for many years, and I am still surprised and delighted when I find myself listening to a musician whose music is fueled by a palpable connection with the audience. Who hasn’t left a concert knowing that something tangible existed for a time in the space between stage and the crowd assembled? Physicists tell us that the smallest particles of matter are held in their orbits of relationship with each other by something that is simply referred to as the “strong force.” The connections between us are so important that we organize our lives and our governments to protect the space in which those interactions take place. All of our structures, our laws, our institutions exist to support what happens between people, in community, whether we are talking a community of two or thousands. Today we celebrate the God who calls us into relationship. We remember that God is relationship. We remember today the God who invites us to join the dance that has always been going on, a dance that requires our presence if it is to be complete. Creator, Christ, Spirit and all creation. The dance was written with us in mind. For this, we were invited into being.

It really does seem to be the case that whatever is good, whatever is real, whatever is lasting and important takes place between individuals and among individuals in community. Maybe that’s why I never heard the kind of stories from my dad that a kid expects to hear about war. Maybe, in those long silences, he was still pondering lessons about what lasts and what doesn’t. Maybe he was remembering long conversations in the cockpit, friends gone but not gone, truths told, memories sealed and saved. Some stories can’t be told. Community can’t really be explained. You can write about it, talk about it, I can preach about it, but we can’t know about what happens in community until we have been in it. Whatever is good, whatever is real takes place between us and among us. And any time that kind of “real” is taking happening, you can be sure that somewhere in the mix, somewhere in the conversations and exchanges, is the God who is the life that binds us together. Amen

Sermon for the Day of Pentecost

May 23, 2010

Growing up in the deep South, I pretty much got used to hearing people ask me if I’d been saved. I took some comfort in the fact that it wasn’t just me. The saved would ask anyone they thought might still need redeeming, and they would ask pretty boldly. I heard the question in all kinds of settings, and even though the question always made me a bit uncomfortable, I had to admire the tactics of some of those weekday preachers who seemed able to slip an inquiry as to the condition of one’s soul into any conversation.

Part of my problem with the question about being saved had to do with my being an Episcopalian. Episcopalians, at least the ones I knew, didn’t go around asking such questions. And, to complicate maters, some of the signs of un-savedness cited by those concerned preachers, drinking, cussing, dancing and lusting, just to name a few, were all practiced by good upstanding Episcopalians I knew and liked and trusted. I was an accepted member of one Christian community being preached at by members of another Christian community who seemed to be trying to pull me over to their side. Those preachers seemed a bit scary. But my friends, the Christians I was familiar with, never expressed any concern about my soul so I wondered. I was, for a time, pulled in two directions. I was caught in the kind of tension that can only be understood through theological reflection, so in my teenage years, before I had any idea what theology was I became a theologian. That is to say, I came to understand that there were differing ideas about God and church and I was going to have to think about it all for a while.

One of the notions that helped me remain an Episcopalian, aside from that list of Episcopalian benefits I mentioned earlier, was a question that began to explain my discomfort with those soul-saving zealots. I wondered, isn’t there more to all this than saving souls? If you get everyone to accept Jesus, then what? What would it all be about if everyone said, “ok. I’m in.” It just seemed to me that the focus for a lot of those other folks was so much on who’s in and who’s out that there wasn’t much discussion of what it would mean to be in, what life would be about, what difference one would make in the world after they were saved. Except, of course, going out and asking other folks if they were saved, and I didn’t feel cut out for that work so I stayed with what I had.

And through these last forty or so years since that time, I have come to believe more and more that the faith we claim, the faith Jesus commended to us isn’t about who’s in with God and who’s out. It isn’t about being saved. It is about what kind of difference we will make in the world because we are a part of God , a part of God’s creative work in the world. I think that is what Jesus came to tell us, but we miss it so easily because we humans just seem to be hard wired for “us versus them.” Jesus showed up in the midst of a people who had, as one of the central organizing principals of their faith, the idea that they were special. That they were different from everyone else around them. In story after story, Jesus tried to break open that idea and break down the strong sense of “us and them” that ran through the faith of his people, but it was a hard message and we are still struggling with it. If we hear it and grapple with it this message of inclusion will make theologians out of all of us and that’s not a bad thing.

Jesus came when he did because the time was right for this new message of inclusion. We hear that in the stories for this Day of Pentecost.

First we have a story from Israel’s mythology explaining why God might have created diversity. That story is followed by one about God deciding that the time was right for us to know our common relationship with the creator.

The story of the Church after Pentecost is not about salvation, about who is in and who is out, but about community and about growing into a new understanding and a new role in the universe. After all those years of seeing themselves set apart, the only ones privileged enough to hear the voice of God, the time now comes when everyone hears the same voice in their own language. Being saved, being part of the inside group, is no longer the agenda. The agenda now has something to do with living in community with people whose ways and languages and understandings are different from our own. “In the last days,” says God, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.” All flesh. The who’s in and who’s out question has been settled. We’re all in. Everybody.

That question being settled, we are ready, or at least Jesus seems to think we are ready for the real question. The real question, the one for our time, can be summed up in two words. Now what? We never again have to worry about being separated from God. God is as close as our breath, our flesh, our thoughts. Now what? What difference will the knowledge that God is with us make in our lives? What difference will it make in the world in which we live and work and make choices every day that affect the people around us?

From very early in the Christian story, the message turned back from what Jesus taught about inclusion and acceptance and began to focus once again on who’s in and who’s out. We Christians have struggled with the pull of that simpler, more comfortable message since the beginning. It is easy to be in. We have rituals, our names go on lists, and if who’s in and who’s out is the question we are finished when we cross the line. We Christians have always been tempted to focus our attention there.

What is harder and what we have to keep coming back to is the work for which we were empowered in that Pentecost story, the work of being God’s hands and hearts in the world. This way of understanding what it means to be a Christian is more difficult because we can never finish its work. We can never reach a place where we can say, we’ve arrived.

This week you may go out and work in the local soup kitchen. Eventually you realize that the soup kitchen exists because of other problems that require your attention. Soon you are attending the local town hall meeting, and maybe in another year or two or twenty, you have the names and contact information for all your elected representatives stuck on the refrigerator. This year you buy a Prius because you begin to see that even though you can afford a gas guzzeling car you have an obligation to future generations to protect the environment they will inherit. In a few years you may be riding a bicycle. Living out the “what now” question involves an ever deepening understanding that we must let go of some of what we might claim as “our rights” so that others can have better lives.

As we approach this Pentecost life of giving and sacrifice and growing concern for the welfare of others--the life Jesus taught--it looks hard. There is much I am not ready to give up. Much I hope I will never have to give up, but I know there is still much I could give up, and that doing so would make a difference to others. The Pentecost life involves treating everyone as neighbor--everyone as someone who is in--a part of the group we are so glad to be a part of. It involves living our lives with their best interests at heart. That life doesn’t come easily to us, but it is the life to which the new church was called, the life to which we are still called.

The call is not easy, so thank God for the rest of today’s message. The part about how that new fledgling little group, people trying, hoping to be faithful, found within them on that day resources they had not expected. We will go out into the world today--we will leave this place in a little while-- reminded, trusting, I hope, maybe even rejoicing in the power of the Spirit that draws us all together and empowers us for the work of community. Amen

April 25, 2010

A Sermon for Easter 4, Good Shepherd Sunday

Psalm 23

So when you and god woke up this morning what was it like? Do you remember dreaming together, lying next to each other? Do you and god ever sleep together like spoons? I knew a woman once who would tell me stories about her husband, Ramone--long dead--she told me one time about how they slept like spoons. When you and god woke up this morning could you feel each other’s presence like spoons laid neatly in the silverware drawer? Was there a conscious greeting or maybe just the peaceful, easy company of the other’s presence? When you and god slipped on a robe, put on your pants, felt around with your foot for a shoe--a slipper, were you still shaking off sleep or had the business of the day already called you into action? Did you have the luxury of waking without an alarm or were you summoned into consciousness by a baby’s crying or the sound of children or maybe a dog sniffing politely at the edge of your bed?

When you and god woke up this morning, after you’d been to the bathroom, after you’d shaved, fixed your hair, brushed your teeth, as you started this day together what plans did you make? Were your plans grand and hopeful? tentative? ambitious? Did you speak about the day to come or did you both just know its expectations and step into it? Sometimes companionship needs words but at other times knowing comes easier than speaking. When you and god woke up this morning did you share a glance, a conspiratorial smile maybe as you set out into your day.

When you and god woke up this morning, what was it like?

I have spent the last two days at a workshop listening to Matthew Fox, theologian, mystic, friend of the earth, teacher. I came away with a renewed sense that god is everywhere, that god is in us and with us and that there is no part of our lives or our world or any world we can imagine that is not contained within god. god is everywhere, in everything, permeating our lives. It is a simple message, but one that I easily forget. Our spiritual ancestors knew it. “Where can I run from your love,” asks the psalmist. “If I climb to the mountains you are there.” god is always near, as close as our breath, but it is so easy to begin believe that we are separated from god.

Maybe we begin by imagining that little bits of our lives are not acceptable to God, or they are not exactly what we might want for ourselves--from ourselves--so we try to hide that bit of ourselves from the one-from-whom-nothing-can-be-hidden. I hope that somewhere in your life experience you know what it is like to look back on such a time of hiding having learned that god, the universe, the people in your life are more accepting than you had expected. Wherever we are, wherever we go, whether we are laughing, crying, dancing, even when we think we’re hidden from god, god is there.

Many of us had a chance to learn this lesson early on in our life as Christians. The message of the unescapable presence and companionship of god is imbedded in one of the best known psalms from our tradition. When I was a kid, I knew two rote ways of speaking to god. One was the Lord’s prayer which pretty much everyone knew, and the other was the twenty-third psalm which I only kind of knew, often mixing up the parts about the table and the cup running over. I don’t know if I would know the twenty-third psalm--though I am sure it is the best known psalm in the book--unless I had had my tonsils out when I was twelve. In the only piece of spiritual advice I ever remember receiving from my father, he told me as I was going into the hospital that when he was about to be operated on he recited the twenty-third psalm and it helped. In what I’m sure was one of the few times I ever took his advice I did my best to learn the psalm, and sure enough; it helped me as they wheeled me into the operating room. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want……..he leads me beside still waters…..

I thought of this psalm as a call to bring god close in times of trouble or fear or danger. What I missed, what I think many of us miss, having been warned in church about the dangers of separating ourselves from god--as if that were possible--what I missed was this psalm’s message about just how deeply we are imbedded in the life of god and how close god is to us. Listen.

The Lord is my shepherd;

I shall not be in want.

Shepherds don’t leave their sheep. They sleep with them, protect them, take responsibility for their welfare. That is what we are meant to take from all the shepherd references we hear on this fourth Sunday in Easter, sometimes called Good Shepherd Sunday.

He makes me lie down in green pastures

and leads me beside still waters.

In the best times of our lives, says the psalmist, when there is no perceived danger or trouble, even when we might tend to forget our need of god, god from whom we can not be separated is not only present, but leading us.

He revives my soul

and guides me along right pathways for his Name's sake.

At the center of our being god is at work restoring, renewing us, helping us--urging us to choose well our path.

Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

I shall fear no evil;

for you are with me;

your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

Our awareness of god’s presence doesn’t begin with being rescued in times of trouble. The god who accompanies us through the hardest parts of life--doesn’t remove us from trouble, but walks through it with us--the god who accompanies us through the hardest parts of our lives is an old friend, a companion we have known from the beginning. We don’t need to call god into the hard moments, but simply remember that we have never been nor will we ever be alone.

You spread a table before me in the presence of those who trouble me;

I don’t know about you, but most of the time when I think someone is troubling me, it is because somehow in my exchange with that person I lose my sense of grounding, I forget for a moment who I am, I lose confidence in some aspect of my being. In the presence of enemies we are told that our responses are fight or flight. I wonder this morning what it would be like, in the midst of some heated argument, to imagine, to picture god right there with us setting a table of fine food, good silver, cloth napkin….maybe the on those goofy place mats from Disney World. To imagine finding our grounding in such times in a table prepared by our absolutely unflappable companion.

you have anointed my head with oil, and my cup is running over.

Can we even stand the thought of being treated like royalty by our divine friend? Can we stand still and let ourselves be made into kings and queens in god’s presence. That is quite a challenge to the arguments we sometimes make about how unworthy we can be to have such a friend.

Surely your goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,

and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for ever.

...and I will dwell in the house of he Lord forever. I don’t know how long forever is, but I would assume it has to contain at least this moment and the next. I think maybe the psalmist is telling us that we live, even now, in this very moment, as close to god as we can get. Didn’t Jesus tell us that the kingdom of god is not out there, but all around us and within us?

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want.

We can not be separated from our divine friend, the god who walks, eats, breaths, laughs, plays, cries, dreams, loves with us.

And so I ask again. When you and god woke up this morning, what was it like?

JB

Just a note about the little g in god. When I preached this on Sunday, no one knew the g was lower case. The little g seemed right because of the familiarity of the god with whom we sleep and wake. The French Prayer Book uses the familiar form of “you” in speaking to god. I had never considered the theological implications of this simple choice. The Matthew Fox workshop put me in touch with the very familiar god, and though I am still a bit uncomfortable with the small g, it feels like a good, growing discomfort so I will leave it as it is.