SERMON September 2, 2007

Jeremiah 2:4-13, Psalm 81; Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16; Luke 14:1, 7-14

I've been in Wales for the last month, and one of the privileges of my stay in Wales was traveling by public transportation. I had no car, so I relied on buses and occasionally the train—and I walked. My life slowed down so much that I could enjoy waiting for the bus—just being. Letting go of the freedom to go when and exactly where I wanted to I enjoyed a different kind of liberty and an opportunity to be present.

I had my experiences waiting for buses and trains. One train I waited for never did show up. But the best waiting story I heard there was from my friend Lynell. One very cold and rainy day she was waiting for a bus in a little Welsh town—and wasn’t really sure if she was at the right place. There was a woman standing there—in her eighties—most of her teeth missing, the ones she still had were chattering—it was cold and very windy. Lynell said to her, “Are you waiting for bus #23?” “Ahh, no, luv, . . . Me, I’m waitin’ for global warmin’.”

Kind of like waiting for God. I mean there you are—you have no control really. You are at the mercy of the one you wait for. And, you aren’t entirely sure if the One you wait for is real. And you’ve heard that however it comes, it will take you places, change your life; it may warm you up, which on a cold day may seem like a good thing, but it may be more than you can bear. Global warmin’ that is. Or maybe …God?

Maybe you’ve picked up the latest edition of Time magazine.⁽¹⁾ It’s got a cover story about Mother Teresa and the new book of her letters to her spiritual directors that’s just been published: Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light. Her letters reveal that for almost all of her life—some fifty years—after she began her ministry to the poor and dying in Calcutta—she lived without sensing the presence of God. Beneath her public persona—and the person known to even her Sisters of Charity—was a person often in pain and anguish really because of the absence of Jesus—the One who had appeared to her in visions and so vividly in prayer during her early years. At one point she wrote, “Lord, my God, who am I that You should forsake me? The Child of your Love—and now become as the most hated one—the one—You have thrown away as unwanted—unloved. I call, I cling, I want—there is no One to answer—no One to whom I can cling—no, No One. –Alone. . . Where is my Faith—even deep down right in there is nothing, but emptiness and darkness—My God—how painful is this unknown pain—I have no faith…”

Time describes Mother Teresa’s work among the poor and her public statements about the love of Jesus being everywhere: “Christ in our hearts, Christ in the poor we meet, Christ in the smile we give and in the smile that we receive.” with what was her private experience of nothing—of the absence of God. The article quotes critics of religion have been quick to claim that Teresa lived a lie—she realized her faith was just fabrication, but that she lacked the courage to say so publicly. Others have already begun to psycho-analyze her.

Whatever we might make of Mother Teresa’s mental and emotional life, in her lengthy and painful living with the absence of God—even in her praying and in the Eucharist—she stands in the long line of faithful Christian experience. that, in a sense, echoes Christ’s cry from the cross “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me.” Just as Jesus accomplished his work he felt that utter aloneness—that awful solitariness. That moment of agony which perhaps called into question all that he’d understood to be God’s call to him. So, too, this 50-year season of solitariness came upon Teresa once she began her ministry to the dying in Calcutta. Teresa who had longed more than anything to know Christ’s passion perhaps came to know it in the way she’d least imagined. The woman who committed her life to living among the poor experienced the painful isolation of poverty even in her interior life.

Last month I was reminded that early Celtic Christianity in Wales, Ireland and Scotland had deep connections to the early Christian desert fathers and mothers of Africa and the Middle East. That seems surprising, but Celtic saints shared with them that same going out into the wilderness to seek God, that willingness to let the Spirit lead you to the edges of life where all your normal strengths and protections are stripped away. Their geographic landscapes differed, but in many ways their interior landscapes were the same. The God present in all things, in every aspect of life. God to be found at the thin places, where the boundaries between heaven and earth were permeable—wells, and mountaintops, and ocean beaches, rocky places—God in the end was unfathomable.

The God we wait for, the God we seek is not like us—as Job discovered, and countless others before and since have realized. There is a strange paradox here, summed up by Andrew Harvey when he says of desert pilgrimage, “We are saved in the end by the things that ignore us.” “We are saved in the end by the things that ignore us.”

I take that to mean that when you go backpacking to the top of the mountain, or sit by the crashing waves on the rocks at the beach, or dare to walk into the desert wasteland what you discover is that these places are not there for you. They ignore you. When we get ahold of that, then comes silence, and a letting go of our self—of our accomplishments, our self-focus, our self-importance, our desire to have a feel good spiritual experience, our need for self-fulfillment. God is other and the landscape can remind us of that.

So can life itself. Waiting with a loved one who is dying can teach you that. I have known that in my own life. There is something here that is beyond my control—beyond me. It ignores my desires, my plans, my needs. It simply is. Poverty, death, the crises of loss we experience can bring us to that place where we are saved by the things that ignore us.

It is really a gift to us: this learning of Mother Teresa’s yearning for God’s presence, her longing, her doubts about the existence even of God—all the while she was carrying out her ministry for Christ. Who among us hasn’t wondered, hasn’t doubted, hasn’t been ready to give up, or hasn’t actually given up—given up this faith—this quest for relationship with the One who is experienced so often as absence. I think of the disciples in their little boat, Jesus sleeping on the pillow in the back when the winds are rising and water begins to pour in. Teresa of Avila lying in a river after her cart overturned on her way to do God’s work, telling God that from the way he treats his friends it’s no wonder he has so few of them. John of the Cross and his dark night of the soul. The list goes on and on. It includes many lesser saints—people like me and many of you.

It’s even more complicated than that. Juxtapose Teresa’s writings with this morning’s snippet from Jeremiah: Here, God cries out in longing: The people have forsaken the One who brought them out of oppression, through the desert and the land of drought and deep darkness and into a plentiful land. There in that land of plenty the people no longer show up at the bus stop—they have forsaken their God—the fountain of living water, and they have dug out for themselves cracked cisterns that can hold no water. God cannot seem to believe it. There is pain here, pathos here. The One who longs for relationship with the people has been ignored, rejected. “Be appalled o heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate.” says the Holy One.

“I am told God loves me—and yet the reality of darkness and coldness and emptiness is so great that nothing touches my soul. Did I make a mistake in surrendering blindly to the Call of the Sacred Heart?” says Mother Teresa. A Christian steeped in the practices of our faith, one who longs for relationship has been ignored; she feels rejected, utterly desolate.

Jeremiah reminds us that God’s longing for us is as deep as our own for God. We forget that at our peril.

The bedrock of our faith is God’s love and grace— God’s promise “I will never leave you or forsake you.” The evidence often seems dim—paradox and uncertainty are hard to live into. Some people of faith do experience moments of mystical unity with God, but those are rare. The truth is that all of us are invited into relationship with one who may attract us more by absence than presence—more by mystery than concrete evidence—more by hints than direct contact. There is an ebb and flow.

For a brief period in her 50 years of longing, Jesus did come to Mother Teresa as she waited. And later, when the darkness returned, she finally came to embrace the darkness—to find in her longing itself a sign of God’s hidden presence. In this perhaps she has given us a greater gift even than her Nobel Peace prize-winning charity. Love involves more than good feelings. It is always risky business. It is beyond words. There are long waits at the bus stop. God’s grace will carry us to love’s greatest depths and heights—and its absences and presences. My friends, that is the great good news.

(1) Time Magazine, International edition, Vol 170, No 9, 2007

SERMON July 15, 2007

Luke 10:38-42 and words about our prayers for the dead

Jesus told them a parable: One morning early in Santa Rosa near a church on Mendocino Avenue, a man was lying to the side of the sidewalk. He had blood on his face, and he looked half-dead. A woman came along on her way to church for the early morning service. She was a member of the altar guild, and when she saw the man lying by the side of the walkway, she was afraid. She took a step back, and quickly went the other way to get into the church from the other entrance. She said a little prayer for the man as she went. Not long after another person came rushing up toward the gate near where the man still lay, This fellow had a clergy collar on, and he was glancing at his watch and muttering under his breath, “I’m late, I’m late, I’m late.” He didn’t even see the man, until he almost tripped over him. He glanced down quickly and realized that if he stopped the Mass would not be offered on time. So he thought perhaps he’d come back later. And he went on into the church. Sometime later another man came along, he too was dressed in black, and kept looking at the time on his cell phone. He didn’t have a collar around his neck, but there were some tattoos showing. He’d come to the courtyard by the church in hopes of making a sale, a deal—but the person he was expecting hadn’t been at the curb as he’d supposed. He looked down and saw the man, and went over and bent down and said, “Hey, buddy, you all right?” The man didn’t answer. So he wiped the blood off his face with his shirttail and saw that his wounds were pretty severe. He lifted his head and gave him a few sips of water, he tried to pick the man up, but realized he couldn’t support him alone. He took out his cell phone and called his friend who was waiting in a car just down the block. When he came they picked the man up, put him n the backseat and drove him to Sutter (it was still open at that time). The man in black got out and told the nurse to bring a stretcher. When the ER staff had finally come, the man and his friend drove away.

Wha-a-t? you say. It could never happen. No way. The Good Drug dealer?

You’ve gotta be kidding.

And, I am playing with the story a bit here. And please know that I just picked this person, this caricature of a drug dealer to try and bring the story out of its humdrum I heard this one a million times-ness. If you’re a person who has dealt drugs maybe you know the stigma attached to the way of life—at least in some circles. I wanted to invite you to experience a bit of the shock, disbelief and surprise that Jesus’ listeners felt when they heard his version of the story. The mercy shown to the half-dead man was mercy every good Jew would have expected to give—that it was shown by a Samaritan was almost incomprehensible. Samaritans were considered less than by Jews of Jesus’ day——outsiders, despised even. The last group you’d go to for help. The last person you’d imagine showing mercy.

I love Jesus’ parables. They are so open-ended and they invite us to enter in so many ways. With whom do you identify in the story? The altar guild member—have you ever been too afraid to get involved? I have.

The priest—have you ever been too preoccupied with your own stuff to even notice? Too busy to have time for another? I have.

The drug dealer?—have you ever reached out in mercy to another when it made no sense to do so?

Or how about the man lying half-dead on the side?—have you ever been hurt, wounded, exhausted, helpless to help yourself? Have you ever been vulnerable in your weakness? Maybe even unable to protect yourself?

The way Jesus told the story made it hard for folks in his day to identify with anyone but the victim really. His listeners knew they were called to show mercy to the stranger. They probably expected the Levite and the priest (the woman and the priest) to have compassion on the man, and maybe they would have judged them—but perhaps they would have understood their motives. If they were like me they might have anticipated being like the third man, the one who helped. It’s so easy to fall into feeling self-righteous, isn’t it? I’d do better than those two! But imagining myself as a Samaritan—or a drug dealer is more than I can handle. So, maybe the one I would most identify with is the man on the side of the road.

From whom will I accept help? Could I accept it from such a despised person? What if I had no choice? the parable asks these questions of me. (they make me uncomfortable).

A good friend of mine once told me about a time he offered to help someone in distress—but because of who he was his offer was rejected. Jerry was a very large (like over 300 lbs) man—an African American man. One night after hours at the university he came down a corridor and a young woman was trying to get her key out of the lock in her office. He came down the hall toward her and said, “Can I help?” She leapt back against the wall and screamed, “Leave me alone. Leave me alone. If you come any nearer I’ll have you arrested.” He drew back in fear, and quickly left the building. Perhaps God had come to her Jerry, but she declined the offer.

That’s how St Augustine read this parable. You and me, that’s us by the side of the road. And, he said God is coming to us in this shocking way—help from the least expected source. God coming in surprise.

I think when Jesus first told this story he was about giving his listeners a taste of the kingdom of God. The shocking way it comes—crossing all boundaries, all our neat arrangements. That feeling of disjuncture—that’s a God feeling. The mercy of God drawing near to us when we’re most in need—how our weakness opens us to the surprising gift of mercy from someone we’d never consider speaking to really. Never consider.

The Good Samaritan or drug dealer as the case may be is disturbing because he breaks up our neat constructions. The ways we categorize people. Deep down we know, you and I, that those categories never hold up. Life is just NOT that neat and tidy: it isn’t good vs bad, the decent and the evil, the worthy and the unworthy. But we live so much of our lives pretending that our judgments are truth. From God’s perspective these are pretty much baloney. Oh, there is evil and there is good, there is righteousness and there is sin. But each of us is a mixture—and we are God’s own.

Maybe the Good Samaritan is a plumb line. God has dropped him into our midst, and like the words of Amos the prophet—the land cannot bear it. We can hardly bear it. God is love all right. No doubt about it. But love is sometimes hard to take—especially from people we’ve judged incapable of love—or not worthy to love me. Samaritans, drug dealers, you name them… Maybe the plumb line of the Good Samaritan is about measuring our willingness to be open to receiving love from the one we despise. Can we let God be God? God can and does come to us in the most surprising ways.

That’s the hard news and the Good News. God comes to us. Very Good News indeed.

I wanted to say a few words about our prayers for the dead in Iraq. Some in our congregation wonder about our motives, wonder if we are making some “political” statement, and others wonder why we are not praying for all of those who have given their lives for our country.

I should have spoken to you earlier about this reading of the names.

The reading of the names was my idea. It came to me after I read about the young men from our County who have died in Iraq. It came to me after a young man I prepared for confirmation when he was 12 was sent back for his third tour of duty. It came to me because I believe that our faith is worth nothing if it isn’t for our lives today. I thought, “this is the world in which we are living today—right now. This is part of our truth and we should dare to speak of it.”

We should have a chance to grieve. War is costly.

And I thought about all the dead in this war. Christ tells us to pray for our enemies. I’m not very faithful about that and I mostly don’t know their names. But I think a lot about the thousands of civilians, men women and children dying and living in fear. I don’t know their names either.

But these names of our American dead I do know, and so I thought to say them out loud here in this place. To pray for them so that we might respect their lives and grieve their loss, and let their names stand for those whose names we do not know.

By saying their names I never thought to dismiss or denigrate other soldiers—those who have gone before—or for that matter any of the others—the countless others we might name here on a Sunday.

The ones lying by the side of the road—here in our own cities and in countless other places. The people too afraid to reach out—the ones too preoccupied to notice—too filled with their own agendas—the ones who are our enemies—the ones we see as other. I never thought to name them all—but to let these names remind of the others. Let these names turn our thoughts to a reality that is painful.

My intent was never to make a “political” statement. I have my political opinions as do you. But this naming was for me more about a faith statement about the value of life. And it is a grief statement about the reality of life.

After all these years of reading the gospels and preaching them, I stand here and tell you honestly that Jesus’ way is the way of the Good Samaritan. It is the way less traveled—the way of love that overturns our divisions and categories, our “us and thems,” is cuts across the deep divides and seeks to offer mercy in surprising and shocking ways. It is demanding and it is life—the fullness of life. Part of the grief I feel when I read the names is grief at my own refusals to choose that path—it’s over our own refusals to choose Christ’s path. The hope I have rests in God—who I know and trust to be at work on the road and along the sides of the road.

You may use the reading of the names for prayers that seem best to you. And, I will be here after the service if you wish to speak to me about this.

Semon June 17, 2007

1 Kings 21:1-10, 15-21a, Psalm 51:1-8, Galatians 2:15-21, Luke 7:36-8:3

“Do you see this woman?” Jesus asks his host. “Do you see this woman?”

I spoke with my daughter-in-law, last week—she and my son and their 18 month-old daughter had returned from a ten-day sojourn with a Christian Peacemaker Team along our border with Mexico. You may remember the Christian Peacemakers—they are an ecumenical group that works in war-torn areas of the world. A CPT volunteer Tom Fox was killed last year in Iraq. This was a delegation closer to home—and it was more of an informative venture than anything else. The thing that most deeply affected Carin was her meeting a mother who had been caught crossing the border in the middle of the Arizona desert. She’d traveled with a group including her children—and one of her little ones had been separated from her when the Border Patrol came upon them. She didn’t know if he was still out on the desert, if he’d been picked up, or if he’d stayed with his grandmother and made it to safety. She was beside herself with fear and grief.

“Do you see this woman?” “Do you see this woman?”

And, of course, we could ask this question about so many people, real people who are part of the "issue" of "immigration". The men and women who live along the border and find their land being trespassed across day in and out, a border patrol agent, wondering if the people he is trying to stop are armed drug smugglers or unarmed men and women seeking work, an employer searching for field workers, a couple staying at a motel and leaving a tip for the woman who cleans the room, a US citizen who is looking for work and doesn’t want to work for the wages being offered to roofers. Do you see this man? “Do you see this woman?”

Jesus’ host sees the woman as a sinner. And he judges Jesus—he thinks that if Jesus really were a prophet he would know that this woman at his feet is a sinner. “Do you see this woman?” Simon sees her as one word: sinner. And, he sees his guest as a man who doesn’t have the sensitivities of a prophet—the ESP perhaps. He judges Jesus to be a less-than prophet. Because if he knew this woman for the sinner she is, he wouldn’t let her touch him.

“Do you see this woman?” When the story is read, whom do you see? A 30 year-old sexy type? A woman of the streets? A jezebel? (her!) Do you imagine this story as a sensual, sexualized tale? A woman of the streets invading the propriety of Pharisee’s dining room, letting her hair down, sashaying toward Jesus, washing his feet with her tears and wiping them with her hair. Oh, my!

Of course maybe she was 65 with gray hair and a bit of a belly. Maybe she was a middle-aged mother, whose 16 year old had driven her to this place; maybe she was someone who’d embezzled money. . . Who knows? The text doesn’t give us these details. What we do know is that she came into the room and that she was weeping, that she cried on Jesus feet, and let down her hair and wiped his feet, she kissed his feet and then she anointed them with oil.

“Do you see this woman?” Much has been made about her letting her hair down. Women in Jesus’ culture usually wore their hair long, but up. They did however let it down in public when they were grieving—the widow we heard about last week—the widow of Nain most probably had her hair down as she walked along in her son’s burial procession. Women also let their hair down in the Roman culture that Luke lived in when they went to give thanks at a temple of a goddess, or when they went in supplication. It was a sign perhaps of their unadorned offering of themselves. Women in the early church were baptized with their hair down. People at the dinner that night would have certainly wondered about the woman—why was she weeping? Why show her grief like this? What kind of supplication might she have been making? Or was her action one of devotion? Unbound hair on a weeping woman would have been associated with grief, or with supplication, or perhaps with gratitude.

Jesus accepts her actions—and he interprets them—as love. He tells his little parable to Simon, he holds her up as a model of hospitality—and then he sums it all up by telling Simon that her sins, which were many, were forgiven—hence her great love. Her act of love flowed from her acceptance of God’s forgiveness. Living as a forgiven person she lived as a loving person. There is a connection. Maybe it’s related to our prayer when we pray Jesus’ own prayer—forgive us our sins as we forgive others. Maybe there is some kind of channel in us that channels love and forgiveness—and when we accept the fact that we are forgiven we open up the channel inside and are able to forgive others. And maybe our faltering efforts to forgive others open the channel inside so that we accept more and more of God’s forgiveness. I don’t know—but clearly there is no earning it. It just is. Free gift freely given—and the woman --her tears and her let down hair tell us that she knew how much she needed forgiveness. She turned to Jesus and opened herself to him. Maybe you’ve had occasion in your own life to want to do the same. . .

Simon seems to have been unaware that he might have needed forgiveness. He is locked in judgment and really unable to see the woman as anything but a sinner—and God knows we know that place, don’t we?— Mexican, Black, white trash, ex-con, druggie, jock, rich, poor, Republican, Democrat, fundamentalist, liberal, conservativegay, straight, right, wrong, ….. on and on, the labels go. Our lives are filled with labels. We go through life categorizing people and we judge groups of people, forgetting the question Jesus asks: “Do you see this woman?”

Do you dare allow your guard down to enter her truth? Do you dare to blur your straight lined convictions? See the person behind the label?— Do you dare to acknowledge God’s incredible amazing forgiveness at work in even the most ridiculous—the most hopeless of persons?

A few weeks ago I was privileged to participate in a restorative justice training—it was sponsored by the Insight Prison Project that works in San Quentin, (a place filled with people we rarely see at all—rarely think about) and by the Bay Area Women Against Rape an organization that works with women who are the victims of rape and with perpetrators. Both organizations run groups in prisons. The offenders in their programs are men who have committed violent crimes—in these groups, they spend weeks and weeks speaking the truth about their crimes, the truth about what led up to their choices to commit those crimes, the truth about their need to forgive others and to forgive themselves, and about the consequences of their crimes on the survivors of those crimes. All this is to prepare these men to meet face-to-face with a panel of victims/survivors of violent crimes.

These survivors go into a prison and tell their stories—they tell how violent crime entered and affected their lives—they give the details of their experiences—their losses, their grief, their fear, their struggle to go on with life, their depression and anger, the effect on their children. . . It is powerful stuff. They let down their hair, they grieve. They weep- maybe. For the offenders—this may be the first time they have faced the truth of what actions like the ones they took themselves cost the survivors. It is hard to describe what happens in that room.

But it is not over yet. The next time they meet, the offenders tell their stories. They describe their actions, tell why they made the choices they made, tell about their families of origin, their pain and grief, They take responsibility for their crimes. Sometimes they tell about how they wish they could be forgiven—how they wish they could forgive themselves. They are like the woman—they let down their hair and weep –the men grieve the enormity of their sins and for the truth of their longing to be forgiven.

“Do you see this woman?” this man? Do you see these human persons we label survivors? Do you see these human persons we label offenders? “Do you?”

These are people who have dared to cross one of the most indelible boundaries in our society to dive deeply below the surface of our categories. They have done the hard and risky work of letting their hair down—they have wept and wailed. They know their need for love and for forgiveness—they know that—whether they are able to give it or receive it yet or not. They know that their capacity to love is somehow tied up with their capacity to accept forgiveness and give it. They understand that. And, so do we.

We followers of Christ are called to accept the forgiveness so freely given. We are called to live into forgiveness—to be transformed by it. We are meant to be loving persons, to find the courage to see the woman. To see one another. To see those we have judged to be “other,” to remember those in prison, and those still struggling to survive. This is who we are. Forgiveness is the great gift—it is ours to accept and live into. Thanks be to God. Amen.

Sermon June 10, 2007

I Kings 17:17-24, Luke 7:11-17

This week I officiated at two burials here—each of a young man who died too early . . Earlier this week when I went into his office to tell Fr. Matt that a parishioner had learned that cancer had returned, he threw his body back in his chair and groaned. We are a people challenged to live with cancer more and more every day. . . . In the middle of the week, a woman in our community talked with me about a her neighbors, both very elderly, one with Alzheimer’s—the other trying to take care of him, and beginning to be physically unable to do so—what to do that would be helpful? . . . Then, on Friday, as has become my custom, I spent time on the computer downloading the names of the American soldiers killed in Iraq during the past week. Young men, and sometimes women, in their late teens, twenties and thirties—dead. I pray as I go with that list, and I think of the unnamed who have died by violence there and elsewhere—even those on the streets of our cities. Death is all about us—and within us. I stand with the grieving widow. I weep.

In this morning’s gospel Jesus comes up on a burial procession. And, when I hear of his raising the young man from the dead I can’t help but wish that he’d been here to raise those two young men whose lives we celebrated here. And all the dead in Iraq. I can’t help but wonder if that power of bringing life from death is still with us. I can’t help longing for death to be undone—here right now, in this place at this time. I get stuck there. In my grief about the state of our world and in my longing for new life. This is a faithful place tobe.

Because this story is about God’s power for new life turning up in just that moment of grief and longing--in the most surprising places—and it’s about the compassion of God. I suspect Luke tells the story more to tell us about Jesus’ compassion than about anything else. And it gives us a taste of what is to come in Jesus’ own living and dying and rising to new life, too.

The widow is weeping. Tears of grief, no doubt for her son—his life seemingly cut short—weeping for all the things he never would get to do—weeping for the person he would never have a chance to become—and truth be told she was probably weeping for herself as well. For as a widow with no son, she finds herself in desperate circumstance—no source of support. Her future is bleak. She grieves her losses. She protests.

And Jesus, had compassion for her. He felt her pain deep inside himself. In his guts, really—to the depths of his heart. The word for compassion has its roots in the word “womb.” Inside he feels her pain. And that feeling of compassion drives him to act—to bring new life. And he does this you’ll see with no direct request from her really, no sign of faith on her part. I take comfort in this. He kind of just inserts himself into the scene—tells her “do not keep on weeping. And he crosses a purity boundary by reaching out to touch the bier—telling the young man to rise—(and then, our text harkens back to the story of Elijah)—Jesus gives the son to his mother.

Elijah too had crossed boundaries. Just before this morning’s portion of the story, he’d gone to this foreign widow for food. God had told him to do this, and he went—and the widow having only a handful of meal for herself and her son had shared that with him—and that handful of meal had fed them all for weeks and weeks. A strange little story, stretching our understanding of who our neighbor is—a foreigner who turns out to be the channel of God's provision. And, then later, we read how Elijah’s own compassion moves him to act—he prays to God from the same feelings the widow expresses in her grief—and then he gives her dead son back to her alive. It’s when he does that that she tells him she finally knows he is a man of God—his words match his actions. The word of new life—the word of the Lord in his mouth is the word of truth.

The thing about compassion is that it brings us together. It’s that simple. You can’t have compassion for someone without drawing close to them. Think about it. Compassion opens our hearts to another—it carries us across the boundaries that separate us. It involves us in knowing another—knowing the other. When I am compassionate I stand with. I am present to. My insides are touched. I am no longer detached, analytical, remote. The other person is real. I listen. I receive. You know about this in your own life.

I’ve been carried by compassion into many wonderful relationships. Last year on the retreat for the women of the living room—those of us providing leadership spent hours really at meals listening, sharing, getting to know—our hearts were opened to one another—all of us women, telling our stories, sharing our truth, knowing our compassion for one another. There was new life where there had been none before.

Last Sunday a woman greeted me at the door at the end of the service with tears in her eyes. She told me she weeps every time we read the names of the dead in Iraq. One of the reasons we read the names of the dead soldiers in Iraq is so that we might open our hearts to them—to the reality of all the dead in Iraq—and else where. Perhaps your compassion for them and for their families began when young men from our county began dying there. Maybe from that start, you’ve found your heart gradually opening more and more to the truth of the cost of this war—to the cost of war period. If you are my age, you have perhaps lost loved ones to other wars in our history. Wars cost lives and lives matter. It is right to grieve.

The widow’s grief is so very important. It’s a powerful statement that something is wrong. Things are not as they should be. And crying and being heard are at the heart of our faith. God heard the cry of the people in slavery in Egypt. Their hearts were breaking and so was God’s. Sometimes we are called to stand with the one who cries and accept the gift of their tears—which may be the only gift they have to give. And, what a gift it is. For the gift of new life flows through the tears—the weeping is a protest—death should not have the final say. Our lives so burdened with the fear of death—the threat of death—are meant for more. Our tears open us to receive the gift of new life.

The powers that be prefer that we not have compassion. Prefer that we are detached from the pain of life. Prefer that we live only in young beautiful, usually thin, bodies. Prefer that we live as voyeurs—watching others lives—but not getting involved. Prefer that we are numb to reality. Think of how numb we have become. “Business as usual” prefers that we avoid the reality of death but that we remember always the threat of death—that we live our lives out under a kind of cloud of fear. You know about this—threat of terrorism, threat of gang violence, threat of child predators, threats, threats, threats…. all involving people who are other—different from us.

Grief and compassion undermine this deathly order of life. Grief protests that there is more to life than this—grief expresses God’s own broken heart. Compassion opens us to one another—joins us together in unlikely ways—frees us to cross boundaries and to enter the darkness together. Compassion energizes us to dare to risk the unknown—to make friends with the enemy—to live in the truth of our oneness. This happens in places like our own families, neighborhoods, communities, everywhere we find ourselves.

Jesus’ compassion led him to interrupt what was business as usual—just another man dead, just another woman left alone—to respond to the widow’s tears, reach out and touch the bier, proclaim the word of God—the word of life.

Jesus—God with us—God the compassionate one. Compassion is “to be with.” God’s compassion assures us that we are never alone. We may not know young men raised from the dead in quite this way, but we are a people who need not live in fear of death. It does not have the final word. The gift of new life is always with us—coming to us as we grieve the present reality, as we long for new life. Part of our calling as Christians is to grieve and weep—let our hearts be broken—so that we are made one with others and with God.

Jesus died for us—not I think so much to pay for our sins, but to take death into his own person. His compassion took him across even that boundary. God embraces the death that you and I must die and in so doing frees us from the realm of death. By standing with us Jesus enables us to stand with each other. No matter what. That is the great good news. It is the word of life.

**I am informed in my thinking by the work of Walter Brueggeman who has written about the importance of grief and of the numbness to which the prophets speak . I commend his writings to you.

MEDITATION GOOD FRIDAY April 6, 2007

“Now from midday there was darkness over the whole land until 3 in the afternoon.”

An echo perhaps of the 9^th of the plagues sent by God to free the Israelites from their Egyptian masters. In the Book of Exodus: “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand toward heaven so that there my be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be felt.’ So, Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven and there was a dense darkness in all the land of Egypt for three days. People could not see one another and for three days they could not move from where they were…”

Mired in dense darkness, unable to move. He hangs from the cross, unable to move from where he is. . . .The women stand at a distance daring to look up from time to time. Hardly breathing. Terrified. In shock. Unable to move from where they were. . . . The alcoholic sitting alone except for his drink—his loved ones no longer able or willing to stand by him. The addict seeing the police car, telling her children, ages 4 and 5, “Run, run and hide,” lest she lose them again to foster care. She too takes off running—flying down the alley. But, she is stuck. Stuck in darkness unable to move. . . . Warring nations, young soldiers sent time and again, young men and women taught to make of themselves a bomb for killing others. Threats. Reprisals. Nothing new. Mired in dense darkness, unable to move. It is midday and darkness covers the land.

The people could not see one another. The soldiers mocking, striking, spitting, hitting, ridiculing, punishing, stripping him bare. Men unable to see him for who he is. Even the two on crosses beside him. Reviling him. Deriding him. These people could not see one another. . . . Children in the school yard teasing, sarcastic, bullying, rejecting. Prison guards in Abu Grave, Guantanamo, men on horseback in Darfur. Two men knock one night at the door of a home in Baghdad, a father and young son answer. Islamic hospitality. They ask for water. While the father goes to get it, they raise their guns and shoot the child. They cannot see the boy for who he is. . . . I drive my car along the road, avert my eyes from the one who is poor, the beggar, the one who staggers in broad daylight and falls in a drunken heap. I cannot—will not—see. It is midday and darkness covers the land.

An echo perhaps of the prophet Amos who describes the day of judgment when God is tired of leaders who trample the needy and bring ruin to the poor, tired of those who practice deceit and care only for themselves. “The songs of the temple shall become wailings in that day, says the Lord God. . . . On that day I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight. I will turn your feasts into mourning and all your songs into lamentation.”

The Roman governors on behalf of their king, taxing, taking, grabbin, laying burdens on the poor. Their collaborators, local leaders selling out for their own gain, or perhaps just to keep the peace, not make waves. It’s so easy to be a collaborator. Together they react to the threat posed by this man who proclaims his allegiance to a different King. . . .The darkness of those who seek only after their own wealth and comfort—and can never grasp enough to satisfy. The emptiness after the acquisition of more possessions. Stuffed but empty. The darkness of failing to notice that my own comfort is built on the despair of others. The darkness of my own complicity in destructive systems. Caught as we are in the mire of consumerism—bigger wants, grander desires, our unwillingness to make choices to change. . . . The darkness of those who have known their own betrayal of their best selves. Later when the college student looked back on it, he was shocked really—he was so sure of his ethical convictions when he agreed to be a part of the university experiment—the peer pressure of the group, its culture. . . within a few hours he had become someone he hardly knew—using his power to abuse others, and taking delight in it.

The darkness of the earth in broad daylight. Jesus hangs on the cross—near death. The dense darkness of the mass graves in Poland, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Cherokee trail of tears from Tennessee to Oklahoma. . . . The darkness of death. A darkness well-known to those who have fought on battle fields, journeyed with loved ones, or lived on the streets.

The darkness of grief. Feasts turned into mourning. Songs into lamentations. The wailing of the women of Jerusalem. Peter’s tears. Grief a measure of the loss. . . . The darkness of the first night spent in the house alone after his death. The darkness of emptiness and of wandering aimlessly around touching objects that serve only as reminders of life that once was. The darkness of not knowing what may lie ahead.

“Now from midday there was darkness over the whole land until 3 in the afternoon.”

Jesus cries out, “My God my God why have you forsaken me?” And haven’t we too cried out? Time and again, as darkness has covered our world, our lives, even our very own our selves. As we have come to know the darkness within. Those occasions when we have dared to enter the darkness of our own selves—armed with a flashlight perhaps and filled with anxiety. That overwhelming sense of aloneness—of the absence of God. Our deadness of spirit. Our stuckness. Our wishing for rescue and finding none. “My God my God why have you forsaken me?”

Thank God for that cry. For almost more than anything it assures us that in spite of our sense of abandonment—in fact we are not alone. Jesus the dying man—soon to be dead man—is with us. In the darkness of being stuck. The darkness of complicity and betrayal. The darkness of grief and loss—of all the letting goes. Of blindness and of failure to love. In the darkness of death itself.

There is more to darkness than meets the eye. As the psalmist reminds us: “Darkness and light are both alike to God.” We are not alone.

SERMON MAUNDY THURSDAY April 5, 2007

Jesus gathers with his friends to share a meal against the backdrop of the Passover. “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us,” we say, “therefore let us keep the feast.”

And so some words about sacrifice and Passover from a vegetarian—what better source? The Old Testament is filled with stories of sacrifices made to God. And in Jesus’ day the custom of making sacrificial offerings to the Holy One continued.

We who get our food in grocery stores, generally pre-packaged… we who live closely mostly to cats and dogs and perhaps a parakeet or two—none of which we generally consider eating—we tend perhaps to draw back in distaste at the very mention of such sacrifices. But for a people who lived on the land and knew that there was no eating or feasting without the killing of an animal—for a person who longed to solidify or celebrate or repair a relationship with God—the offering of the best—the first fruits of the land—food or animal made sense. Certainly as much sense as our offerings of money in the plate on a Sunday morning.

Marcus Borg reminds us that the sacrifice—the word comes from the Latin “to make something sacred”—the sacrifice typically was a gift or a meal. As a gift the animal or crop would be burned as an offering to God—to celebrate the blessings of God perhaps, or to express a person’s loyalty to God. The gift sacrifice is a recognition of God’s sovereignty and is made is gratitude.

The meal sacrifice is one in which the blood of an animal was poured over the altar as an offering to God and then the animal was returned to the family for a meal—a meal shared with God. The Passover sacrifice in the Exodus is such an offering. Only in this instance the blood was put on the doorposts of the house as a sign to the plague of death that was coming over Egypt to passover. The meal of lamb was to be eaten immediately with unleavened bread and bitter herbs and the people were to gird their loins, don their sandals and prepare for the journey.

Oh, the heavy-laden mystery of the Last Supper the meal we call the Eucharist… Jesus takes the bread and gives thanks for it, breaks it and gives it to his friends. After supper he takes the cup and tells them that it is full of his blood—the blood of the new covenant. As often as you drink it, do this in remembrance of me.

And oh the meals we remember when we hear these words. Meals of the past: The Passover meal—eaten hurriedly—strength for the journey. Manna in the wilderness. The many meals that Jesus shared with that motley crew of folks he seemed always to draw to the table—rich and poor, powerful and powerless, high-society, and the low, educated and not, sinners all perhaps, though not all aware of their condition. No one turned away—everyone invited. A Jesus meal. And, then oh, yes, the feeding of the five thousand, where he’d earlier taken bread, blessed and broken and given it to his friends to distribute to everyone who was hungry.

Meals of the future. Those bounteous tables set for the people of God when the reign of God is exercised to its fullest. Those celebrations, like the wedding feast or the banquet for the prodigal son, that are a foretaste of that heavenly banquet where no one is turned away, and there is more than enough for everyone. Joy and Plenty. Justice and Mercy.

And meals for the present. Just as in the gathering of the family for the Passover meal—when everyone comes together not just to remember the past—but somehow mysteriously to be present to it. To be a slave, to put the blood on the doorposts, eat the meal, scurry to prepare for the journey to freedom. The past is made present in the meal. And for us at the Eucharist—this is not just some sweet or perhaps poignant remembrance of the past—Jesus with his friends just before his death. This is thanksgiving in the here and now. This is the offering of our thanks. This is the sacrificial offering of as one of our prayers puts it of “ourselves, our souls and bodies” to God. Here is the gift we have to bring. May we be made sacred. May this eating and drinking of the body and the blood, the bread and the wine transform us ever more deeply into your people.

We dare not come to this meal thinking of it as a simple remembrance. It is a meal for the journey. We dare not come to this time in Holy Week imagining only that Jesus’ sacrifice is some kind of substitutional offering for us and our sins. Jesus invites us instead to remember him. Remember him. Re-member him perhaps. Follow him, incarnate him, eat and drink him, be one with him.

The way Jesus took the bread and then the wine. The way he took them, blessed them and shared them. This is about his life. No doubt about it. Remember him. His taking up of life to the fullest, deepest, his giving thanks for it, his living his life as a gift, not to be grasped, but to honor the giver. His breaking—those letting goes, those relinquishings, those countless times he withheld using his power, his giving way to the place and need of another. His giving of himself—in his teaching, and healing, in his journeying with, in his daring to set his face toward Jerusalem, in his speaking the truth to power. Remember him. This is about his life and it is about our lives. Remember him.

This is about his death. No doubt about it. And it is about our own. Remember him. Follow me. Not I’m here to substitute for you. But follow me. On the path to transformation that comes from taking up your life, knowing that it is pure gift, entering the brokenness—knowing your limits, finding life in letting go, in dying to self and giving way. This is the path that calls us to die to the ways of our world—to the conventions of our day. It calls us in large ways and small to stand up to the powers that be whose ways are those of a different kind of death. “When Christ calls a man,” said Bonhoeffer, “he bids him come and die.” Perhaps literally sometimes, as in Bonhoeffer’s case, but truthfully always—as we follow the descending path of growing up into the fullness of who we were created to be. Remember him. This is about his dying and our dying. Remember him.

And so, we come here to eat and drink. And to serve, reminded in this simple footwashing of Christ’s call to follow him as those who serve. As those who die by turning our eyes from self to another. From looking down at others, to gazing up at them.

We pause on the eve of the Friday we call Good. To reflect on our own living and dying. On our own following of Christ. We pause to share a meal—to keep the feast. The feast is both gift and meal. To keep the feast is to offer a sacrifice. To be fed for the journey. “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us,” we say, “therefore let us keep the feast.” May it be so. Amen.

ASH WEDNESDAY --St. George's, New Orleans

Ash Wednesday 2007 Homily preached at St George’s Episcopal Church New Orleans, LA

Of course! it would rain. On the day we move from carnival and partying to these Ash Wednesday lessons—this focus on our sins and limits. Joel’s depiction of the end times ending—the day of darkness and gloom. I can only think that there is a part ofyou that feels like Lent is a return to business as usual in New Orleans—after the brief respite of Mardi Gras. This return to the place where hearts and garments both have been rent—torn apart. Here in New Orleans where just about everything has been torn apart… Yet it is the wisdom of the church year that we once again enter the season of Lent. Lent developed in the early church as the culminating season of preparation for the catechumens—those people who would join the community through baptism at the Easter Vigil. After three years of prayer and learning and ministry, these adults would be baptized and marked as Christ’s own forever—just as you and I have been. This was also a time when people who had committed what our prayer book calls “notorious sins” were reconciled to their community of faith—welcomed back—where a healing of broken relationships took place. Lent then was a time of preparation for new life—for a healing of relationships with one another and with God. This is heavy—important stuff. We begin the season with ashes: Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return. The ashes of our mortality—our fragility. The ashes that remind us that we will die. Underneath all our human accomplishments, our gifts, our ability to make things happen, our incredible capacity to persevere: we are mortal. We will die. There are limits. New Orleans is a City of Ashes. Its people know the truth of the ashes—know about fragility and brokenness—know about limits and death. Here in New Orleans we can wonder if there is a need for a season of Lent. The somber disciplines of Lent, the lamentations and contritions of Lent. Here in New Orleans it seems as though the exhaustion, frustration, grief and depression of a people, called to face insurmountable challenges and loss would perhaps be enough. 18 months of Lent would be enough. The Lenten disciplines of preparation: almsgiving, prayer and fasting might seem irrelevant in the face of the giving and giving up already going on—in the face of the deathliness already here. But, the ashes mean much more than just our mortality and our penitence—our dust to dust, ashes to ashes endings. The ashes strangely are about our beginning. The ashes are about our oneness, our unity, our common humanity. The ashes are about our creation—about God’s breathing God’s sacred breath into the dust of the earth to bring us into being. the ashes are about life where there was none—about God’s continuing creative spirit at work in the dust of our lives. The ashes on our foreheads are a powerful reminder to us of our untiy with each other and with all the rest of God’s creation. Scientists today remind us as they study the universe that the stars came into being out of what we might call quantum dust. And out of stardust or ash came what we call the primal elements. And out of those elements came the rocks—the dust of the earth. You and I are made of the same stuff. Dust seems to be all that God needs to make life. The ashes on our foreheads are signs then to us of our part in this intricate web of life filled with God’s energy in and beyond it. We are made for unity. Made for relationship with one another and with God and in some mystical way perhaps with all of creation. The dance of life is all about relationship and connection. What could be more important than to remember who we are and what we are made of? What could be more important than to give thanks for the sheer gift of life and for God’s grace—God’s mystical energy at work even now within us and between us and around us bringing us together and into new life? All that God needs it seems, is the dust. Susan took us Californians on a tour of some of the most devastated areas of the city, filling our eyes with the emptiness and our hearts with the brokenness. We stopped to visit her grandparent’s old home and looked into the gutted house—from the back door to the front: emptiness—only the studs left. All the possessions, all of the clutter of our lives, gone. Emptiness. What a Lenten image: that gutted house. Often the disciplines of Lent are meant to strip us bare of the clutter of our lives, trim us down, open us up, create space inside us so that there will be room for God’s creative energy to enter. Hence the giving up or giving away that often becomes trivialized or minimized. The almsgiving—giving of our wealth, perhaps our time, our attention, our presence—to others. Giving away, practice in letting go—unclenching our grip. Giving away—turning our attention to others, losing our self-focus and self-preoccupation. Prayer, turning to God. Matthew’s Jesus urging us to pray in secret—to turn to our inner self—to open our inner selves to relationship with God. To be emptied perhaps of our outer persona—the masks we wear—to be present to God in the truth of who we are—our dusty fragile selves. Fasting—abstaining from food that fills us up—stuffing us to the gills—leaving no room for newness. To fast is to create space—fast from food—feel in your body your hunger for God. Fast from television—from noise—from shopping—from complaining—fast from busyness—from worry. It’s all about disrupting our ordinary patterns that so often leave us numb. It’s about creating room inside us for God’s truth to enter in—or be perceived perhaps by us. Be noticed. Be attended to. To be empty—to be a gutted house is a dangerous thing. To be in that place of vulnerability—knowing my fragility, my longing for relationship—for community. This is a hard place to be—almost unbearable. So when I’m there—gutted out—knowing my fragility, my temptation is to fill up again, quickly. . . with whatever food, activity, emotions, hard work, escape. . .I can find. Perhaps this Lent, here in this place, the spiritual task or calling is not so much about emptying—that has already happened. But it is about turning in emptiness to receive the gift of new life. It’s not so much about focusing on my sins, my acts of sin, both individual and corporate, but it is about recognizing and giving thanks for God’s grace in my life that transforms and redeems me—that enters the emptiness and dust and makes us new. Rather than doing more—to cover the vast emptiness that is me, this may be the Lent to sit in silence and offer the frazzled, exhausted truth of myself to God. Experienced meditators often say that meditation is really about sitting in the truth of our scattered thoughts and returning time and again to God. It’s about the offering of ourselves to God. Sometimes in my morning meditation I have to do that a thousand times—my mind wanders so. It is the turning—the offering to God—that is transformative. Let the ashes remind us then: not only of our limits and mortality, not only of our sins and losses. . . but especially of God’s creative grace that brings new life where there is only dust. And in whose web of energizing breath we are made one. All it takes is dust. Amen

--Patricia Moore

SERMON 4 LENT 3.18.,07

Joshua 5:9-12, Psalm 32, 2 Corinthians 5:16-21, Luke 15:1-3, 1b1-35

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation, everything old has passed away; see everything has become new.” Beautiful words these. Words that in a sense sum up our faith. Words that could be said over the baptismal waters as the person being baptized rises out of the water, cleansed and made new.

And yet, in all honesty I sometimes wonder if we’ve been made new, how come we spend so much time wandering around in a distant land feeding pigs?

Why is it that the parable of the prodigal—perhaps the most well-known of all parables, why is it that this beautiful parable is all about death?—all about death. It begins with the younger son asking for his inheritance—in a sense—proclaiming that his father is a dead man. The Father accepts his own death—prematurely though it may seem—he divides his estate between his two sons. He is legally dead. The younger one goes off to the distant land—the place of exile perhaps, in any case the place of estrangement from home. The place of separation. You’ve probably been there. I certainly have. No cell phones. East of Eden, the Jews in exile. The son is self-focused and self-indulgent—he does whatever he does and ends up dead. Ends up in the pig sty feeding slop to the pigs and recognizing his hunger and his poverty, he imagines going back home this time as a servant—not a son. But of course, he is a son. And really he’s a dead son. He doesn’t fully grasp that until he is embraced in the arms of his dead Father who throwing all convention to the wind races down the road to welcome him. In that embrace of dead father to dead son, the son knows the truth of his death. “Father, I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” . . . So the dead father invites the whole village into a homecoming party for his dead son.

Then we hear from the older brother—not self-indulgent like the younger one—but self-righteous I guess we would say. The one who imagines that his righteousness comes from himself—his own behavior. He refuses the invitation to party and can only think of how mistreated he has been by the father. “I have been working like a slave for you…and yet you’ve never given me even a young goat to celebrate over with my friends.” Woe is me. I can only imagine the dead father’s surprise--after all he’d already given this son his portion of the estate. “Son, you are always with me and all that is mine is yours.” The older brother is as dead as the younger brother and the father. He just doesn’t recognize his condition. He is stuck in earning, deserving, and being worthy. He is stuck in not dying.

We don’t know what happens next.

So much death. Paul says, “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation, everything old has passed away; see everything has become new.” Then he says, “All this from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.”

It’s possible that when you hear that line about God’s reconciling with us through Christ what you think of is Jesus on the cross, dying—and maybe what you think of next is that traditional idea that somehow God needed a sacrificial lamb—some kind of blood offering—to be reconciled with humanity. That understanding of Jesus’ death is prevalent in our world and in much of the history of the church.

But I wonder about reconciliation. What is it anyhow? When in your life have you been reconciled? Have you carried out a ministry of reconciliation? The dictionary tells us that reconciliation is bringing harmony where there was none. It’s bringing unity where there was separation. So, if Jesus is God reconciling God’s self to humanity then Jesus is bringing us together when we were apart. Closing the chasm between us. Repairing the breech. Realigning things. It’s about being able to talk with your brother or your daughter whom you haven’t spoken to in 20 years. It’s about listening so deeply and respectfully to someone you don’t agree with that finally you really hear the reason for their thinking or their actions. It’s about looking at the person that hurt you and imagining how his mother might have looked at him when he was a baby. It’s about daring to cross the chasm that separates you from another. That’s reconciliation.

How did Jesus bring reconciliation to his world—to our world. I think about the way he ate meals with folks who’d been judged and rejected—who were marginalized. He sat down with them and ate with them. His need to be fed was the same as theirs. They were one in that. He taught about reconciliation—certainly this parable is about that. He reached out to touch and heal. He forgave—even on the cross. Forgiveness is so often at the core of reconciliation—don’t you think? He entered the depths of life—in his body he came to know the pain, the grief, the abandonment, the ambiguities of life. Jesus reconciled us to God in his living—his living the fullness of life as God-with-us—unto death itself.

Jesus is like the father in the parable. On the cross he is dead. And he knows it. He even seems to know his own death before that when he stands silent before the powers that be. Simply silent in the truth of his own self. His own child of God beloved by God self. Maybe the reconciliation of God is through Jesus because in Jesus we know that God’s love will go to any lengths to convince us that we are loved extravagantly—no matter what. We are forgiven not because we deserve it—not because we confess—not because we head for home for any good reason except that were hungry. As Robert Farrar Capon puts it, we’re forgiven because God is the Forgiver. We’re loved because God is the Lover.

Reconciliation requires death. Requires us to let go of something. Requires us to change in some way. Requires us to know our own vulnerability. Reconciliation invites us to journey in Christ. To journey to tables to eat with folks we’d rather not eat with. To draw near to folks we’d rather run from. To face into the truth of our own sinfulness. Only in dying can we be graced into new life.

In a previous lifetime of mine, a good friend told me a story about his own life that I have never forgotten. He was a gay man who when he finally came to terms with his sexuality had gone through a hard divorce and pretty much thought he’d lost his children forever. He was from a faith tradition that viewed both his sexuality and his divorce as sin. He was filled with shame. He was in the distant land—far from home. In the pit of depression he tried to kill himself. Thankfully he did not succeed. As he began to get back on his feet his therapist told him that he simply had to stop living in secrecy—he had to tell his family about his sexuality. He was an only child; he tried to tell his parents, but simply couldn’t. He decided to tell his cousin—his one cousin he’d grown up with. She’d been his closest friend when they were children. As adults they’d drifted apart as his life and her life took them separate ways. She had married a man who abused her physically. The marriage had ended and now she was ill—so ill that my friend couldn’t be sure she would make it. So he drove to tell her his secret—not sure of how she would take it—but feeling like he needed to tell her his truth.

When he got there she was in bed—and he went in and they talked. He sat beside her and after bit he told her what lay behind his suicide attempt. “You tried to kill yourself because you are gay?” She was incredulous. He tried to explain. He talked of his shame. His grief. His losses. Then he blurted out, “You can’t imagine what it’s like to live with a secret like mine.” There was silence. She took his hand and looked him in the eyes. And she told him how ashamed she had been about her marriage, about marrying a man and staying with a man who hit her. How humiliated she’d been. How she kept it a secret so long she’d almost been killed. There was a pause and then she said, “After I left him I found out I was pregnant. I couldn’t bear it--to be connected to him that way. I ended the pregnancy.” Silence. Tears. Reconciliation. Healing. One truth led to another. What had been broken was repaired. The chasm was closed. Two dead people home at last by the grace of God that runs out to embrace us in our truth.

In baptism of course, we sink down and die with Christ. And we are raised to new life. “So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation, everything old has passed away; see everything has become new. All this from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation.” AMEN

Robert Farrar Capon’s three books on the parables are well worth reading—he provokes me to thought every time—even though I don’t always agree with him. Various authors have commented on the death of the father in the prodigal son parable, Capon’s analysis of death in the parable was helpful in my preparation of this sermon.

SERMON February 4, 2007

Isaiah 6:1-13, Psalm 138; 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Luke 5:1-11

I had an epiphany the other day. You know one of those moments when you suddenly behold the world in a new way. One of those times when a new light shines—often on your own self and you see with new eyes—you see with a sudden clarity. My granddaughter and I were just leaving a restaurant in downtown Petaluma—she suddenly pulled my hand and pointed across the restaurant at a man sitting at a table by the window. Her face had a kind of astonished look on it—although she didn’t say anything. I looked over and what I saw was an African American man sitting at the table. That’s what I saw. I looked down at her—a little embarrassed that she was pointing at him. She whispered to me,”Look, Mamaw, there’s a policeman eating here.” What she saw was a uniform. What I saw was the man’s skin color. My eyes were trained to see that way a long time ago. Who says racism is dead in this country? Who says I’m not infected with it? It was a little epiphany—an insight into the truth. A challenge to let go—and enter a new future. It was a light shining in the darkness of myself calling me to new life.

The season of the Epiphany when we celebrate the light of Christ shining in the darkness of the world—is a time to think about our own epiphanies—small and large. Our own moments when the light of Christ shines on us revealing the truth and reorienting us. Revelation involves challenge and change.

In today’s lessons God’s light falls on 3 men and they are never the same again. All three are humbled as they encounter the power and the mystery of God. We start with Isaiah the prophet—who spoke to the political realities of his day—a world of displacement and devastation when the powers that be destroy Jerusalem, drive the people into exile, and then, finally, there is a promise new beginnings. Isaiah has a vision of God so powerful, so indescribable really, that the closest he can come to words is to say that the hem of God’s robe filled the entire temple.

In the face of God’s majesty—the words of the seraphs praise: “Holy holy holy” echo even today in our own words at the Eucharist—Isaiah describes himself as tiny, lost, a man of unclean lips amidst a people of the same kind. God’s otherness, God’s holiness, God’s glory reveal the smallness—the lostness—of the man Isaiah.

And then with fire, a seraph cleanses Isaiah and pronounces that he is forgiven. Isaiah overhears God asking, ”Whom should I send?” He blurts out, ”Here am I. Send me.” And that’s where we usually end the lesson—but not this morning. . .

This morning we hear the awful commission of Isaiah by God to a thankless and incredibly painful task—he’s to speak to the people in ways that will actually keep them from repenting and being healed. Isaiah is called by God to be an agent of judgment—to speak to God’s people who have remained steadfastly resistant to God’s call. Not only will his words fall on deaf ears, but God seems to have given up on the people and decided to leave them to their own devices—to the crushing results of their having shut down— to their refusal to see and to hear. Isaiah can hardly stand it. He asks, ”How long must I do this?”

God’s response is not encouraging—“do it until there is nothing left, Isaiah. Do it until the land is utterly desolate and there is a vast emptiness. Everything burned.”

These are not words I want to hear on a Sunday morning or ever, really. These words expressing God’s frustration and giving up almost on the people of God. God sending his prophet to add to the numbing of the people—to encourage them in the path they have already clearly chosen.

Poor Isaiah. Poor Isaiah’s people. The people of God. The only word of possibility comes at the end of the passage. In describing the stump that is left, God proclaims that the holy seed is in the stump.

This passage reminds me of how stumped we get in our EFM class some Monday nights when we are reading some of the Old Testament passages. It makes me think of how much I like to skip over Good Friday to get to Easter morning.

The only sense I make of it in my own experience is that there have been times in my life when I had to bottom out—I seemed to have to go the absolute end of the path I had chosen—to its depths, its pain, its loss—the fire of it—before I could experience new life. I had to lose all and give up all before I could turn around—turn toward God for the seed of new life to begin to sprout.

It’s discomforting to think that God might have actually encouraged me along this path—helping me to reach bottom—numbing me so that I wouldn’t choose new life before I hit bottom. I don’t know. But it gives me pause as I consider the ways in which I personally, and we nationally might be numbing out to God’s option.

And then there’s Paul and Peter. They had epiphanies, too: one was on a road to Damascus and the other was in a fishing boat. God can come to us anywhere, any time, any place. In the ordinariness of life. In a restaurant.

Peter in the boat after a night of fruitless fishing. Or fish-less fishing I guess. And then with Jesus in the boat he and his friends are overwhelmed with fish. Their nets just about bursting with abundance. Something in that moment led Peter to fall down on his knees and proclaim his unworthiness. There is no earning, no deserving. All the other fishermen hauling in the catch go about their business—perhaps thankful, perhaps amazed. Only Peter falls to his knees in the truth of his humility. Like Paul who knows himself to be the “least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle,” Peter tells Jesus to distance himself from him. He is not worthy. What do you suppose Peter saw that the other men didn’t see? What glimpse did he get of the divine—of the God who knocked Paul off his high horse of righteousness, and Isaiah to the truth of his limits?

Whatever he saw—whatever the others maybe sensed—the story ends with them leaving everything and following Jesus. Following the one who had blown open their ordinary lives and who invited them into an open future. Business as usual—professional expertise hadn’t gotten them anywhere—but Jesus showed them that right in their midst—in the ordinariness of their days—there was goodness and abundance and fullness of life they hadn’t imagined—and off they went into the future—into God only knows what—trusting this light that had suddenly lit up their lives.

Now you and I in our ordinary days find it hard sometimes to find any flickering light—the numbness of business as usual is so overwhelming that we don’t hear, don’t see, don’t think or imagine, don’t even smell the possibilities of the new thing God is doing—the new thing we are called to be a part of—the new open-ended future that beckons. Sometimes all we can focus on is the past—all we can feel in the present is the emptiness—or the fire that burns—and we lose hope. Our children keep making lousy choices, our friends are ill, our church is falling apart, our government is carrying us to desolate places. All is lost and woe are we. That God might be at work in all of this seems impossible to trust.

You’ll have noticed that none of those chosen by God to take part in the mysterious workings of God is really the kind of person you would have chosen. None is of presidential caliber. None is the kind of person who did well on his SATs or the kind of person you’d want your daughter to marry. They are all in their own ways failures—or worse—even after they catch a glimpse of God they aren’t pillars of righteousness. Peter, as we know, failed again and again.

But God calls and transforms them. They take tiny steps or big ridiculous leaps of trust and they become part of God’s working. God’s mysterious workings among us. They lean into the new possibilities. They trust themselves to God’s future.

There is no excuse. Really. No manner of sin or unclean lips. Self-righteousness, ignorance, victimization… Not even persecution of the faithful can get you off the hook.

Have you had any epiphanies recently? Any moments in a restaurant? Any conversations with a friend? Any invitations to let go of your old self and move into the open-ended future of God? Any possibility for making amends, or speaking the truth in love, or forgiving, or encouraging, or calling even the most recalcitrant to new life? Has any light shined on you and called you to be more than you thought you could be—or more than you wanted to risk being? Is God calling us at Incarnation out of comfort into newness?

It is the season of Epiphany which is not to say that God will only disrupt our lives in this time of the year—nevertheless you might keep and eye opened, and ear tuned, a mind alerted, and hand ungrasped. You and I are no more unclean than Isaiah, no more unworthy than Paul, no more a sinner than Peter. Pay attention. The Holy One is in our Midst. You can expect to be reoriented. Revelation means change. Thanks be to God.

SERMON 2 Epiphany 1/14/2007

[THE GOSPEL STORY WAS TOLD INSTEAD OF READ John 2.1-11] One day Jesus and his mother and his friends go to a wedding in Cana of Galilee. Cana is a little peasant village—and weddings are big deals in Cana and in most such villages in Jesus day. A wedding brings together two families and a wedding is a sign of promise—hope that the community is going to continue and be strengthened. A wedding is an occasion of joy and feasting. Usually eating in the village is a kind of meager and boring event—making do with whatever you can get together. But, at a wedding, the party and feasting usually goes on for a whole week, and there is every kind of food and wine and there’s lots of dancing and singing. And there is worship. In fact a wedding is a time when you expect to encounter God in the joy and the blessing. At the door you dip your hands in the water of purification to prepare yourself for that meeting with the divine. You get ready—as ready as you can-- given who you are—to meet God—at the wedding. A few days into the party while Jesus is talking with his friends, his mother comes up to him and in that voice she says, ”They have no wine.” You know that tone of voice. . . the one that no matter what the actual words are--means, “”you--do something! “Woman, what’s that to you or me?” . . .To make his point, Jesus whips out his Blackberry and takes a look at his calendar. “My hour has not yet come.” . . . Then in that way she has, she just turns to the servants and says, ”Do whatever he tells you,” and she walks away. mothers… This is not what he has in mind. He has a plan and this isn’t it. But, of course, he looks around, and notices for the first time that the jars for the rites of purification are large—huge even for this village crowd. Water for the rite of purification really doesn’t have to be that much—enough would be more like the holy water we have at the doorways here—where a little dab will do you. Oh, well, he shrugs to himself mostly. Maybe this is you-know-whose timing. “Not my timing but yours be done,” he mutters under his breath. “Fill the jars with water,” he says to the servants. He stares right back at them as they fix their doubting eyes on him. “Go on.” And, so they do as they are told—with only a few remarks. And maybe with a bit of a rebellious spirit they fill those jugs to the tippy-top. “Draw some out and take it to the wine steward.” They do. [The water has become wine]; the steward tastes it and this is what he says, in a loud, “I’m a big deal kind of person” voice, ”People usually serve the best wine at the beginning of a feast—like on the first day—and then as the party gets wilder and wilder they serve the bad stuff—when no one will really notice. But you have saved the best until now. . . .Like Amazing! No one except Jesus, his friends, and the servants know where all that wine comes from—and oh, yes, his mother… she knows. For them, right there at that little peasant wedding, they catch a glimpse of the glory of God. Right there. Even his mother sees it. THIS IS THE GOSPEL OF THE LORD. What a story. John is careful to tell us its not a miracle story, it’s the story of Jesus’ first sign. A sign is something like an ambulance siren or police lights flashing—a sign isn’t the real thing, but it points to the real thing. It points to the deep thing—the true thing. This is Jesus’ first sign—it points to God. And it happens at a wedding. Weddings are big deals—even today they are. People cry at weddings. Sometimes I think they are crying for grief—losses in their own lives—dreams that have died, relationships gone south, times in their own lives when they haven’t lived up to their promises. Sometimes they are crying out of joy—and hope—hope that the couple—two people can really live out their vows over time—and that their love for one another will transform them into more and deeper and truer people than they were before they had lived into that love. Sometimes it’s a mixture of joy and grief—of dreams dashed and hopes for the future. They cry because they feel vulnerable—almost as vulnerable as the couple do when they pronounce their promises in front of their community. Love makes you vulnerable. It does that. People still dance and sing and feast and drink at weddings—to differing degrees and with differing styles—but a wedding is an occasion of joy—and people clap and cry out hurrah! and congratulations! and best wishes! and God bless! And when a wedding is in church with a priest presiding the couple come not only to make their promises in the context of their community, but also to seek God’s blessing on their relationship—on their love. They come in hopes that they will be met by God here. Kind of like we come here on a Sunday morning. Weddings are so laden with emotion that sometimes people involved forget that the occasion is really about celebrating the love of the couple, their commitment to each other, and their wild hope that God will continue to bless their relationship--that God’s love will in fact flow through them to each other and out into the world. Once I once rashly informed God that I would no longer officiate at wedding for anyone under 70 years of age. This occurred after a particularly painful experience I had officiating at a wedding where the groom’s bachelor party seeped into the church and the bride’s mother had a tantrum. I despaired and drew the line. I was about as successful as Jesus was in consulting his Blackberry. Oh, well…I’d forgotten God’s presence in the midst of that very human celebration—God’s blessing in the mess of it all. The truth is that the Old Testament and the New have all kinds of images of marriage and weddings as metaphors describing the relationship between God and people—between God and us. Isaiah is full of dreams for the people that carry them beyond their present reality. He speaks to a forlorn forlorn people who having survived exile and have now returned to their land that seems so barren and forsaken. But, says Isaiah, they are so beloved by God that God will marry their land and rejoice over the people as a groom rejoices over a bride. The people will get a new name --no longer will they be called Forsaken—now they will be My Delight is in Her. My Delight is in You. Kind of like the voice Jesus heard at his baptism isn’t it? “You are my beloved, with you I am well pleased.” This is who we are at the deepest truest level. People in whom God delights. Imagine that if you can. That’s who you are. Weddings and marriages aren’t the only metaphors for God’s loving relationship with people. And marriage isn’t the only model in the Bible or in our lives for deep intimate long-lasting relationship. Our lives are filled with relationships that nurture us and transform us over time in ways that are signs that point to the ways God’s love and grace make us new people. Mothers and their children, fathers and their children, old friendships, partners, grandparents and grandchildren, …my son had a soccer coach who left his loving imprint on the character of the boys he coached, teachers and mentors, the list goes on and on. We are made for relationship and deep loving relationships are places where we learn about the risks, and abundance and steadfastness of God’s love. For surely whatever else this first sign points to it points to the abundance of God’s love and grace. Jesus’ response to his mother’s insistence goes way beyond what she would have expected. 120-to-180 gallons of wine. Fine wine—the finest—the best saved to the last. In John’s gospel “Jesus’ hour”—the one he says is not yet come—is his death. In John’s gospel Jesus’ death on the cross is the point where the glory of God is most clearly visible. The signs throughout the gospel lead us to that moment of glory. Where the enormity of God’s love, God’s loving embrace of humankind takes Jesus to the depths of what it means to be human—takes Jesus to that place of greatest vulnerability—the place of death. There is no place we can go that is not married to God. No place we can go where God is not. No place of scarcity where God’s abundant steadfastness cannot be found. No place of emptiness so deep that it cannot be filled to the brim with God’s love. For John, that is the last and best sign. This sign is just the first. It takes place at a wedding feast. It is noticed only by some. It points to the God of abundance—the God among us—the God of surprises and newness. Because, of course, weddings are new beginnings. The people being married come with their histories of course, they aren’t newborns. But their commitment to one another and to their relationship transforms them and makes them new. They may even take on a new name. It used to be that women in this culture took on the name of their spouses. Today more and more couples are taking on a hyphenated name or a new name entirely. This recognizes that they are entering new territory. I’ve been thinking about that new name. Isaiah tells us our new name is My Delight is in you. Our names are important aren’t they? Our names carry a history and they carry a promise. When my brother died one of my sons chose to take on the name Moore to honor his uncle—so now he’s Christopher Moore Backman. Some of us spend a lifetime trying to live up to our names. Think about being named Martin Luther King. Some of us change our names and pick one that we’d rather live into than the one that was given us. And of course, others give us names too. I wonder what name this community has. –what others call us. This Church of the Incarnation. There have been times when I wanted to change our name to Incarnation Parish—just because its shorter and easier to write on baptismal certificates. We get mail here sometimes to the Church of the ReIncarnation. But what do others call us? Sometimes when I tell people what church I belong to, they say things like, “Oh, I know! That little redwood church on Mendocino.” or “That Cute Little Church on Mendocino.” Some people call us “The Living Room Church.” Maybe part of what Fr. Matt was saying in our ad last week was that we here in this place want to live into the name of “God’s Wild Abundant Transforming Love & Hospitality to All Church.” Maybe that’s the name we’re being invited into. Because here’s the deal. God has given us a new name: My Delight is in You. That’s the kind of name we cannot incarnate, put our flesh around, grow up into, without being transformed into more than we’d ever dreamed we could be. It’s something we may have known when we were infants, but most of us have forgotten how to live as God’s beloved. It’s more than we dare let ourselves imagine. It’s kind of like asking for a case of 2 buck Chuck and getting 180 gallons of Silver Oak cabernet! We come here seeking God’s love, thinking if we’re lucky we’ll eat a tiny wafer, drink a sip of wine, catch a glimpse of glory, get a few sprinkles. . . instead we get a new name. A new beginning. And, the most real of all relationships with the One who says, My Delight is in You. God’s Wild Abundant Transforming Love and Hospitality to All Church.