The First Sunday After Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord Isaiah 42: 1 – 9
Sunday, January 12, 2014 Acts 10: 34 – 43
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 3: 13 - 17
“And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.”
Matthew 3: 16
The heavens are opened in our reading this morning from the gospel of Matthew. The veil between heaven and earth is lifted, and the very Spirit of God is given to Jesus. Jesus comes to be baptized by John and is revealed to be God’s Beloved Son, the bearer of the Spirit of God in the world.
Matthew tells us this Spirit was like a dove, an image we often see in art as we do on our mosaic here at St. Asaph’s. The dove suggests for some commentators, that what our evangelist Matthew had in mind as he narrates the story of Jesus’ baptism is the story of creation. “In the beginning,” we read in Genesis, “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the spirit of God brooded over the face of the waters.” Now as Jesus comes up from the water of baptism, he sees the Spirit of God like a dove coming to rest on him. The same Spirit of God that gave life to all that is, now gives life to a new creation, to Jesus, the beloved Son of God.
If the story of creation is what our evangelist has in mind we would be well to return to that story. In that story, after God creates the heavens and the earth, the seas and the dry land and all that lives within the sea and on the land, God creates human being forming man from the dust of the ground and then blowing into his nostrils the breath of life. This “mud man” is brought to life by the breath or the wind or the Spirit of God, which are all appropriate translations. The same Spirit of God which brooded over the formless void “in the beginning” is now breathed into man, bringing man to life.
We are given two accounts of the creation of humankind in Genesis and in the other account God simply says: “Let us make humankind in our image” and so does. In both accounts, humankind is the climax of creation, a unique creation made in the image of God, brought to life with God’s very own breath.
In the beginning, Genesis tells us God created a beautiful and diverse world filled with all kinds of living things. As the climax of creation, God brought forth human beings and gave them dominion over everything else God had created. The world was good and human beings were given the task of keeping the world good and the means to do so. Human beings were the most noble of all of God’s creature for they alone were made in God’s image. The opening chapters of Genesis exalt human being above everything else in creation, and give human beings the responsibility to care for everything else God has created. Go back and re-read the story of creation lest you begin to think we are “merely human.” To human being was given the very glory of God.
And that glory is what we lost in the fall when human beings preferred the lie of a snake to the wisdom of God. Now, our evangelist Matthew tells us, at Jesus’ baptism, God is creating anew, re-creating human being in the person of Jesus, restoring in Jesus the image of God which we were given but which we gave away. Jesus is the image of God humankind was meant to be. Matthew is making a radical claim. Jesus is the one true human being and only through Jesus can we become truly human.
On this the first Sunday in Epiphany, the season of revelation, what is revealed to us is who we were created to be, creatures made in the image of God, beings brought to life by the very breath of God and made to live as Jesus lived, in harmony with God, ourselves and one another. To confess Jesus as Lord is a confession about ourselves, a confession that while we may believe we are human, we are but a very pale reflection of what God created us to be. To be human is to be like Christ, the bearer of the Spirit of God.
In Christ, the glory of true human being, human being made in the image of God is revealed to us and for us. In Christ, we are brought to life, the life God intended us to have “in the beginning.” This life, truly human life, is God’s gift to us, a blessing, not a curse.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where being human means you are not an animal, vegetable or mineral. What constitutes us as human beings for some is our brain, for others our capacity for language. Few would argue that what makes us human is our unique relationship to God. The story of creation says otherwise. Commenting on that story, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes:
The creature is seen as the one who is entrusted with power and the authority to rule. The text is revolutionary. It presents an inverted view of God, not as the one who reigns by fiat and remoteness, but as the one who governs by gracious self-giving. It also presents an inverted view of humanness. This man and this woman are not the chattel and servants of God, but the agents of God to whom much is given and much is expected.
We were created to be the agents of God. We were created to be like Christ. “In Jesus Christ,” Brueggemann continues, “we are offered a new discernment of who God is and of who humankind is called to be. The striking feature of Jesus is that he did not look after his own interests but always after the interests of others. That is an echo of God’s act of creation. Creation is God’s decision not to look after himself but to focus his energies and purposes on the creation.”
Looking after ourselves is what we do best. To do otherwise is simply “unnatural.” Which is why, from very early on, the church confessed a belief in the Holy Spirit, “God at work in the world,” in the words of the catechism. By the power of the Holy Spirit we are drawn away from ourselves, our needs, our fears, our pre-occupations and into a relationship with God and with others. Alan Jones, former dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco once wrote that the work of the Holy Spirit was all about falling in love, and not with ourselves, but rather with a God who created us to be human, as human as was Christ.
Now, I suppose the thought that we are created to be like Christ is a bit unsettling. It is for me. I am and you are, are we not, “merely” human, not at all like Christ who was fully human and fully divine. But as I re-read the story of creation, I marvel at who we were created to be and what God tasked us to do. I come away wondering if God really believed we mere mortals could shepherd God’s creation. And then I look at Christ and know, whereas I might give up my life for someone I love, I would never give up my life for someone who despised me and that is what Christ did.
Oh, Epiphany! This is the season of revelation and the revelations are, shall we say, revealing. The heavens are opened today and we know a good bit more about God and a good bit more about who we are supposed to be. We, human beings that we are, are far more glorious than we believe, and far more ignoble than we care to think. To us is given the image of God to be for the world God’s agents. And now to us is given the image we were meant to be and he dies a cruel and painful death. Epiphany is the season of revelation and these revelations are hard to bear. May the God of creation who has created us to be God’s agents in the world and given to us the model of true human being give us courage and strength in this season of surprise.
Sunday, January 12, 2014 Acts 10: 34 – 43
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 3: 13 - 17
“And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.”
Matthew 3: 16
The heavens are opened in our reading this morning from the gospel of Matthew. The veil between heaven and earth is lifted, and the very Spirit of God is given to Jesus. Jesus comes to be baptized by John and is revealed to be God’s Beloved Son, the bearer of the Spirit of God in the world.
Matthew tells us this Spirit was like a dove, an image we often see in art as we do on our mosaic here at St. Asaph’s. The dove suggests for some commentators, that what our evangelist Matthew had in mind as he narrates the story of Jesus’ baptism is the story of creation. “In the beginning,” we read in Genesis, “the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the spirit of God brooded over the face of the waters.” Now as Jesus comes up from the water of baptism, he sees the Spirit of God like a dove coming to rest on him. The same Spirit of God that gave life to all that is, now gives life to a new creation, to Jesus, the beloved Son of God.
If the story of creation is what our evangelist has in mind we would be well to return to that story. In that story, after God creates the heavens and the earth, the seas and the dry land and all that lives within the sea and on the land, God creates human being forming man from the dust of the ground and then blowing into his nostrils the breath of life. This “mud man” is brought to life by the breath or the wind or the Spirit of God, which are all appropriate translations. The same Spirit of God which brooded over the formless void “in the beginning” is now breathed into man, bringing man to life.
We are given two accounts of the creation of humankind in Genesis and in the other account God simply says: “Let us make humankind in our image” and so does. In both accounts, humankind is the climax of creation, a unique creation made in the image of God, brought to life with God’s very own breath.
In the beginning, Genesis tells us God created a beautiful and diverse world filled with all kinds of living things. As the climax of creation, God brought forth human beings and gave them dominion over everything else God had created. The world was good and human beings were given the task of keeping the world good and the means to do so. Human beings were the most noble of all of God’s creature for they alone were made in God’s image. The opening chapters of Genesis exalt human being above everything else in creation, and give human beings the responsibility to care for everything else God has created. Go back and re-read the story of creation lest you begin to think we are “merely human.” To human being was given the very glory of God.
And that glory is what we lost in the fall when human beings preferred the lie of a snake to the wisdom of God. Now, our evangelist Matthew tells us, at Jesus’ baptism, God is creating anew, re-creating human being in the person of Jesus, restoring in Jesus the image of God which we were given but which we gave away. Jesus is the image of God humankind was meant to be. Matthew is making a radical claim. Jesus is the one true human being and only through Jesus can we become truly human.
On this the first Sunday in Epiphany, the season of revelation, what is revealed to us is who we were created to be, creatures made in the image of God, beings brought to life by the very breath of God and made to live as Jesus lived, in harmony with God, ourselves and one another. To confess Jesus as Lord is a confession about ourselves, a confession that while we may believe we are human, we are but a very pale reflection of what God created us to be. To be human is to be like Christ, the bearer of the Spirit of God.
In Christ, the glory of true human being, human being made in the image of God is revealed to us and for us. In Christ, we are brought to life, the life God intended us to have “in the beginning.” This life, truly human life, is God’s gift to us, a blessing, not a curse.
Unfortunately, we live in a world where being human means you are not an animal, vegetable or mineral. What constitutes us as human beings for some is our brain, for others our capacity for language. Few would argue that what makes us human is our unique relationship to God. The story of creation says otherwise. Commenting on that story, Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann writes:
The creature is seen as the one who is entrusted with power and the authority to rule. The text is revolutionary. It presents an inverted view of God, not as the one who reigns by fiat and remoteness, but as the one who governs by gracious self-giving. It also presents an inverted view of humanness. This man and this woman are not the chattel and servants of God, but the agents of God to whom much is given and much is expected.
We were created to be the agents of God. We were created to be like Christ. “In Jesus Christ,” Brueggemann continues, “we are offered a new discernment of who God is and of who humankind is called to be. The striking feature of Jesus is that he did not look after his own interests but always after the interests of others. That is an echo of God’s act of creation. Creation is God’s decision not to look after himself but to focus his energies and purposes on the creation.”
Looking after ourselves is what we do best. To do otherwise is simply “unnatural.” Which is why, from very early on, the church confessed a belief in the Holy Spirit, “God at work in the world,” in the words of the catechism. By the power of the Holy Spirit we are drawn away from ourselves, our needs, our fears, our pre-occupations and into a relationship with God and with others. Alan Jones, former dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco once wrote that the work of the Holy Spirit was all about falling in love, and not with ourselves, but rather with a God who created us to be human, as human as was Christ.
Now, I suppose the thought that we are created to be like Christ is a bit unsettling. It is for me. I am and you are, are we not, “merely” human, not at all like Christ who was fully human and fully divine. But as I re-read the story of creation, I marvel at who we were created to be and what God tasked us to do. I come away wondering if God really believed we mere mortals could shepherd God’s creation. And then I look at Christ and know, whereas I might give up my life for someone I love, I would never give up my life for someone who despised me and that is what Christ did.
Oh, Epiphany! This is the season of revelation and the revelations are, shall we say, revealing. The heavens are opened today and we know a good bit more about God and a good bit more about who we are supposed to be. We, human beings that we are, are far more glorious than we believe, and far more ignoble than we care to think. To us is given the image of God to be for the world God’s agents. And now to us is given the image we were meant to be and he dies a cruel and painful death. Epiphany is the season of revelation and these revelations are hard to bear. May the God of creation who has created us to be God’s agents in the world and given to us the model of true human being give us courage and strength in this season of surprise.
The Second Sunday after the Epiphany Isaiah 49: 1 – 7
Sunday, January 19, 2014 I Corinthians 1: 1 – 9
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 1: 29 - 42
The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”
John 1: 35 – 36
We hear this morning from the gospel according to John. The gospel according to John is different from the gospels according to Matthew, Mark and Luke. Matthew, Mark and Luke sound a bit more historical, even though none of our four gospels are eyewitness accounts, and all were written at least a generation after the resurrection. Yet, Matthew, Mark and Luke all sound like a history of the life of Jesus - his birth, ministry, death and resurrection.
The gospel of John, on the other hand, is less a history of the life of Jesus and more of a witness into the nature of God. John, unlike Matthew, Mark and Luke, states clearly in the beginning of his gospel that Jesus is the “Word of God” and was God. Matthew, Mark and Luke never make that claim. Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us what Jesus said and did; John invites us to wonder what that says about God. John, the last of our gospels to be written, bids us to look beneath events that took place roughly around 30 A.D., and to ponder what these events tell us about the nature of God.
And so today, we hear John the Baptist declaring that Jesus is the “Lamb of God” (not once, but twice) and later the “Son of God.” Although none of us can be sure what our evangelist was thinking as he was writing his gospel, our evangelist’s bold declarations that Jesus is the “Lamb of God” and the “Son of God” has alerted some to wonder if John did not have in mind a story from the Old Testament, a story our evangelist would have known and known well.
That story is recounted in the book of Genesis and is about Abraham, a man God had promised would be the father of many nations and to whom God had given a son, Isaac, in his old age. And then God tells Abraham:
‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.’ So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt-offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, ‘Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.’ Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, ‘Father!’ And he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ He said, ‘The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?’ Abraham said, ‘God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son.’ So the two of them walked on together.
After binding his beloved son to the altar,
An angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.’ And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt-offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place ‘The Lord will provide’; as it is said to this day, ‘On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.’
The story is a chilling account of the faith of Abraham who God had promised would be the father of many nations and to whom God had given a son, Isaac, the child of the promise. And then God demands that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac, and Abraham binds his son upon on altar and raises his knife, blindly trusting in the faithfulness of God who had promised that Abraham would be the father of many nations. The story is also a chilling account of a God who will test our faith in the goodness and faithfulness of God. God will provide but God will also demand. And the story is a chilling understanding of the Christ event, an event in which Christ gave up his life and on the third day was raised from the dead.
“What are you looking for?” Jesus asks two of John’s disciples in our reading this morning. These disciples are, like John the Baptist, looking for God’s long promised Messiah, the One who would rescue God’s people from all that sought to destroy them – from evil, sin and death. These disciples are looking for the light of the world which God promised would come through the family of Abraham.
But just as God tested Abraham before the ram appeared in the thicket, these disciples will be tested as they watch with horror, the Messiah lay down his life and go to his death. God will provide but not in any way we can understand nor predict. God is faithful and was faithful to God’s promise to Abraham but not before Abraham was asked to give up his only son, the son whom he loved.
The disciples ask Jesus where Jesus is staying and Jesus responds: “Come and see.” The Greek verb we translate as “see” has the deeper meaning of knowing, understanding and perceiving. Jesus is not inviting these disciples to take a look around his pad but rather inviting them to perceive in his person the Son of God who will also be the Lamb, the Lamb God will sacrifice for us.
In our psalm this morning we hear the psalmist proclaim: “I waited patiently upon the Lord; he stooped to me and heard my cry.” Patience we often hear is a virtue and patience in the midst of adversity is especially difficult. Faith bids us to trust that God will provide for us, will make a way, will bring us through death into life. Faith bids us to remember that God is always faithful even when we are not, that in the mystery of the Word made flesh God has delivered us, provided the Lamb so that we, bound as we so often are on altars of adversity and suffering, may yet know life.
You and I live in a world determined that we can fix whatever problems beset us. We value folk who can solve problems, find solutions and correct whatever is broken. “If you are not part of the solution, you are a part of the problem,” we are admonished. But not everything that comes our way can be fixed. Some of the time we are called to be patient, to endure, in the words of Saint Paul. Some of the time, we are called to wait upon the Lord, trusting God will provide. Few of us will be graced with the faith of Abraham, but all of us will know times when waiting for God to act, for a light to shine in the darkness, will challenge every fiber of our being and our desire to “fix” what is wrong. Sitting still, being patient, waiting upon the Lord, are simply not skills we learn in our culture that so much wants “to get things done.”
“Come and see,” Jesus invites us this morning. Come and know that I am the God who brought your ancestors out of slavery in Egypt, fed you with manna in the wilderness, gave a promise to Abraham and led you into a land flowing with milk and honey. Come and know that in the fullness of time, I am the God who gave up my Son for your sake, not to be swallowed up by death but that you might know that life, not death, will have the last word.
“Come and see.” “Take, eat: This is my Body which is given for you.” Later in John’s gospel, Jesus will tell his disciples to “eat my flesh and drink my blood,” literally to feed on him, the Lamb that was slain for the life of the world. As we wait bearing our burdens and those of the people we love, God feeds us, not leaving us to bear our burdens alone but inviting us Sunday after Sunday to be nourished by the body and blood of the Lamb of God. The bread and the wine are not magic and few of us will leave our Eucharistic celebration to discover that our troubles have suddenly disappeared. What I do pray we will discover is strength and courage to meet the days ahead, knowing God has provided and God will provide.
When Abraham raised his knife to sacrifice his son, Abraham gave up all hope of understanding the strange demands of God who was asking him to kill the child of the promise. And when Abraham raised his knife, Abraham was placing all of his hope in a God Abraham trusted to keep God’s promise. What Abraham could see was that God appeared to be taking back the promise. God was not; Abraham simply could not understand and could not know until Abraham risked everything, even the very child of the promise, trusting that God would keep God’s promise.
The disciples who follow Jesus this morning are following one they call the Messiah and that Messiah will die and their faith will be tested. And we, following after those first disciples, will often be left to wonder: “What is God doing and why is this happening?” Answers will elude us and we will elude all those who proffer answers for we know there are none to give. All we can trust, and ‘tis everything, is that God will be faithful always and everywhere. God has brought lambs out of thickets and life out of death, not because we are as faithful as Abraham nor because we would ever presume to be disciples like Andrew and Peter, but simply because God is faithful and will keep God’s promises.
Sunday, January 19, 2014 I Corinthians 1: 1 – 9
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 1: 29 - 42
The next day John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”
John 1: 35 – 36
We hear this morning from the gospel according to John. The gospel according to John is different from the gospels according to Matthew, Mark and Luke. Matthew, Mark and Luke sound a bit more historical, even though none of our four gospels are eyewitness accounts, and all were written at least a generation after the resurrection. Yet, Matthew, Mark and Luke all sound like a history of the life of Jesus - his birth, ministry, death and resurrection.
The gospel of John, on the other hand, is less a history of the life of Jesus and more of a witness into the nature of God. John, unlike Matthew, Mark and Luke, states clearly in the beginning of his gospel that Jesus is the “Word of God” and was God. Matthew, Mark and Luke never make that claim. Matthew, Mark and Luke tell us what Jesus said and did; John invites us to wonder what that says about God. John, the last of our gospels to be written, bids us to look beneath events that took place roughly around 30 A.D., and to ponder what these events tell us about the nature of God.
And so today, we hear John the Baptist declaring that Jesus is the “Lamb of God” (not once, but twice) and later the “Son of God.” Although none of us can be sure what our evangelist was thinking as he was writing his gospel, our evangelist’s bold declarations that Jesus is the “Lamb of God” and the “Son of God” has alerted some to wonder if John did not have in mind a story from the Old Testament, a story our evangelist would have known and known well.
That story is recounted in the book of Genesis and is about Abraham, a man God had promised would be the father of many nations and to whom God had given a son, Isaac, in his old age. And then God tells Abraham:
‘Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt-offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.’ So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt-offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away. Then Abraham said to his young men, ‘Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.’ Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham, ‘Father!’ And he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ He said, ‘The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering?’ Abraham said, ‘God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt-offering, my son.’ So the two of them walked on together.
After binding his beloved son to the altar,
An angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.’ And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt-offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place ‘The Lord will provide’; as it is said to this day, ‘On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.’
The story is a chilling account of the faith of Abraham who God had promised would be the father of many nations and to whom God had given a son, Isaac, the child of the promise. And then God demands that Abraham sacrifice his son Isaac, and Abraham binds his son upon on altar and raises his knife, blindly trusting in the faithfulness of God who had promised that Abraham would be the father of many nations. The story is also a chilling account of a God who will test our faith in the goodness and faithfulness of God. God will provide but God will also demand. And the story is a chilling understanding of the Christ event, an event in which Christ gave up his life and on the third day was raised from the dead.
“What are you looking for?” Jesus asks two of John’s disciples in our reading this morning. These disciples are, like John the Baptist, looking for God’s long promised Messiah, the One who would rescue God’s people from all that sought to destroy them – from evil, sin and death. These disciples are looking for the light of the world which God promised would come through the family of Abraham.
But just as God tested Abraham before the ram appeared in the thicket, these disciples will be tested as they watch with horror, the Messiah lay down his life and go to his death. God will provide but not in any way we can understand nor predict. God is faithful and was faithful to God’s promise to Abraham but not before Abraham was asked to give up his only son, the son whom he loved.
The disciples ask Jesus where Jesus is staying and Jesus responds: “Come and see.” The Greek verb we translate as “see” has the deeper meaning of knowing, understanding and perceiving. Jesus is not inviting these disciples to take a look around his pad but rather inviting them to perceive in his person the Son of God who will also be the Lamb, the Lamb God will sacrifice for us.
In our psalm this morning we hear the psalmist proclaim: “I waited patiently upon the Lord; he stooped to me and heard my cry.” Patience we often hear is a virtue and patience in the midst of adversity is especially difficult. Faith bids us to trust that God will provide for us, will make a way, will bring us through death into life. Faith bids us to remember that God is always faithful even when we are not, that in the mystery of the Word made flesh God has delivered us, provided the Lamb so that we, bound as we so often are on altars of adversity and suffering, may yet know life.
You and I live in a world determined that we can fix whatever problems beset us. We value folk who can solve problems, find solutions and correct whatever is broken. “If you are not part of the solution, you are a part of the problem,” we are admonished. But not everything that comes our way can be fixed. Some of the time we are called to be patient, to endure, in the words of Saint Paul. Some of the time, we are called to wait upon the Lord, trusting God will provide. Few of us will be graced with the faith of Abraham, but all of us will know times when waiting for God to act, for a light to shine in the darkness, will challenge every fiber of our being and our desire to “fix” what is wrong. Sitting still, being patient, waiting upon the Lord, are simply not skills we learn in our culture that so much wants “to get things done.”
“Come and see,” Jesus invites us this morning. Come and know that I am the God who brought your ancestors out of slavery in Egypt, fed you with manna in the wilderness, gave a promise to Abraham and led you into a land flowing with milk and honey. Come and know that in the fullness of time, I am the God who gave up my Son for your sake, not to be swallowed up by death but that you might know that life, not death, will have the last word.
“Come and see.” “Take, eat: This is my Body which is given for you.” Later in John’s gospel, Jesus will tell his disciples to “eat my flesh and drink my blood,” literally to feed on him, the Lamb that was slain for the life of the world. As we wait bearing our burdens and those of the people we love, God feeds us, not leaving us to bear our burdens alone but inviting us Sunday after Sunday to be nourished by the body and blood of the Lamb of God. The bread and the wine are not magic and few of us will leave our Eucharistic celebration to discover that our troubles have suddenly disappeared. What I do pray we will discover is strength and courage to meet the days ahead, knowing God has provided and God will provide.
When Abraham raised his knife to sacrifice his son, Abraham gave up all hope of understanding the strange demands of God who was asking him to kill the child of the promise. And when Abraham raised his knife, Abraham was placing all of his hope in a God Abraham trusted to keep God’s promise. What Abraham could see was that God appeared to be taking back the promise. God was not; Abraham simply could not understand and could not know until Abraham risked everything, even the very child of the promise, trusting that God would keep God’s promise.
The disciples who follow Jesus this morning are following one they call the Messiah and that Messiah will die and their faith will be tested. And we, following after those first disciples, will often be left to wonder: “What is God doing and why is this happening?” Answers will elude us and we will elude all those who proffer answers for we know there are none to give. All we can trust, and ‘tis everything, is that God will be faithful always and everywhere. God has brought lambs out of thickets and life out of death, not because we are as faithful as Abraham nor because we would ever presume to be disciples like Andrew and Peter, but simply because God is faithful and will keep God’s promises.
Easter Day: The Sunday of the Resurrection Acts 10: 34 – 43
Sunday, April 20, 2014 Colossians 3: 1 – 4
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 20: 1 – 18
Mary Magdelene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
John 20: 18
Alleluia! The Lord is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
Alleluia! Today is Easter. The church is full, the bells are pealing, the lilies are magnificent, the choir sounds like a heavenly host of angels and an Easter Egg hunt awaits us. Today is glorious. Alleluia!
I would be less than honest if I did not confess that I wished every Sunday felt like this Sunday. Today we pull out the stops, celebrating with family and friends, with beautiful flowers and magnificent music, the joy of the Resurrection. Every Sunday, of course, we celebrate the Resurrection but not like this! Today is definitely different. Today looks and feels like a celebration.
In the New Testament Jesus often used the image of a great celebration to image what life looks like in the kingdom of God. “The kingdom of God may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son,” write Matthew and Mark. In Luke we have the wonderful story of the return of the prodigal son and the great homecoming party his father threw for him. And in all three synoptic gospels we have the story of the feeding of thousands, a great banquet, more than enough food for everyone starting with only a couple of fish and a few loaves of bread.
The kingdom of God in the New Testament is neither dreary nor dull but alive with abundance, with good food and fine wine, a banquet hall with room for everyone not just the great and powerful, a place where the lame are dancing, the blind are seeing, and the old men are dreaming dreams. The kingdom of God for Jesus was a grand celebration and no one in their right mind would want to miss it.
Jesus did not live and clearly did not die because Jesus thought the Kingdom of God was a place of doom and gloom or only a far off possibility. Jesus preached with an urgency, saying the kingdom of God has come among you. Jesus lived and died because Jesus knew and believed that the Kingdom of God was a great and glorious experience of God’s outrageous love that we could know now. The kingdom of God was and is, outrageously wonderful and Jesus knew that in a way the church has often forgotten.
Sadly, the church has sometimes forgotten these celebratory images of the kingdom of God. Rather than a great feast to which all are invited, the kingdom of God has from time to time been portrayed as a private dinner party for the morally upright or the politically correct. Jesus’ guest list according to the New Testament excluded no one and fairly regularly included the morally suspect like prostitutes and tax collectors.
And not only did Jesus throw open the doors of the kingdom to everyone, Jesus intended for the party to begin in this life and not after we die and go to heaven.
And what a strange kingdom it is, so strange that Mary cannot believe what she sees this morning in our gospel reading from John. When Mary sees the empty tomb, she assumes someone has stolen Jesus’ body and rushes off to find the disciples. To the angels Mary sees sitting in the tomb, Mary in anguish says: “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” And finally, when Mary sees a man she takes to be the gardener, she suspects he is the one who has removed the body: “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Mary cannot believe that Jesus who was crucified and buried is now standing before her, not as a ghostly apparition but a recognizable person, her Lord who calls her by name. And with the words: “I have seen the Lord,” Mary becomes the first witness to the resurrection.
But not the last.
For us, perhaps, in the twenty-first century, the greatest power of that sentence – “I have seen the Lord” - is its capacity to confound us with its incredulity. We know people do not rise from the dead. Mary must have been deluded. Mary must have been overwhelmed with grief, following the death of the man who had loved her and given, in her grief, to visions not grounded in reality.
And yet, Mary encounters the empty tomb in the firm and only plausible conviction that Jesus’ body has been stolen. Mary knew as well as we all do that people do not rise from the dead. What happened that first Easter Day to change her mind?
For that matter, what happened to all of those first disciples who had given up everything to follow Jesus and then watched as he was crucified? What we know is that following the crucifixion, those who had followed Jesus during his brief ministry should have quietly disappeared from the scene. Their leader had been executed as a criminal by Rome and his known associates would certainly have been suspect. Yet, against all reason, those first disciples did not go away; rather, their numbers grew, enduring persecution and hardship because they said and all the gospels bear witness, that God had raised Jesus from the dead. What we know is that following the crucifixion, the church was born.
Now much ink has been spilled in trying to explain what happened on that first Easter day. The gospels tell us Jesus was transformed, made new with a body that ate and drank and passed through doors. Science has no way to explain this. And we are left scratching our heads.
Scratching our heads and wondering what a “new” creation like that of the Resurrected Christ might look like. The New Testament, particularly the book of Revelation, suggests that a “new” creation would be something like what we already know, but without death, without decay, without pain and suffering. If that would not be a cause for celebration I do not know what would be!
Saint Paul, writing some twenty years after the crucifixion and resurrection, would describe the church as “the body of Christ.” For Saint Paul, Christ is a real presence in our midst and our fellowship one with another is not rooted in our blood lines or our feelings about one another but rather in the presence of the living Christ in our midst. We, the church, are to be a sign of the resurrection, a “new creation,” a people who know that Christ is risen and that Christ lives. We, the body of the risen Christ, have every reason to dance in the aisles, even if, as Episcopalians, we prefer our celebrations to be a bit more sedate and our “rejoicing” to be done in good order.
And our joy is meant to spill out of those front doors and into the world, like rain on a parched field, bringing forth fruit, bearing witness to this “new creation” in the midst of the old. We are to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and visit the prisoner and relieve the sick and comfort the dying and give hope to the despairing because in the Kingdom of God, no one weeps, no one mourns, and no one goes hungry.
For sure, the Easter lilies will be a bit faded next Sunday and the choir probably will not be doing anything special. We will not be having an Easter egg hunt next Sunday. Next Sunday will not look and feel like today. But next Sunday, like this Sunday, will be a celebration, the celebration that in Christ, God’s kingdom has come. We have good news to share and much work to do. Remember the joy of this day and all those in this world of sorrows, who hunger to know, for just a moment, joy.
Enjoy this day and give thanks. The Lord is risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!
Sunday, April 20, 2014 Colossians 3: 1 – 4
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 20: 1 – 18
Mary Magdelene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
John 20: 18
Alleluia! The Lord is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
Alleluia! Today is Easter. The church is full, the bells are pealing, the lilies are magnificent, the choir sounds like a heavenly host of angels and an Easter Egg hunt awaits us. Today is glorious. Alleluia!
I would be less than honest if I did not confess that I wished every Sunday felt like this Sunday. Today we pull out the stops, celebrating with family and friends, with beautiful flowers and magnificent music, the joy of the Resurrection. Every Sunday, of course, we celebrate the Resurrection but not like this! Today is definitely different. Today looks and feels like a celebration.
In the New Testament Jesus often used the image of a great celebration to image what life looks like in the kingdom of God. “The kingdom of God may be compared to a king who gave a wedding banquet for his son,” write Matthew and Mark. In Luke we have the wonderful story of the return of the prodigal son and the great homecoming party his father threw for him. And in all three synoptic gospels we have the story of the feeding of thousands, a great banquet, more than enough food for everyone starting with only a couple of fish and a few loaves of bread.
The kingdom of God in the New Testament is neither dreary nor dull but alive with abundance, with good food and fine wine, a banquet hall with room for everyone not just the great and powerful, a place where the lame are dancing, the blind are seeing, and the old men are dreaming dreams. The kingdom of God for Jesus was a grand celebration and no one in their right mind would want to miss it.
Jesus did not live and clearly did not die because Jesus thought the Kingdom of God was a place of doom and gloom or only a far off possibility. Jesus preached with an urgency, saying the kingdom of God has come among you. Jesus lived and died because Jesus knew and believed that the Kingdom of God was a great and glorious experience of God’s outrageous love that we could know now. The kingdom of God was and is, outrageously wonderful and Jesus knew that in a way the church has often forgotten.
Sadly, the church has sometimes forgotten these celebratory images of the kingdom of God. Rather than a great feast to which all are invited, the kingdom of God has from time to time been portrayed as a private dinner party for the morally upright or the politically correct. Jesus’ guest list according to the New Testament excluded no one and fairly regularly included the morally suspect like prostitutes and tax collectors.
And not only did Jesus throw open the doors of the kingdom to everyone, Jesus intended for the party to begin in this life and not after we die and go to heaven.
And what a strange kingdom it is, so strange that Mary cannot believe what she sees this morning in our gospel reading from John. When Mary sees the empty tomb, she assumes someone has stolen Jesus’ body and rushes off to find the disciples. To the angels Mary sees sitting in the tomb, Mary in anguish says: “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” And finally, when Mary sees a man she takes to be the gardener, she suspects he is the one who has removed the body: “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Mary cannot believe that Jesus who was crucified and buried is now standing before her, not as a ghostly apparition but a recognizable person, her Lord who calls her by name. And with the words: “I have seen the Lord,” Mary becomes the first witness to the resurrection.
But not the last.
For us, perhaps, in the twenty-first century, the greatest power of that sentence – “I have seen the Lord” - is its capacity to confound us with its incredulity. We know people do not rise from the dead. Mary must have been deluded. Mary must have been overwhelmed with grief, following the death of the man who had loved her and given, in her grief, to visions not grounded in reality.
And yet, Mary encounters the empty tomb in the firm and only plausible conviction that Jesus’ body has been stolen. Mary knew as well as we all do that people do not rise from the dead. What happened that first Easter Day to change her mind?
For that matter, what happened to all of those first disciples who had given up everything to follow Jesus and then watched as he was crucified? What we know is that following the crucifixion, those who had followed Jesus during his brief ministry should have quietly disappeared from the scene. Their leader had been executed as a criminal by Rome and his known associates would certainly have been suspect. Yet, against all reason, those first disciples did not go away; rather, their numbers grew, enduring persecution and hardship because they said and all the gospels bear witness, that God had raised Jesus from the dead. What we know is that following the crucifixion, the church was born.
Now much ink has been spilled in trying to explain what happened on that first Easter day. The gospels tell us Jesus was transformed, made new with a body that ate and drank and passed through doors. Science has no way to explain this. And we are left scratching our heads.
Scratching our heads and wondering what a “new” creation like that of the Resurrected Christ might look like. The New Testament, particularly the book of Revelation, suggests that a “new” creation would be something like what we already know, but without death, without decay, without pain and suffering. If that would not be a cause for celebration I do not know what would be!
Saint Paul, writing some twenty years after the crucifixion and resurrection, would describe the church as “the body of Christ.” For Saint Paul, Christ is a real presence in our midst and our fellowship one with another is not rooted in our blood lines or our feelings about one another but rather in the presence of the living Christ in our midst. We, the church, are to be a sign of the resurrection, a “new creation,” a people who know that Christ is risen and that Christ lives. We, the body of the risen Christ, have every reason to dance in the aisles, even if, as Episcopalians, we prefer our celebrations to be a bit more sedate and our “rejoicing” to be done in good order.
And our joy is meant to spill out of those front doors and into the world, like rain on a parched field, bringing forth fruit, bearing witness to this “new creation” in the midst of the old. We are to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and visit the prisoner and relieve the sick and comfort the dying and give hope to the despairing because in the Kingdom of God, no one weeps, no one mourns, and no one goes hungry.
For sure, the Easter lilies will be a bit faded next Sunday and the choir probably will not be doing anything special. We will not be having an Easter egg hunt next Sunday. Next Sunday will not look and feel like today. But next Sunday, like this Sunday, will be a celebration, the celebration that in Christ, God’s kingdom has come. We have good news to share and much work to do. Remember the joy of this day and all those in this world of sorrows, who hunger to know, for just a moment, joy.
Enjoy this day and give thanks. The Lord is risen! Alleluia! Alleluia!
The Second Sunday of Easter Acts 2: 14a, 22 – 32
Sunday, April 27, 2014 I Peter 1: 3 – 9
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 20: 19 - 31
But Thomas said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
John 20: 25b
“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Every year on the Sunday following Easter, we hear the story of Doubting Thomas. Thomas will not believe the other disciples who tell him they have seen the Lord and must see Jesus himself before he can believe in the Resurrection. Thomas needs to “see to believe” and Thomas is often understood as a skeptical and faithless disciple who needs proof before he can believe that Jesus is risen from the dead.
Thomas, though, may be the most faithful of all the disciples as Thomas insists upon confirming for himself that the man the others have seen is, indeed, his crucified Lord, the Jesus who died on the cross. Thomas needs to see the marks of the crucifixion before Thomas will trust that the Lord who died has now been raised from the dead. Thomas’ Lord went to his death for Thomas’ sake and Thomas wants to make sure this same Lord has been raised and not some other. Thomas may not be looking for proof that a man had been raised from the dead; Thomas may be seeking to know that the Lord who had loved him and died for him, was loving him still.
Thomas, as did all the disciples, abandoned Jesus when Jesus was crucified. Not one of the disciples wanted to be associated with a convicted criminal. And following the crucifixion we meet the disciples behind locked doors, in fear for their lives, known associates of a man executed for treason. Thomas may not want to meet Jesus after bailing ship at the eleventh hour. If this man is the same man who Thomas had abandoned, would Jesus still love him? Thomas may be much more than simply doubting the truth of the Resurrection. Thomas may be doubting that he is loved.
Thomas’ need to see and to touch Jesus, to know the real presence of Christ crucified and risen, is the same need we all have to experience our claims of faith in real and concrete ways and not just as abstract theological statements. This Sunday we will confess the mystery of faith: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” But that confession will be meaningless unless we have tasted and seen and touched for ourselves and in our lives something of the wonder and majesty of God. Until we experience in our own lives the presence of the Risen Christ, we will not, as we prayed in our collect this morning, be able “to show forth in our lives what we profess by our faith.”
Last Sunday was pretty amazing. After a long and difficult Lent and a profoundly moving Holy Week, we rang out with abandon our “Allelulia’s.” Some folk were taken by surprise at what they experienced; others were moved to tears; many found hope and comfort. Last Sunday many of us experienced the real presence of the Risen Christ. Last Sunday was a day of joy. For sure, Sherry and I had discussed the liturgy beforehand and the choir had planned and practiced their music and the acolytes and lectors had been scheduled in advance. But none of that planning guaranteed that we would know joy. Only God can do that. And God did.
Thomas needed to see for himself the real presence of the risen Christ and so do we. We need to feel and to see and to touch the love of God for us in real ways, in the flesh and on the ground. Thomas was not looking for proof that a man had been raised from the dead; Thomas wanted confirmation that the Lord who had loved him was loving him still. And Jesus was, offering his body to Thomas to be seen and to be touched.
Saint Paul called the church “the body of Christ.” And last Sunday we were – pulling out the stops, celebrating with great fanfare and enjoying a full house. The spirit of the Risen Christ was blowing all over this place. And, yes, a lot of planning went into our service but none of that guaranteed that the outcome would be joy and abundant joy. That was an act of God. And by the way, a couple of pictures that Dale Brittle sent to the diocese are on the diocesan facebook page!
We all, like Thomas, need to experience the love of the Risen Christ in real and tangible ways. Jesus is not dead but very much alive and working in and through us. Last Sunday was a good example. The vestry meeting we held at my house a week before A.G. died was another. That night we closed our meeting as we always do praying the service of Compline. A.G. lay in a bed in an adjoining room and listened as we prayed: “Lord, you now have set your servant free to go in peace as you have promised; For these eyes of mine have seen the Savior, whom you have prepared for all the world to see.” And A.G. asked me to repeat those words after the vestry left before he went to sleep. Do not tell me Christ is not a real presence in our midst.
Thomas wanted to know if Jesus was still loving him, still loving him after Thomas had fled when Jesus was arrested. And Jesus was still loving Thomas, in spite of what Thomas had done, offering his body and his wounds to Thomas to touch. This is the Jesus we worship – the Jesus who offered himself in love to a disciple who was afraid he would no longer be loved.
Every Sunday, we begin our Eucharist with the words: “It is right, and a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” Every Sunday we give thanks for the presence of the Risen Christ in our midst. And we give thanks so that we might go out into the world to become instruments of peace and joy to others, to enable others to experience the love of the Risen Christ. But if we ourselves have never known or experienced that love, we will have little to share with this world that longs to be loved and to taste the goodness of God.
“My Lord and my God!” Thomas confesses this morning after Thomas experiences the real presence of Christ. Thomas has seen God, not a ghost nor a vision nor a figment of his imagination. And tradition holds that Thomas subsequently preached the gospel of the Risen Christ in India where he was martyred. Thomas lived and died knowing beyond a doubt that the love of God was real, as real as the warmth of the sun or the light of the moon.
“We have seen the Lord,” the disciples all claimed after the crucifixion. That confession gave birth to the Church which did not pass away but rather grew after an obscure Jewish carpenter died. And we who are gathered here today are called to make that same confession. Where and how have you seen the Lord? In what ways have you experienced the real presence of Christ? Not everything that happens to us in this world is the result of our good planning or wise decisions. Sometimes we are taken by surprise, overwhelmed by love, lifted up with joy and moved with gratitude by a mystery we will never fully understand. At those times, are we bold enough to say: “I have seen the Lord!” or would we rather consign such experiences to coincidence or luck or simply being in the right place at the right time? Are we really masters of our own fate or is the Spirit of the Risen Christ moving among us and all of creation giving us life and hope, peace and joy?
The peace of God, which Jesus gives to the all the disciples including Thomas this day, truly does pass understanding. I had no idea four years ago what might happen as we began our journey together. Nor did you. But as we have made our way together, we have seen God’s hand at work among us, gracing us with the laughter of children, new friends and opportunities to reach forth our hands in love to this community. We have been blessed over and over again and this is the Lord’s doing. We have seen the Lord and no one of us could have orchestrated the journey we have shared together. Do not doubt but believe!
Sunday, April 27, 2014 I Peter 1: 3 – 9
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 20: 19 - 31
But Thomas said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.”
John 20: 25b
“Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Every year on the Sunday following Easter, we hear the story of Doubting Thomas. Thomas will not believe the other disciples who tell him they have seen the Lord and must see Jesus himself before he can believe in the Resurrection. Thomas needs to “see to believe” and Thomas is often understood as a skeptical and faithless disciple who needs proof before he can believe that Jesus is risen from the dead.
Thomas, though, may be the most faithful of all the disciples as Thomas insists upon confirming for himself that the man the others have seen is, indeed, his crucified Lord, the Jesus who died on the cross. Thomas needs to see the marks of the crucifixion before Thomas will trust that the Lord who died has now been raised from the dead. Thomas’ Lord went to his death for Thomas’ sake and Thomas wants to make sure this same Lord has been raised and not some other. Thomas may not be looking for proof that a man had been raised from the dead; Thomas may be seeking to know that the Lord who had loved him and died for him, was loving him still.
Thomas, as did all the disciples, abandoned Jesus when Jesus was crucified. Not one of the disciples wanted to be associated with a convicted criminal. And following the crucifixion we meet the disciples behind locked doors, in fear for their lives, known associates of a man executed for treason. Thomas may not want to meet Jesus after bailing ship at the eleventh hour. If this man is the same man who Thomas had abandoned, would Jesus still love him? Thomas may be much more than simply doubting the truth of the Resurrection. Thomas may be doubting that he is loved.
Thomas’ need to see and to touch Jesus, to know the real presence of Christ crucified and risen, is the same need we all have to experience our claims of faith in real and concrete ways and not just as abstract theological statements. This Sunday we will confess the mystery of faith: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” But that confession will be meaningless unless we have tasted and seen and touched for ourselves and in our lives something of the wonder and majesty of God. Until we experience in our own lives the presence of the Risen Christ, we will not, as we prayed in our collect this morning, be able “to show forth in our lives what we profess by our faith.”
Last Sunday was pretty amazing. After a long and difficult Lent and a profoundly moving Holy Week, we rang out with abandon our “Allelulia’s.” Some folk were taken by surprise at what they experienced; others were moved to tears; many found hope and comfort. Last Sunday many of us experienced the real presence of the Risen Christ. Last Sunday was a day of joy. For sure, Sherry and I had discussed the liturgy beforehand and the choir had planned and practiced their music and the acolytes and lectors had been scheduled in advance. But none of that planning guaranteed that we would know joy. Only God can do that. And God did.
Thomas needed to see for himself the real presence of the risen Christ and so do we. We need to feel and to see and to touch the love of God for us in real ways, in the flesh and on the ground. Thomas was not looking for proof that a man had been raised from the dead; Thomas wanted confirmation that the Lord who had loved him was loving him still. And Jesus was, offering his body to Thomas to be seen and to be touched.
Saint Paul called the church “the body of Christ.” And last Sunday we were – pulling out the stops, celebrating with great fanfare and enjoying a full house. The spirit of the Risen Christ was blowing all over this place. And, yes, a lot of planning went into our service but none of that guaranteed that the outcome would be joy and abundant joy. That was an act of God. And by the way, a couple of pictures that Dale Brittle sent to the diocese are on the diocesan facebook page!
We all, like Thomas, need to experience the love of the Risen Christ in real and tangible ways. Jesus is not dead but very much alive and working in and through us. Last Sunday was a good example. The vestry meeting we held at my house a week before A.G. died was another. That night we closed our meeting as we always do praying the service of Compline. A.G. lay in a bed in an adjoining room and listened as we prayed: “Lord, you now have set your servant free to go in peace as you have promised; For these eyes of mine have seen the Savior, whom you have prepared for all the world to see.” And A.G. asked me to repeat those words after the vestry left before he went to sleep. Do not tell me Christ is not a real presence in our midst.
Thomas wanted to know if Jesus was still loving him, still loving him after Thomas had fled when Jesus was arrested. And Jesus was still loving Thomas, in spite of what Thomas had done, offering his body and his wounds to Thomas to touch. This is the Jesus we worship – the Jesus who offered himself in love to a disciple who was afraid he would no longer be loved.
Every Sunday, we begin our Eucharist with the words: “It is right, and a good and joyful thing, always and everywhere to give thanks to you, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” Every Sunday we give thanks for the presence of the Risen Christ in our midst. And we give thanks so that we might go out into the world to become instruments of peace and joy to others, to enable others to experience the love of the Risen Christ. But if we ourselves have never known or experienced that love, we will have little to share with this world that longs to be loved and to taste the goodness of God.
“My Lord and my God!” Thomas confesses this morning after Thomas experiences the real presence of Christ. Thomas has seen God, not a ghost nor a vision nor a figment of his imagination. And tradition holds that Thomas subsequently preached the gospel of the Risen Christ in India where he was martyred. Thomas lived and died knowing beyond a doubt that the love of God was real, as real as the warmth of the sun or the light of the moon.
“We have seen the Lord,” the disciples all claimed after the crucifixion. That confession gave birth to the Church which did not pass away but rather grew after an obscure Jewish carpenter died. And we who are gathered here today are called to make that same confession. Where and how have you seen the Lord? In what ways have you experienced the real presence of Christ? Not everything that happens to us in this world is the result of our good planning or wise decisions. Sometimes we are taken by surprise, overwhelmed by love, lifted up with joy and moved with gratitude by a mystery we will never fully understand. At those times, are we bold enough to say: “I have seen the Lord!” or would we rather consign such experiences to coincidence or luck or simply being in the right place at the right time? Are we really masters of our own fate or is the Spirit of the Risen Christ moving among us and all of creation giving us life and hope, peace and joy?
The peace of God, which Jesus gives to the all the disciples including Thomas this day, truly does pass understanding. I had no idea four years ago what might happen as we began our journey together. Nor did you. But as we have made our way together, we have seen God’s hand at work among us, gracing us with the laughter of children, new friends and opportunities to reach forth our hands in love to this community. We have been blessed over and over again and this is the Lord’s doing. We have seen the Lord and no one of us could have orchestrated the journey we have shared together. Do not doubt but believe!
The Third Sunday of Easter Acts 2: 14a, 36 – 41
Sunday, May 4, 2014 I Peter 1: 17 – 23
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 24: 13 – 35
While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.
Luke 24: 15 – 16
About a week ago, I had the joy of seeing the play Wicked at the Landmark Theatre in Richmond. Wicked, subtitled The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz, narrates the origins of the wicked witch of the west and Glinda, the good witch of the north. Wicked is not only an untold story but also a good story with a captivating plot and much food for thought. The story invites us to wonder not only about where the witches of Oz came from, but also about the nature of good and evil, the cost of living authentically, and the underside of what we call progress. Wicked, like all good stories, draws us into an imaginary world so that we might see the world in which we really live with new eyes. A good story opens our eyes.
Our evangelist Luke is a master story teller who has given us the stories of the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son and the story we hear this morning of the appearance of Jesus to two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Our story this morning begins late in the afternoon on the day of Easter. Two disciples, one of whom is named Cleopas, are walking away from Jerusalem toward Emmaus, seven miles away. The disciples are sad, reflecting on the events of the last days and the crucifixion of the man they had hoped would redeem Israel from the oppression of Rome.
Compounding their grief is now the news that Jesus’ body is not in the tomb where he was laid and some foolish women’s tale about seeing angels who told them Jesus was alive. The last days have been filled with bad news and dashed hopes and walking along a dusty road away from Jerusalem must have felt like leaving the hospital without your first born child.
So when a stranger encounters these two disciples and asks about their conversation, the disciples stop walking and seem incredulous that this stranger does not know what has happened. “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” the disciples ask, wondering how anyone could have missed the news that Jesus had been crucified. That news was as world shattering as the attack on Pearl Harbor or the destruction of the towers of the World Trade Center. But this stranger casually responds: “What things?” as if he has just dropped onto the Emmaus road from outer space.
And so, patiently, I would offer, the disciples explain what has happened along with their grief and befuddlement over the rumors that Jesus is alive. And Jesus listens patiently, after which he calls them foolish and slow of heart. All these things had to happen, Jesus explains and all these things were told to you in your scriptures. The Messiah had to suffer and then enter into glory. What has happened is exactly the way God intended to bring in the kingdom of God.
What the disciples had presumed was a disaster, this man is now telling them is the fulfillment of God’s promises made long ago to Israel. The kingdom God promised to Abraham has come and the disciples are simply unable to see that new reality. The disciples still do not recognize this stranger, but clearly are intrigued and want to learn more. So the disciples invite Jesus to stay the night and have dinner with them. And when at dinner, Jesus took the bread, blessed, broke and gave the bread to them, their eyes were opened, and they recognized him;.
I am partial to stories with happy endings which is why I have always loved the story of The Wizard of Oz. At the end of the story, Dorothy clicks her ruby slippers together three times and finds herself back home in Kansas and all is well. The story Wicked does not end as neatly, leaving the audience to decide who, at the end, is happy and who is not. Good stories do not always have happy endings.
The story of Jesus appearing to two disciples on the Emmaus Road sounds like a story with a happy ending. Just days after the man these disciples had hoped would restore the glory of Israel suffers a cruel and unjust death, Jesus suddenly appears, transforming their grief into gladness, their despair into hope. The agony of Good Friday can now be forgotten because Jesus is very much alive, enjoying a meal with friends. All’s well that ends well and now that Jesus has shown up for dinner, we can all go home happy.
The story we hear this morning of the appearance of Jesus to the disciples and which is just one of several such stories in the gospels, is not the happy ending to a story that began during Holy Week and which resulted in the unjust death of an innocent man. The resurrection is not a trump card that God plays because bad people killed an innocent man. Jesus’ suffering and death was “necessary” we hear this morning before Jesus could enter into glory. And the story of the appearance of the risen Jesus we hear this morning is not an ending at all but rather a new beginning, an encounter which sends the two disciples back to Jerusalem “that same hour,” in other words, before they had finished dinner. Those same disciples would now make the mad claim that “The Lord has risen indeed!”
Whatever those early disciples encountered following the crucifixion was real, so real they would suffer hardship and persecution before giving up the claim that God had raised Jesus from the dead. Their claim did not lead them to happiness but rather moved them to keep meeting together hear the scriptures and to break bread together, in spite of those who thought they were crazy, deluded and dangerous fanatics who consumed the flesh and blood of a dead man.
What is not real, for the most part, are happy endings. Life rarely unfolds in such a way that all our problems get resolved, all our wishes are granted and, well, we are always “happy.” What is far more real is our common experience of suffering and struggle in a world God created to be very good but which is not always. What can become real is our doubt that perhaps Jesus is not alive and not at work among us and through us. We can become skeptical that any power save our own is at work in the world, loving us and redeeming us from all that seeks to destroy us.
The eyes of the disciples are opened this morning and we prayed in our collect that God would open the eyes of our faith. We are not to be blind to the suffering that is a part of life in this world nor blind to the joy and beauty of life in this world. We are to love this world, the world God made, and not some other world of our making, a world of happy endings. We are to love the world Jesus died to redeem, not a world that needs no redeeming. And we are to love this world the way Jesus loved this world – with compassion.
“Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over,” the disciples urge their strange companion. This stranger has broken open the scriptures for them in new and startling ways and they are hungry for more. So Jesus stays with them and “when he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him.” Jesus not only broke open the scriptures for those two disciples but Jesus broke bread with them. Jesus taught them and then fed them.
Which is why every Sunday we first hear scriptures read and interpreted in a sermon and then share in Holy Communion. We first hear the Word of the Lord and then we are fed at the Table of the Lord. We are taught and we are fed, just as were those two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Christ encounters us both in the Bible and at the Table, both by Word and Sacrament. And like those two disciples on the road to Emmaus, we do not encounter Christ; Christ encounters us, drawing near to us as we hear the Word of God and then as we receive the bread and wine of communion.
When Christ encounters us, when we are encountered by the living Lord, we begin to see not happy endings necessarily but rather life in the midst of death, joy in the midst of sorrow, hope in the midst of despair and peace in the midst of chaos. When Christ encounters us, our eyes are opened to the goodness and love of God which surrounds us all the time but to which we are often blind. Heaven and earth are full of God’s glory for those with eyes to see.
Knowing that we, and indeed, the whole world are enfolded by the love of God made known to us in Christ, is not the same as having a fairy godmother and a pair of ruby slippers. The same disciples who claimed they had seen the risen Lord suffered mightily for their mad claims. Their encounter with the living Lord led often to persecution, exile and even death. But having been encountered by the living Lord, those same disciples could say, as we do in our funeral liturgy: “Whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s.” As for me and my house, I would much rather belong to Christ than a witch with a wand, no matter how good she might be.
Sunday, May 4, 2014 I Peter 1: 17 – 23
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 24: 13 – 35
While they were talking and discussing, Jesus himself came near and went with them, but their eyes were kept from recognizing him.
Luke 24: 15 – 16
About a week ago, I had the joy of seeing the play Wicked at the Landmark Theatre in Richmond. Wicked, subtitled The Untold Story of the Witches of Oz, narrates the origins of the wicked witch of the west and Glinda, the good witch of the north. Wicked is not only an untold story but also a good story with a captivating plot and much food for thought. The story invites us to wonder not only about where the witches of Oz came from, but also about the nature of good and evil, the cost of living authentically, and the underside of what we call progress. Wicked, like all good stories, draws us into an imaginary world so that we might see the world in which we really live with new eyes. A good story opens our eyes.
Our evangelist Luke is a master story teller who has given us the stories of the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son and the story we hear this morning of the appearance of Jesus to two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Our story this morning begins late in the afternoon on the day of Easter. Two disciples, one of whom is named Cleopas, are walking away from Jerusalem toward Emmaus, seven miles away. The disciples are sad, reflecting on the events of the last days and the crucifixion of the man they had hoped would redeem Israel from the oppression of Rome.
Compounding their grief is now the news that Jesus’ body is not in the tomb where he was laid and some foolish women’s tale about seeing angels who told them Jesus was alive. The last days have been filled with bad news and dashed hopes and walking along a dusty road away from Jerusalem must have felt like leaving the hospital without your first born child.
So when a stranger encounters these two disciples and asks about their conversation, the disciples stop walking and seem incredulous that this stranger does not know what has happened. “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?” the disciples ask, wondering how anyone could have missed the news that Jesus had been crucified. That news was as world shattering as the attack on Pearl Harbor or the destruction of the towers of the World Trade Center. But this stranger casually responds: “What things?” as if he has just dropped onto the Emmaus road from outer space.
And so, patiently, I would offer, the disciples explain what has happened along with their grief and befuddlement over the rumors that Jesus is alive. And Jesus listens patiently, after which he calls them foolish and slow of heart. All these things had to happen, Jesus explains and all these things were told to you in your scriptures. The Messiah had to suffer and then enter into glory. What has happened is exactly the way God intended to bring in the kingdom of God.
What the disciples had presumed was a disaster, this man is now telling them is the fulfillment of God’s promises made long ago to Israel. The kingdom God promised to Abraham has come and the disciples are simply unable to see that new reality. The disciples still do not recognize this stranger, but clearly are intrigued and want to learn more. So the disciples invite Jesus to stay the night and have dinner with them. And when at dinner, Jesus took the bread, blessed, broke and gave the bread to them, their eyes were opened, and they recognized him;.
I am partial to stories with happy endings which is why I have always loved the story of The Wizard of Oz. At the end of the story, Dorothy clicks her ruby slippers together three times and finds herself back home in Kansas and all is well. The story Wicked does not end as neatly, leaving the audience to decide who, at the end, is happy and who is not. Good stories do not always have happy endings.
The story of Jesus appearing to two disciples on the Emmaus Road sounds like a story with a happy ending. Just days after the man these disciples had hoped would restore the glory of Israel suffers a cruel and unjust death, Jesus suddenly appears, transforming their grief into gladness, their despair into hope. The agony of Good Friday can now be forgotten because Jesus is very much alive, enjoying a meal with friends. All’s well that ends well and now that Jesus has shown up for dinner, we can all go home happy.
The story we hear this morning of the appearance of Jesus to the disciples and which is just one of several such stories in the gospels, is not the happy ending to a story that began during Holy Week and which resulted in the unjust death of an innocent man. The resurrection is not a trump card that God plays because bad people killed an innocent man. Jesus’ suffering and death was “necessary” we hear this morning before Jesus could enter into glory. And the story of the appearance of the risen Jesus we hear this morning is not an ending at all but rather a new beginning, an encounter which sends the two disciples back to Jerusalem “that same hour,” in other words, before they had finished dinner. Those same disciples would now make the mad claim that “The Lord has risen indeed!”
Whatever those early disciples encountered following the crucifixion was real, so real they would suffer hardship and persecution before giving up the claim that God had raised Jesus from the dead. Their claim did not lead them to happiness but rather moved them to keep meeting together hear the scriptures and to break bread together, in spite of those who thought they were crazy, deluded and dangerous fanatics who consumed the flesh and blood of a dead man.
What is not real, for the most part, are happy endings. Life rarely unfolds in such a way that all our problems get resolved, all our wishes are granted and, well, we are always “happy.” What is far more real is our common experience of suffering and struggle in a world God created to be very good but which is not always. What can become real is our doubt that perhaps Jesus is not alive and not at work among us and through us. We can become skeptical that any power save our own is at work in the world, loving us and redeeming us from all that seeks to destroy us.
The eyes of the disciples are opened this morning and we prayed in our collect that God would open the eyes of our faith. We are not to be blind to the suffering that is a part of life in this world nor blind to the joy and beauty of life in this world. We are to love this world, the world God made, and not some other world of our making, a world of happy endings. We are to love the world Jesus died to redeem, not a world that needs no redeeming. And we are to love this world the way Jesus loved this world – with compassion.
“Stay with us, because it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over,” the disciples urge their strange companion. This stranger has broken open the scriptures for them in new and startling ways and they are hungry for more. So Jesus stays with them and “when he was at the table with them, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized him.” Jesus not only broke open the scriptures for those two disciples but Jesus broke bread with them. Jesus taught them and then fed them.
Which is why every Sunday we first hear scriptures read and interpreted in a sermon and then share in Holy Communion. We first hear the Word of the Lord and then we are fed at the Table of the Lord. We are taught and we are fed, just as were those two disciples on the road to Emmaus. Christ encounters us both in the Bible and at the Table, both by Word and Sacrament. And like those two disciples on the road to Emmaus, we do not encounter Christ; Christ encounters us, drawing near to us as we hear the Word of God and then as we receive the bread and wine of communion.
When Christ encounters us, when we are encountered by the living Lord, we begin to see not happy endings necessarily but rather life in the midst of death, joy in the midst of sorrow, hope in the midst of despair and peace in the midst of chaos. When Christ encounters us, our eyes are opened to the goodness and love of God which surrounds us all the time but to which we are often blind. Heaven and earth are full of God’s glory for those with eyes to see.
Knowing that we, and indeed, the whole world are enfolded by the love of God made known to us in Christ, is not the same as having a fairy godmother and a pair of ruby slippers. The same disciples who claimed they had seen the risen Lord suffered mightily for their mad claims. Their encounter with the living Lord led often to persecution, exile and even death. But having been encountered by the living Lord, those same disciples could say, as we do in our funeral liturgy: “Whether we live, therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s.” As for me and my house, I would much rather belong to Christ than a witch with a wand, no matter how good she might be.
The Fourth Sunday of Easter Acts 2: 42 – 47
Sunday, May 11, 2014 I Peter 2: 19 – 25
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 10 : 1 – 10
So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.”
John 10: 7
We hear this morning from the tenth chapter of the gospel according to John. On the fourth Sunday of Easter every year we hear from the tenth chapter of the gospel according to John. And the tenth chapter of the gospel according to John is all about sheep, shepherds and sheepfolds. The fourth Sunday of Easter is, therefore, affectionately called “Good Shepherd Sunday.”
In the tenth chapter of the gospel according to John, Jesus says, as we hear this morning: “I am the gate” and later, in verses we will hear next year, “I am the good shepherd.” So we might say this Sunday is not only “Good Shepherd Sunday” but also “Gate Sunday.” Unfortunately, “Gate Sunday” does not sound nearly as comforting as “Good Shepherd Sunday.” Gates separate those on the inside from those on the outside, keeping those inside the gate safe from those outside of the gate.
My father lived in a gated community for many years and every time I visited I needed to show the gatekeeper my pass in order to be allowed entry. Visitors to that community needed the permission of a resident in order to pass through the gate. Absent such permission, visitors were not allowed to enter, keeping the residents of that community safe from door to door salesmen and wandering proselytizers.
When John wrote his gospel, shepherds were known to lay down at night at the entrance of the sheepfold. The shepherds were a literal gate, able to protect their sheep from wolves at night as well as keep the sheep from leaving the fold. The sheep within were safe from harm because the shepherd himself became a barrier who would wake if a sheep from within or a wolf from outside tried to pass over him. A good shepherd protected his flock both by day and by night.
A good gate protects us by separating those on the inside from those on the outside. In baptism, we separate ourselves, acknowledging Christ as our Lord and savior, turning away from all other lords. By baptism, we become members of the Church, the body of Christ, and look to Christ to bring us to life. Baptism is a gate that distinguishes those in the Church from those outside the Church. The confession we make at baptism is not inclusive but rather exclusive, as we confess that Jesus is Lord and not the Dalai Lama or Mohammed.
To say Jesus is the gate, though, does not make the Church a gatekeeper. God is the gatekeeper and in the gospel of John, those who do confess that Jesus is Lord, do so, by the power of God. Many times throughout history, the Church has presumed to be a gatekeeper, making doctrines or customs gates rather than faith in Jesus. Rather than acknowledge a generous orthodoxy, we have created litmus tests to separate the orthodox from the heretic.
Whether we use wine or grape juice for communion, believe popes are infallible or that some of us are predestined for salvation, are not gates. And when doctrines and customs become gates, the Church divides, bearing witness that we really do not want to be one, but would much rather believe we are right.
The Church is not a gatekeeper and we do not all have to agree with another to be Church. Indeed, in our own Anglican communion, we are very aware that the Episcopal Church in the United States looks very different from the African Anglican churches. The bonds of affection we share with other churches in our communion are fragile and can be broken, a painful reality that we have just recently experienced.
This past week I attended the spring conference for clergy at Shrine Mont. In his homily during our Eucharist, a colleague from northern Virginia preached from the gospel of John and Jesus’ prayer that we all might be one as Jesus and his Father are one. Maintaining the unity of the Church is our mission, he said, our single most effective means of evangelism. The world, in other words, will never believe the love of God made known to us in Christ if the Church is seen to be a battlefield and a place of conflict.
That does not mean we must agree with another nor that we must keep our thoughts and opinions to ourselves. Our witness to the world does, however, depend upon our mutual forbearance, maintaining our relationships one with another even, and especially when, those relationships become strained by disagreement. Loving one another does not mean we will always like one another!
Jesus is the gate but the church is not a gated community and we are not gatekeepers. In baptism, we are made one with Christ, and one with all the baptized, both the living and the dead. And in the gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples: “You did not choose me but I chose you.” For our evangelist, we have been called together by God. And, as we say in our marriage liturgy, “those whom God has joined together, let no one put asunder.”
Jesus is also the good shepherd who calls us together to grow and to learn from one another. We often learn more from those who see things differently than we do than from those with whom we share a common point of view. That we all do not see things in the same way is a good thing! Our witness to the world does not depend on our being of one mind, but rather that we all worship the one Lord.
Many years ago when I started seminary, I was taken completely by surprise. I had presumed before I started, that seminary would give me all the answers to all my many questions. The seminary had a wonderful library and a learned faculty and would certainly be able to tell me definitively who Jesus was and what Jesus did. Of course, I had some other questions such as who is God and what is the Holy Spirit? Very quickly, though, I came to learn that just about all of my questions had multiple answers depending upon who was answering the question. What I learned is that throughout the history of the Church, faithful men and women have wrestled with their faith, struggling to know this God made known to us in Christ. What I learned as we gathered each day for chapel, is that praying together is what is important and not your theory of the atonement.
In baptism, we acknowledge one Lord and one faith. Once baptized, we belong to Christ. Christ never belongs to us. Faithful folk will not always understand and interpret our faith in Christ in the same way and one of the Church’s saddest legacies are the divisions that are caused when we see things differently. We can see things differently and we can still worship together. And that is the bold dream of the Anglican communion, a communion with many members who do not see things the same way but are convicted that common prayer is more important than a common theology.
We live in a culture that dislikes disagreement, seeks to go along to get along and disdains any form of exclusion. In the midst of that culture, we the Church read the Bible on Sunday and not the Koran, welcome new members by baptism and not just a handshake, and seek to live into a mystery that has been handed down to us by folk long gone. We can and we do disagree, we do believe that baptism makes a difference and we strive for truth before harmony. We, the Church, are counter-cultural, always have been and, God willing, always will be.
When I gathered with my colleagues from across the diocese at Shrine Mont this past week, I was showered by love, showered by the love of priests from high churches and low churches and all manner in between, showered by love from folk whose theology fits neatly with mine and by those whose theology is a bit of a rub. I came away lifted up by prayer not theology. I came away knowing I am loved.
We can and we should seek to understand our claims of faith. But when adult ed ends on any given Sunday morning, the real work of the Church begins. The real work of the Church is worship, not theologizing. Worshipping together is our witness, our witness in a world that prefers to be with folk who all think alike, delighting more in harmony than seeking after truth. When we break bread together beside folk who do not see things the same way we do, we are bearing witness to our Lord who lived and died not just for us but for the sake of the whole world.
Sunday, May 11, 2014 I Peter 2: 19 – 25
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 10 : 1 – 10
So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.”
John 10: 7
We hear this morning from the tenth chapter of the gospel according to John. On the fourth Sunday of Easter every year we hear from the tenth chapter of the gospel according to John. And the tenth chapter of the gospel according to John is all about sheep, shepherds and sheepfolds. The fourth Sunday of Easter is, therefore, affectionately called “Good Shepherd Sunday.”
In the tenth chapter of the gospel according to John, Jesus says, as we hear this morning: “I am the gate” and later, in verses we will hear next year, “I am the good shepherd.” So we might say this Sunday is not only “Good Shepherd Sunday” but also “Gate Sunday.” Unfortunately, “Gate Sunday” does not sound nearly as comforting as “Good Shepherd Sunday.” Gates separate those on the inside from those on the outside, keeping those inside the gate safe from those outside of the gate.
My father lived in a gated community for many years and every time I visited I needed to show the gatekeeper my pass in order to be allowed entry. Visitors to that community needed the permission of a resident in order to pass through the gate. Absent such permission, visitors were not allowed to enter, keeping the residents of that community safe from door to door salesmen and wandering proselytizers.
When John wrote his gospel, shepherds were known to lay down at night at the entrance of the sheepfold. The shepherds were a literal gate, able to protect their sheep from wolves at night as well as keep the sheep from leaving the fold. The sheep within were safe from harm because the shepherd himself became a barrier who would wake if a sheep from within or a wolf from outside tried to pass over him. A good shepherd protected his flock both by day and by night.
A good gate protects us by separating those on the inside from those on the outside. In baptism, we separate ourselves, acknowledging Christ as our Lord and savior, turning away from all other lords. By baptism, we become members of the Church, the body of Christ, and look to Christ to bring us to life. Baptism is a gate that distinguishes those in the Church from those outside the Church. The confession we make at baptism is not inclusive but rather exclusive, as we confess that Jesus is Lord and not the Dalai Lama or Mohammed.
To say Jesus is the gate, though, does not make the Church a gatekeeper. God is the gatekeeper and in the gospel of John, those who do confess that Jesus is Lord, do so, by the power of God. Many times throughout history, the Church has presumed to be a gatekeeper, making doctrines or customs gates rather than faith in Jesus. Rather than acknowledge a generous orthodoxy, we have created litmus tests to separate the orthodox from the heretic.
Whether we use wine or grape juice for communion, believe popes are infallible or that some of us are predestined for salvation, are not gates. And when doctrines and customs become gates, the Church divides, bearing witness that we really do not want to be one, but would much rather believe we are right.
The Church is not a gatekeeper and we do not all have to agree with another to be Church. Indeed, in our own Anglican communion, we are very aware that the Episcopal Church in the United States looks very different from the African Anglican churches. The bonds of affection we share with other churches in our communion are fragile and can be broken, a painful reality that we have just recently experienced.
This past week I attended the spring conference for clergy at Shrine Mont. In his homily during our Eucharist, a colleague from northern Virginia preached from the gospel of John and Jesus’ prayer that we all might be one as Jesus and his Father are one. Maintaining the unity of the Church is our mission, he said, our single most effective means of evangelism. The world, in other words, will never believe the love of God made known to us in Christ if the Church is seen to be a battlefield and a place of conflict.
That does not mean we must agree with another nor that we must keep our thoughts and opinions to ourselves. Our witness to the world does, however, depend upon our mutual forbearance, maintaining our relationships one with another even, and especially when, those relationships become strained by disagreement. Loving one another does not mean we will always like one another!
Jesus is the gate but the church is not a gated community and we are not gatekeepers. In baptism, we are made one with Christ, and one with all the baptized, both the living and the dead. And in the gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples: “You did not choose me but I chose you.” For our evangelist, we have been called together by God. And, as we say in our marriage liturgy, “those whom God has joined together, let no one put asunder.”
Jesus is also the good shepherd who calls us together to grow and to learn from one another. We often learn more from those who see things differently than we do than from those with whom we share a common point of view. That we all do not see things in the same way is a good thing! Our witness to the world does not depend on our being of one mind, but rather that we all worship the one Lord.
Many years ago when I started seminary, I was taken completely by surprise. I had presumed before I started, that seminary would give me all the answers to all my many questions. The seminary had a wonderful library and a learned faculty and would certainly be able to tell me definitively who Jesus was and what Jesus did. Of course, I had some other questions such as who is God and what is the Holy Spirit? Very quickly, though, I came to learn that just about all of my questions had multiple answers depending upon who was answering the question. What I learned is that throughout the history of the Church, faithful men and women have wrestled with their faith, struggling to know this God made known to us in Christ. What I learned as we gathered each day for chapel, is that praying together is what is important and not your theory of the atonement.
In baptism, we acknowledge one Lord and one faith. Once baptized, we belong to Christ. Christ never belongs to us. Faithful folk will not always understand and interpret our faith in Christ in the same way and one of the Church’s saddest legacies are the divisions that are caused when we see things differently. We can see things differently and we can still worship together. And that is the bold dream of the Anglican communion, a communion with many members who do not see things the same way but are convicted that common prayer is more important than a common theology.
We live in a culture that dislikes disagreement, seeks to go along to get along and disdains any form of exclusion. In the midst of that culture, we the Church read the Bible on Sunday and not the Koran, welcome new members by baptism and not just a handshake, and seek to live into a mystery that has been handed down to us by folk long gone. We can and we do disagree, we do believe that baptism makes a difference and we strive for truth before harmony. We, the Church, are counter-cultural, always have been and, God willing, always will be.
When I gathered with my colleagues from across the diocese at Shrine Mont this past week, I was showered by love, showered by the love of priests from high churches and low churches and all manner in between, showered by love from folk whose theology fits neatly with mine and by those whose theology is a bit of a rub. I came away lifted up by prayer not theology. I came away knowing I am loved.
We can and we should seek to understand our claims of faith. But when adult ed ends on any given Sunday morning, the real work of the Church begins. The real work of the Church is worship, not theologizing. Worshipping together is our witness, our witness in a world that prefers to be with folk who all think alike, delighting more in harmony than seeking after truth. When we break bread together beside folk who do not see things the same way we do, we are bearing witness to our Lord who lived and died not just for us but for the sake of the whole world.
The Fifth Sunday of Easter Acts 7: 55 – 60
Sunday, May 18, 2014 I Peter 2: 2 – 10
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 14: 1 - 14
Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.
John 14: 1
We hear a reading from the gospel of John this morning which is often read at funerals:
‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.
These words are comforting when we say goodbye to those we love, comforting because although the dead are no longer with us, the dead remain, in death as in life, with God.
Jesus speaks these words to the disciples on the eve of his death, assuring his friends whom he loves, that although he is going away he will be with them again. The bond of love which Jesus shares with the disciples will not be broken by death. These are words of love, a love which will abide even though Jesus will no longer be physically present with the disciples. “I love you,” Jesus says, “and I will always love you.”
But Thomas wants to know where Jesus is going. I asked the same question just moments after A.G. died. “Where are you?” I wondered aloud. His body was with me, but he was no longer with me. A.G. had been away from me many times before, at work, visiting family and friends, and running errands. But this absence was peculiar and bewildering because I did not know where he was.
Jesus is going to “his Father’s house,” which is not a place but a different reality altogether. Our New Testament writers used a variety of phrases to describe that new reality calling it “the kingdom of God,” “the kingdom of heaven,” and “the heavenly Jerusalem.” In the Father’s house or in the kingdom of God, “God will be all in all,” in the words of Saint Paul; “mourning and crying and pain will be no more,” in the words of Revelation. The place to which Jesus is going is not a location but a way of being, a being with God, fully and completely and forever.
“And you know the way to the place where I am going,” Jesus tells the troubled disciples. The way into this new reality is the way of Jesus, the way of self-giving love. Walk in my way, my truth and my life, Jesus encourages the disciples, and you will find your way into the kingdom of God.
“Believe in God, believe also in me,” Jesus bids the disciples. Presbyterian preacher, Nanette Sawyer writes:
In comforting them, Jesus tells his disciples to trust. Many translations use the English word “believe” for the Greek pisteuo, but we have so flattened this word that it conveys to most listeners the sense of intellectual assent. Pisteuo has more of a connotation of trust and fidelity. It’s a relationship thing, not an intellectual thing.
Jesus tells his followers that they are not going to lose him, but to the disciples this is crazy talk. Look, they say, you’re going to be gone, separate from us, and we don’t know how to find you! In the disciples’ reactions I see the panic of imminent loss and abandonment, but Jesus never slackens in his offer of comfort and teaching.
Jesus tells them to trust in God and trust in him. He also implicitly tells them to trust in themselves and in their relationship. “You do know the way,” he asserts. “I am the way,” and you know me. Trust yourself to know what you know. Trust what we have done here together. Keep doing it. Keep loving each other as I have loved you. You know God, because you know me. You know the way, because you know me. Trust yourselves, trust me, trust God.
For Sawyer, Jesus’ words are the language of love, a love that will continue to give life to the disciples even when Jesus is gone. The love of God made known to us in Christ can be trusted.
Which is why in the Episcopal Church, we are baptized just once in our lives. Baptism establishes a bond between us and God and that bond, once established, is, in the words of The Book of Common Prayer “indissoluble.” The bond between us and God that is created at our baptism cannot be broken because God establishes that bond and God can be trusted to keep God’s promises even when we fail to keep ours. Once baptized, we belong to God forever. We may, and we do, re-affirm our baptismal promises, but we are baptized only once and “marked as Christ’s own forever.” In other words, in the words of Saint Paul, “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”
Yet, if Jesus’ words are words of love and comfort, how are we to understand Jesus’ declaration: “No one comes to the Father except through me”? Do those words mean that all the rooms in the Father’s house are reserved for Christians only? What happens to Jews and Muslims and those who have never heard the good news of Christ?
For our evangelist John, there is but one house and one God. John, like his Jewish ancestors, was a monotheist. One God created the world and one God loves the world. And for our evangelist, human beings once walked with God “in the cool of the evening” in the Garden of Eden, enjoying friendship with God. Then along came a snake and humankind lost that relationship of friendship and trust. For John, as for his Jewish brothers and sisters, our way back to God has been lost and only God can restore the relationship Adam and Eve once enjoyed. That we cannot by ourselves, find our way to God, does not sit well in a culture that scoffs at evil and sin and that resists the notion that we are fallen creatures who live in a fallen creation. That, for John, is a fundamental truth. Our evangelist John is preaching “good news” to a people who are in darkness and who have now received a great light.
On the other hand, John also knows that beginning with Abraham, God set about restoring that lost relationship. God did take the initiative, calling forth a people to be God’s people. That God, the God who loves God’s creation and all of us, and who promised that God would make of Abraham “a great nation,” is the same God we come to know in Jesus. Jesus is not a different God, but the perfect reflection of the one God who created us, who loves us, and who promised to Abraham that through Abraham, God was restoring the relationship between humankind and God that was lost by Adam and Eve. Jesus, for John, is not one of many ways to God, but is the way, the perfect image of God.
For our evangelist, all of humankind was created for relationship with one God, all of humankind have lost that relationship, and we have now been given the good news that a way has been by made by God to restore that relationship. “The text affirms that all who come to God come to the God who has revealed himself in Christ. The text does not claim that adherents of all other religions are doomed if they do not make a personal confession of faith in Jesus before they die,” in the words of theologians Fred Craddock and Eugene Boring. Our evangelist John is neither a fundamentalist who condemns others nor is he a relativist who sees Jesus as one of many ways to God. What John wants is that we all might be brought to trust in the love of the God who created us and loves us still.
Our claims of faith are particular and are not the same as those of Jews or Buddhists or Muslims. But our claims of faith should make us humble, not arrogant, as we acknowledge that God reached out to us in Jesus, not the other way round.
This past Wednesday, I realized that a motion sensor that turned on a post lamp that welcomed me as I drove up my driveway in the dark was not working. I investigated the motion sensor and discovered wires attached to the device. Wires bring me pause and I consulted You Tube. Which led me to the panel box, which manifested no blown fuses. Which led me to query the vestry Thursday night about possible causes. Perhaps a GFI is the culprit, which they patiently explained was a “ground fault indicator.” And I went home and checked all the “GFI’s.” Still nothing worked. On Saturday, Gary Gravatt came to carry my motorcycle to a shop for needed repairs and I inquired of him: “What’s wrong?” Turns out, after Gary checked all of my outside sockets and found none of them to be working, we were both flummoxed.
I will need to call an electrician. Our evangelist John never presumed that we would be able to do all things but always believed we knew all things. And what we know is that the love of God made known to us in Christ will not abandon a woman with five husbands at a well nor a man born blind nor even Lazarus, four days dead in the grave. What we know is that the love of God reaches far beyond our limited ways of knowing.
Believe in God, believe also in me. Trust that God loves you and me and the electrician who may be able to unfold the mysteries of my outdoor sockets. And give thanks, for me and for you and for lights that do not work and for folk who may be able to fix them. In all things give thanks to God, the God we have come to know in Christ.
Sunday, May 18, 2014 I Peter 2: 2 – 10
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 14: 1 - 14
Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me.
John 14: 1
We hear a reading from the gospel of John this morning which is often read at funerals:
‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.
These words are comforting when we say goodbye to those we love, comforting because although the dead are no longer with us, the dead remain, in death as in life, with God.
Jesus speaks these words to the disciples on the eve of his death, assuring his friends whom he loves, that although he is going away he will be with them again. The bond of love which Jesus shares with the disciples will not be broken by death. These are words of love, a love which will abide even though Jesus will no longer be physically present with the disciples. “I love you,” Jesus says, “and I will always love you.”
But Thomas wants to know where Jesus is going. I asked the same question just moments after A.G. died. “Where are you?” I wondered aloud. His body was with me, but he was no longer with me. A.G. had been away from me many times before, at work, visiting family and friends, and running errands. But this absence was peculiar and bewildering because I did not know where he was.
Jesus is going to “his Father’s house,” which is not a place but a different reality altogether. Our New Testament writers used a variety of phrases to describe that new reality calling it “the kingdom of God,” “the kingdom of heaven,” and “the heavenly Jerusalem.” In the Father’s house or in the kingdom of God, “God will be all in all,” in the words of Saint Paul; “mourning and crying and pain will be no more,” in the words of Revelation. The place to which Jesus is going is not a location but a way of being, a being with God, fully and completely and forever.
“And you know the way to the place where I am going,” Jesus tells the troubled disciples. The way into this new reality is the way of Jesus, the way of self-giving love. Walk in my way, my truth and my life, Jesus encourages the disciples, and you will find your way into the kingdom of God.
“Believe in God, believe also in me,” Jesus bids the disciples. Presbyterian preacher, Nanette Sawyer writes:
In comforting them, Jesus tells his disciples to trust. Many translations use the English word “believe” for the Greek pisteuo, but we have so flattened this word that it conveys to most listeners the sense of intellectual assent. Pisteuo has more of a connotation of trust and fidelity. It’s a relationship thing, not an intellectual thing.
Jesus tells his followers that they are not going to lose him, but to the disciples this is crazy talk. Look, they say, you’re going to be gone, separate from us, and we don’t know how to find you! In the disciples’ reactions I see the panic of imminent loss and abandonment, but Jesus never slackens in his offer of comfort and teaching.
Jesus tells them to trust in God and trust in him. He also implicitly tells them to trust in themselves and in their relationship. “You do know the way,” he asserts. “I am the way,” and you know me. Trust yourself to know what you know. Trust what we have done here together. Keep doing it. Keep loving each other as I have loved you. You know God, because you know me. You know the way, because you know me. Trust yourselves, trust me, trust God.
For Sawyer, Jesus’ words are the language of love, a love that will continue to give life to the disciples even when Jesus is gone. The love of God made known to us in Christ can be trusted.
Which is why in the Episcopal Church, we are baptized just once in our lives. Baptism establishes a bond between us and God and that bond, once established, is, in the words of The Book of Common Prayer “indissoluble.” The bond between us and God that is created at our baptism cannot be broken because God establishes that bond and God can be trusted to keep God’s promises even when we fail to keep ours. Once baptized, we belong to God forever. We may, and we do, re-affirm our baptismal promises, but we are baptized only once and “marked as Christ’s own forever.” In other words, in the words of Saint Paul, “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.”
Yet, if Jesus’ words are words of love and comfort, how are we to understand Jesus’ declaration: “No one comes to the Father except through me”? Do those words mean that all the rooms in the Father’s house are reserved for Christians only? What happens to Jews and Muslims and those who have never heard the good news of Christ?
For our evangelist John, there is but one house and one God. John, like his Jewish ancestors, was a monotheist. One God created the world and one God loves the world. And for our evangelist, human beings once walked with God “in the cool of the evening” in the Garden of Eden, enjoying friendship with God. Then along came a snake and humankind lost that relationship of friendship and trust. For John, as for his Jewish brothers and sisters, our way back to God has been lost and only God can restore the relationship Adam and Eve once enjoyed. That we cannot by ourselves, find our way to God, does not sit well in a culture that scoffs at evil and sin and that resists the notion that we are fallen creatures who live in a fallen creation. That, for John, is a fundamental truth. Our evangelist John is preaching “good news” to a people who are in darkness and who have now received a great light.
On the other hand, John also knows that beginning with Abraham, God set about restoring that lost relationship. God did take the initiative, calling forth a people to be God’s people. That God, the God who loves God’s creation and all of us, and who promised that God would make of Abraham “a great nation,” is the same God we come to know in Jesus. Jesus is not a different God, but the perfect reflection of the one God who created us, who loves us, and who promised to Abraham that through Abraham, God was restoring the relationship between humankind and God that was lost by Adam and Eve. Jesus, for John, is not one of many ways to God, but is the way, the perfect image of God.
For our evangelist, all of humankind was created for relationship with one God, all of humankind have lost that relationship, and we have now been given the good news that a way has been by made by God to restore that relationship. “The text affirms that all who come to God come to the God who has revealed himself in Christ. The text does not claim that adherents of all other religions are doomed if they do not make a personal confession of faith in Jesus before they die,” in the words of theologians Fred Craddock and Eugene Boring. Our evangelist John is neither a fundamentalist who condemns others nor is he a relativist who sees Jesus as one of many ways to God. What John wants is that we all might be brought to trust in the love of the God who created us and loves us still.
Our claims of faith are particular and are not the same as those of Jews or Buddhists or Muslims. But our claims of faith should make us humble, not arrogant, as we acknowledge that God reached out to us in Jesus, not the other way round.
This past Wednesday, I realized that a motion sensor that turned on a post lamp that welcomed me as I drove up my driveway in the dark was not working. I investigated the motion sensor and discovered wires attached to the device. Wires bring me pause and I consulted You Tube. Which led me to the panel box, which manifested no blown fuses. Which led me to query the vestry Thursday night about possible causes. Perhaps a GFI is the culprit, which they patiently explained was a “ground fault indicator.” And I went home and checked all the “GFI’s.” Still nothing worked. On Saturday, Gary Gravatt came to carry my motorcycle to a shop for needed repairs and I inquired of him: “What’s wrong?” Turns out, after Gary checked all of my outside sockets and found none of them to be working, we were both flummoxed.
I will need to call an electrician. Our evangelist John never presumed that we would be able to do all things but always believed we knew all things. And what we know is that the love of God made known to us in Christ will not abandon a woman with five husbands at a well nor a man born blind nor even Lazarus, four days dead in the grave. What we know is that the love of God reaches far beyond our limited ways of knowing.
Believe in God, believe also in me. Trust that God loves you and me and the electrician who may be able to unfold the mysteries of my outdoor sockets. And give thanks, for me and for you and for lights that do not work and for folk who may be able to fix them. In all things give thanks to God, the God we have come to know in Christ.
The Sixth Sunday of Easter Acts 17: 22 – 31
Sunday, May 25, 2014 I Peter 3: 13 – 2
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 14: 15 - 21
“Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you,”
I Peter 3: 15b
“Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you,” we hear this morning in our reading from the First Letter of Peter. And in our reading from the Book of Acts, we hear Paul accounting for his hope that one day, Christ will come again and make all things new. Finally, in our gospel reading, on the eve of his crucifixion, we hear Jesus promise the disciples that they will receive another Advocate, the Spirit of truth, the Holy Spirit.
Hope looms large in our readings this morning. First Paul gives hope to religious Greeks, struggling to know an unknowable God. To the people of Athens, Paul proclaims that the God they seek has now been revealed in the person of Christ, who God has raised from the dead. Then Peter (or more probably a disciple of Peter) gives hope to churches struggling to exist in the Roman Empire at the close of the first century to trust in their baptism by which they are now numbered among the righteous. And lastly, Jesus gives hope to the disciples, the hope that they will not be orphaned after his death, but will receive another Advocate, the Spirit of truth.
The hope which Peter and Paul proclaim so boldly this morning is the conviction that the resurrection is the beginning of a brave new world, a world transformed by the love of God and which God has not abandoned and will never forsake. The hope which Peter and Paul proclaim so boldly this morning bears witness to what God has done and looks forward to what God will do in the future. The hope of Peter and Paul is hope in God, not in themselves.
And because the hope of Peter and Paul was in God and not in themselves, Peter and Paul could be a little less anxious about what happened to them, less fearful that the changes and chances of this life would overwhelm them, more willing to risk doing things differently as they sought to pass on the hope they had received, to a world that often is more frightened than hopeful.
Recently, I have fallen prey to the temptation to hope in myself, to hope that nothing breaks in the house that I cannot fix, to hope that nothing comes in the mail that I do not understand, to hope that I will never run out of gas or have a flat tire. Those hopes unfortunately spring from fear, my fear that I will not be able to cope in my strange new world of widowhood. My world has changed, but God has not and God has not forsaken me. I will need to learn how to do some things differently, and God willing, I will.
Our hope is not that life will forever remain the same, but that our lives are hidden in God and God will bring about God’s good purposes in ways you and I will never understand. Our hope is that God will give us the grace and courage to live into God’s brave new world, a world shaped by the resurrection and the promise of new life.
This past Thursday, the ECW of the diocese of Virginia gathered in Richmond. Buck Blanchard, our missioner for outreach challenged the ECW to consider changing our name, changing our name to make ECW more accessible to young women, young women whose perspective is that ECW is for “older women.” Eyes rolled and blood pressures soared as we, all of whom were over forty, considered Buck’s audacity at suggesting that our name might be a barrier to young women. Buck is not the first to suggest that the way we do church is not working for young people and we need to consider doing things differently. Buck was being bold, bold because Buck was giving “an accounting for the hope that is within us,” a hope that includes all people and not just those of us who grew up before Facebook and Twitter.
I remember my grandmother bemoaning television advertising. She was aghast at advertisements for women’s lingerie long before Victoria’s Secret became a cultural icon. My grandmother feared that such advertisements were a manifestation of a moral laxity that would lead us all to ruin. As my grandmother got older, she did a good bit more despairing than hoping, and I wondered as a teenager, what my life in this world would be like. Was I living in the last days of a world spinning out of control?
My grandson Connor, just now age ten, is growing up in a world of computers, the internet and social media. Connor will never know a world absent “the cloud.” Connor is growing up in a world vastly different from the world in which my grandmother lived. And as Connor makes his way through this world, I trust he will always have hope, hope that, even though the world may change, God will not and will always be present for Connor to know and to love.
We, the Church, abide in an ever changing world and will be called upon to do things differently from time to time. Yesterday, I attended a 350th anniversary celebration for Cople Parish in Hague. In 1664, when Cople Parish was founded, the Church of England was the established church in Virginia and clergy were paid in pounds of tobacco. Failure to attend church was a serious offense. All of that has changed and we, who are gathered here this morning, look back with some amusement at “the ways things used to be.”
On the other hand, as we look forward and wonder about how we might do church in the twenty-first century, we can be shocked by suggestions, such as those Buck Blanchard made to the ECW, that we might have to re-package ourselves to reach our young people and those who are growing up in a digital age. We are apt to scoff at the thought of contemporary services, praise bands, Bible studies at Panera and using PayPal to pay our pledge on line.
We are the bearers of a great hope, a hope that has been passed on to us in a constantly changing world. As we move forward together, we, like our forbearers, will need to find new ways to share that hope with those who will come after us, not fearing what we might have to give up but holding fast to our hope that God will not forsake us. What God has given to us, God has given to us so that we can give it away.
As many of you know, I am technically and digitally challenged. Tweeting and texting are not as yet, a part of my skill set. I grew up with The 1928 Book of Common Prayer but have become very fond of The 1979 Book of Common Prayer. I would be challenged by a new prayer book and doubly challenged if it was only published as an E-Book. I am grateful we women no longer have to wear hats to church and grateful that forty years ago, women were admitted to the priesthood. I am grateful for all those who have shared their hope in God with me in any number of different ways, on countless occasions and down through the centuries by the words they have left behind.
That many young people find church boring and out of touch with the world in which they live saddens me. That countless folk find more meaning in reality T.V. shows than the stories of the Bible is troubling. That going to church for many is not the high point of the week but rather an unwanted disruption of an otherwise free weekend is disturbing. We simply cannot dismiss the reality that many folk are not seeing the church as a place of hope, the kind of hope that led Peter and Paul to become martyrs rather than renounce their faith in the risen Christ.
How we share our hope will challenge each and every one of us. I believe the only real mistake we can make is to do nothing, content that if church works for us that is all we need to be concerned about. We need to be concerned about those who are not here and wonder why.
Paul went to Athens because Paul had good news to share. After Paul shared his good news, we read in the following verse: “When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.’ At that point Paul left them. But some of them joined him and became believers.” Paul was not trying to save the world as Paul knew that was God’s job, not his. But Paul was sharing his hope that God would indeed bring this world back round right and that hope was grounded in the power of the God who raised Jesus from the dead. Not everyone believed Paul and some needed more time to digest what he was saying; not everyone will believe us and many of us will need to ponder and think about our claims of faith before signing on. But we do need to preach the good news, to give an accounting of the hope that is in us, at all times and in all places and in all kinds of ways – not for our sakes but for the sake of this world which God loves.
Sunday, May 25, 2014 I Peter 3: 13 – 2
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 14: 15 - 21
“Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you,”
I Peter 3: 15b
“Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you,” we hear this morning in our reading from the First Letter of Peter. And in our reading from the Book of Acts, we hear Paul accounting for his hope that one day, Christ will come again and make all things new. Finally, in our gospel reading, on the eve of his crucifixion, we hear Jesus promise the disciples that they will receive another Advocate, the Spirit of truth, the Holy Spirit.
Hope looms large in our readings this morning. First Paul gives hope to religious Greeks, struggling to know an unknowable God. To the people of Athens, Paul proclaims that the God they seek has now been revealed in the person of Christ, who God has raised from the dead. Then Peter (or more probably a disciple of Peter) gives hope to churches struggling to exist in the Roman Empire at the close of the first century to trust in their baptism by which they are now numbered among the righteous. And lastly, Jesus gives hope to the disciples, the hope that they will not be orphaned after his death, but will receive another Advocate, the Spirit of truth.
The hope which Peter and Paul proclaim so boldly this morning is the conviction that the resurrection is the beginning of a brave new world, a world transformed by the love of God and which God has not abandoned and will never forsake. The hope which Peter and Paul proclaim so boldly this morning bears witness to what God has done and looks forward to what God will do in the future. The hope of Peter and Paul is hope in God, not in themselves.
And because the hope of Peter and Paul was in God and not in themselves, Peter and Paul could be a little less anxious about what happened to them, less fearful that the changes and chances of this life would overwhelm them, more willing to risk doing things differently as they sought to pass on the hope they had received, to a world that often is more frightened than hopeful.
Recently, I have fallen prey to the temptation to hope in myself, to hope that nothing breaks in the house that I cannot fix, to hope that nothing comes in the mail that I do not understand, to hope that I will never run out of gas or have a flat tire. Those hopes unfortunately spring from fear, my fear that I will not be able to cope in my strange new world of widowhood. My world has changed, but God has not and God has not forsaken me. I will need to learn how to do some things differently, and God willing, I will.
Our hope is not that life will forever remain the same, but that our lives are hidden in God and God will bring about God’s good purposes in ways you and I will never understand. Our hope is that God will give us the grace and courage to live into God’s brave new world, a world shaped by the resurrection and the promise of new life.
This past Thursday, the ECW of the diocese of Virginia gathered in Richmond. Buck Blanchard, our missioner for outreach challenged the ECW to consider changing our name, changing our name to make ECW more accessible to young women, young women whose perspective is that ECW is for “older women.” Eyes rolled and blood pressures soared as we, all of whom were over forty, considered Buck’s audacity at suggesting that our name might be a barrier to young women. Buck is not the first to suggest that the way we do church is not working for young people and we need to consider doing things differently. Buck was being bold, bold because Buck was giving “an accounting for the hope that is within us,” a hope that includes all people and not just those of us who grew up before Facebook and Twitter.
I remember my grandmother bemoaning television advertising. She was aghast at advertisements for women’s lingerie long before Victoria’s Secret became a cultural icon. My grandmother feared that such advertisements were a manifestation of a moral laxity that would lead us all to ruin. As my grandmother got older, she did a good bit more despairing than hoping, and I wondered as a teenager, what my life in this world would be like. Was I living in the last days of a world spinning out of control?
My grandson Connor, just now age ten, is growing up in a world of computers, the internet and social media. Connor will never know a world absent “the cloud.” Connor is growing up in a world vastly different from the world in which my grandmother lived. And as Connor makes his way through this world, I trust he will always have hope, hope that, even though the world may change, God will not and will always be present for Connor to know and to love.
We, the Church, abide in an ever changing world and will be called upon to do things differently from time to time. Yesterday, I attended a 350th anniversary celebration for Cople Parish in Hague. In 1664, when Cople Parish was founded, the Church of England was the established church in Virginia and clergy were paid in pounds of tobacco. Failure to attend church was a serious offense. All of that has changed and we, who are gathered here this morning, look back with some amusement at “the ways things used to be.”
On the other hand, as we look forward and wonder about how we might do church in the twenty-first century, we can be shocked by suggestions, such as those Buck Blanchard made to the ECW, that we might have to re-package ourselves to reach our young people and those who are growing up in a digital age. We are apt to scoff at the thought of contemporary services, praise bands, Bible studies at Panera and using PayPal to pay our pledge on line.
We are the bearers of a great hope, a hope that has been passed on to us in a constantly changing world. As we move forward together, we, like our forbearers, will need to find new ways to share that hope with those who will come after us, not fearing what we might have to give up but holding fast to our hope that God will not forsake us. What God has given to us, God has given to us so that we can give it away.
As many of you know, I am technically and digitally challenged. Tweeting and texting are not as yet, a part of my skill set. I grew up with The 1928 Book of Common Prayer but have become very fond of The 1979 Book of Common Prayer. I would be challenged by a new prayer book and doubly challenged if it was only published as an E-Book. I am grateful we women no longer have to wear hats to church and grateful that forty years ago, women were admitted to the priesthood. I am grateful for all those who have shared their hope in God with me in any number of different ways, on countless occasions and down through the centuries by the words they have left behind.
That many young people find church boring and out of touch with the world in which they live saddens me. That countless folk find more meaning in reality T.V. shows than the stories of the Bible is troubling. That going to church for many is not the high point of the week but rather an unwanted disruption of an otherwise free weekend is disturbing. We simply cannot dismiss the reality that many folk are not seeing the church as a place of hope, the kind of hope that led Peter and Paul to become martyrs rather than renounce their faith in the risen Christ.
How we share our hope will challenge each and every one of us. I believe the only real mistake we can make is to do nothing, content that if church works for us that is all we need to be concerned about. We need to be concerned about those who are not here and wonder why.
Paul went to Athens because Paul had good news to share. After Paul shared his good news, we read in the following verse: “When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed; but others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.’ At that point Paul left them. But some of them joined him and became believers.” Paul was not trying to save the world as Paul knew that was God’s job, not his. But Paul was sharing his hope that God would indeed bring this world back round right and that hope was grounded in the power of the God who raised Jesus from the dead. Not everyone believed Paul and some needed more time to digest what he was saying; not everyone will believe us and many of us will need to ponder and think about our claims of faith before signing on. But we do need to preach the good news, to give an accounting of the hope that is in us, at all times and in all places and in all kinds of ways – not for our sakes but for the sake of this world which God loves.
The Seventh Sunday After Easter Acts 1: 6 – 14
Sunday, June 1, 2014 I Peter 4: 12 – 14; 5: 6 – 11
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 17: 1 – 11
Jesus looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you.”
John 17: 1
We hear, on this the last Sunday in Easter, Jesus pray: “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you.” Our text comes from the gospel of John on the night before Jesus dies. On this night, Jesus gathers with his disciples for a last supper. During this last supper, if you remember from the liturgy of Maundy Thursday during Holy Week, Jesus washes the disciples’ feet and commands them to do the same.
In the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, at the last supper, Jesus institutes the Eucharist, telling the disciples to remember him through the breaking of bread and the sharing of wine. But in the gospel of John, Jesus tells the disciples to “love one another as I have loved you,” and washes their feet. For our evangelist John, the washing of feet not the breaking of bread grounds the disciples’ common life.
And now, as this supper in the gospel of John comes to an end, Jesus prays to his Father. And unlike the other gospels, Jesus is not in anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying that “this cup might pass” but sounds victorious as Jesus acknowledges that his work has been finished and the glory of his Father has been made known through him.
In the gospel of John, a gospel in which Jesus has turned water into wine, fed the multitudes with five loaves of bread and two fish, walked on water and raised Lazarus from the dead – all signs of God’s glory – the crucifixion is the last and ultimate sign of the glory of God revealed through Jesus. The crucifixion completes Jesus’ work of “making God known.”
“Glory” is not a word most of us would associate with the crucifixion. Jesus’ death on the cross was intended by the Romans who nailed him there to deter any would be revolutionaries from disturbing the peace, as Jesus had clearly done. Crucifixion was a humiliating death, as the condemned was stripped and hung for hours along a public road for all to see, to slowly and painfully suffocate. “Glory” suggests something of triumph and worthy of praise; crucifixion meant condemnation and failure.
Commenting on our text for this day, the Lutheran professor of New Testament Craig Koester writes: “If the signs reveal God’s glory by displaying divine power, the crucifixion reveals God’s glory by conveying divine love. The crucifixion completes Jesus’ work of glorifying God on earth, for by laying down his life he gives himself completely so that the world may know of Jesus’ love for God and God’s love for the world… The crucifixion manifests the scope of divine power by disclosing the depth of divine love.”
“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” Jesus has just told the disciples at their last meal together. For our evangelist John, Jesus’ death is an offering made in love, the return of all that the Father had given to the Son, the completion of Jesus’ work in the name of his Father on earth.
Koester concludes provocatively: “If glory defines what the crucifixion is, the crucifixion defines what glory is.” The word for “glory” is δοξα in Greek and can mean splendor and power and praise; δοξα is the root for doxology, the hymn of praise we sing as we offer up our gifts before the Eucharist. How might we re-imagine the glory of God in light of the crucifixion?
This week my sister who lives in Wisconsin came to visit and our time together was glorious. My sister is a lot of fun and we spent our time moving between visits to the lawyer and the continuing journey with the business of death and buying a retro trash can for a bathroom. On Wednesday, just as I was begging off the ECM meeting, I learned a surprise birthday party had been planned that night for me and that was glorious, but I almost missed it!
“Glorious” is an adjective that comes to mind when strolling through the gardens of the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens in spring; hearing Handel’s Messiah performed by the Richmond Symphony at Christmas time; and watching the sun come up over a calm sea. Glorious, for sure, would have been Jesus’ miraculous transformation of water into wine at the wedding in Cana; glorious would been that afternoon on a hillside, when the crowds ate their fill from just a few fish and a couple of loaves of bread; glorious would be to receive your sight after being born blind. Glorious is the word we use to describe those “over the top moments” we never expected.
Glorious was not a word that came to my mind very often this past fall and winter. Glorious was a not a word I would have used to describe the journey from our move to Caroline County and then into heart surgery, rehab and back and forth to MCV. Glorious is, though, a word I would use to describe the last two weeks of A.G.’s life as folk came to visit, A.G. enjoyed a coconut cream pie baked by Michelle Mason and ice cream dripped off the faces of our young grandchildren one Saturday as our children cooked hamburgers on the grill. I and A.G. saw glory but we saw that glory in the midst of death.
Something is glorious because that something is good; our evangelist John pushes us this morning to see hidden in this horror of crucifixion, the very, the ultimate display of God’s love. You and I are wont to draw back, to recoil when our evangelist John invites us to see the crucifixion as a, indeed “the,” revelation of the glory of God. Remember Peter on Maundy Thursday – on that night Peter was horrified that Jesus wanted to wash his feet. Now Jesus is going to his death and Jesus is dying so that the world will know the depth of God’s love.
Today ends our Easter celebration. Next Sunday is Pentecost and I hope Pentecost will be a grand celebration. Next Sunday we will be celebrating our 60th anniversary in this building and Lydia Carmine’s baptism. But for the most part we are now thrust into a long season of green, ordinary time we call it in the church, not a lot of fanfare, no great celebrations, just life on the road. I have no idea where God will lead us during the next six months, the time between now and the beginning of Advent. What I know is that during this “ordinary” season, God will make Godself known in ways we will enjoy and delight in; what I also know is that during this time we will experience difficult and painful times, times of crucifixion, times when the glory of God will be veiled from us.
Our evangelist John is giving all of us a bit of a heads up this morning; the time to come will not be like the time that has passed. The paschal candle is going back to the sacristy next Sunday. Jesus will no longer being turning water into wine, raising the dead, feeding the multitudes, or giving sight to the blind. For sure, we are not on our own, Jesus is leaving us with an “Advocate,” but the long season of Pentecost will not always appear glorious. Jesus takes leave today, his work on earth is finished and our work begins.
The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all give us a different picture of Jesus; in the gospel of John we meet a Jesus who was not born in a stable but who was with God before the world began and returns to God when his work on earth is finished. Jesus’ work on earth in the gospel of John is to reveal the God who sent him. On the cross, the God who loves the world and who wishes that the wine at a wedding never run out, the blind might see, and the hungry be fed is supremely revealed as a God who will withhold nothing, not even God’s own life for us. The Jesus of John’s gospel is the King of Glory and we, who worship this King of Glory, are now sent into the world to show forth God’s glory, the glory of God made known to us as we give ourselves away, loving others as God loves us. May God sustain and strengthen us all by the power of the Holy Spirit as we take up our holy calling in the months to come.
Sunday, June 1, 2014 I Peter 4: 12 – 14; 5: 6 – 11
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 17: 1 – 11
Jesus looked up to heaven and said, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you.”
John 17: 1
We hear, on this the last Sunday in Easter, Jesus pray: “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you.” Our text comes from the gospel of John on the night before Jesus dies. On this night, Jesus gathers with his disciples for a last supper. During this last supper, if you remember from the liturgy of Maundy Thursday during Holy Week, Jesus washes the disciples’ feet and commands them to do the same.
In the gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, at the last supper, Jesus institutes the Eucharist, telling the disciples to remember him through the breaking of bread and the sharing of wine. But in the gospel of John, Jesus tells the disciples to “love one another as I have loved you,” and washes their feet. For our evangelist John, the washing of feet not the breaking of bread grounds the disciples’ common life.
And now, as this supper in the gospel of John comes to an end, Jesus prays to his Father. And unlike the other gospels, Jesus is not in anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane, praying that “this cup might pass” but sounds victorious as Jesus acknowledges that his work has been finished and the glory of his Father has been made known through him.
In the gospel of John, a gospel in which Jesus has turned water into wine, fed the multitudes with five loaves of bread and two fish, walked on water and raised Lazarus from the dead – all signs of God’s glory – the crucifixion is the last and ultimate sign of the glory of God revealed through Jesus. The crucifixion completes Jesus’ work of “making God known.”
“Glory” is not a word most of us would associate with the crucifixion. Jesus’ death on the cross was intended by the Romans who nailed him there to deter any would be revolutionaries from disturbing the peace, as Jesus had clearly done. Crucifixion was a humiliating death, as the condemned was stripped and hung for hours along a public road for all to see, to slowly and painfully suffocate. “Glory” suggests something of triumph and worthy of praise; crucifixion meant condemnation and failure.
Commenting on our text for this day, the Lutheran professor of New Testament Craig Koester writes: “If the signs reveal God’s glory by displaying divine power, the crucifixion reveals God’s glory by conveying divine love. The crucifixion completes Jesus’ work of glorifying God on earth, for by laying down his life he gives himself completely so that the world may know of Jesus’ love for God and God’s love for the world… The crucifixion manifests the scope of divine power by disclosing the depth of divine love.”
“No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” Jesus has just told the disciples at their last meal together. For our evangelist John, Jesus’ death is an offering made in love, the return of all that the Father had given to the Son, the completion of Jesus’ work in the name of his Father on earth.
Koester concludes provocatively: “If glory defines what the crucifixion is, the crucifixion defines what glory is.” The word for “glory” is δοξα in Greek and can mean splendor and power and praise; δοξα is the root for doxology, the hymn of praise we sing as we offer up our gifts before the Eucharist. How might we re-imagine the glory of God in light of the crucifixion?
This week my sister who lives in Wisconsin came to visit and our time together was glorious. My sister is a lot of fun and we spent our time moving between visits to the lawyer and the continuing journey with the business of death and buying a retro trash can for a bathroom. On Wednesday, just as I was begging off the ECM meeting, I learned a surprise birthday party had been planned that night for me and that was glorious, but I almost missed it!
“Glorious” is an adjective that comes to mind when strolling through the gardens of the Lewis Ginter Botanical Gardens in spring; hearing Handel’s Messiah performed by the Richmond Symphony at Christmas time; and watching the sun come up over a calm sea. Glorious, for sure, would have been Jesus’ miraculous transformation of water into wine at the wedding in Cana; glorious would been that afternoon on a hillside, when the crowds ate their fill from just a few fish and a couple of loaves of bread; glorious would be to receive your sight after being born blind. Glorious is the word we use to describe those “over the top moments” we never expected.
Glorious was not a word that came to my mind very often this past fall and winter. Glorious was a not a word I would have used to describe the journey from our move to Caroline County and then into heart surgery, rehab and back and forth to MCV. Glorious is, though, a word I would use to describe the last two weeks of A.G.’s life as folk came to visit, A.G. enjoyed a coconut cream pie baked by Michelle Mason and ice cream dripped off the faces of our young grandchildren one Saturday as our children cooked hamburgers on the grill. I and A.G. saw glory but we saw that glory in the midst of death.
Something is glorious because that something is good; our evangelist John pushes us this morning to see hidden in this horror of crucifixion, the very, the ultimate display of God’s love. You and I are wont to draw back, to recoil when our evangelist John invites us to see the crucifixion as a, indeed “the,” revelation of the glory of God. Remember Peter on Maundy Thursday – on that night Peter was horrified that Jesus wanted to wash his feet. Now Jesus is going to his death and Jesus is dying so that the world will know the depth of God’s love.
Today ends our Easter celebration. Next Sunday is Pentecost and I hope Pentecost will be a grand celebration. Next Sunday we will be celebrating our 60th anniversary in this building and Lydia Carmine’s baptism. But for the most part we are now thrust into a long season of green, ordinary time we call it in the church, not a lot of fanfare, no great celebrations, just life on the road. I have no idea where God will lead us during the next six months, the time between now and the beginning of Advent. What I know is that during this “ordinary” season, God will make Godself known in ways we will enjoy and delight in; what I also know is that during this time we will experience difficult and painful times, times of crucifixion, times when the glory of God will be veiled from us.
Our evangelist John is giving all of us a bit of a heads up this morning; the time to come will not be like the time that has passed. The paschal candle is going back to the sacristy next Sunday. Jesus will no longer being turning water into wine, raising the dead, feeding the multitudes, or giving sight to the blind. For sure, we are not on our own, Jesus is leaving us with an “Advocate,” but the long season of Pentecost will not always appear glorious. Jesus takes leave today, his work on earth is finished and our work begins.
The gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John all give us a different picture of Jesus; in the gospel of John we meet a Jesus who was not born in a stable but who was with God before the world began and returns to God when his work on earth is finished. Jesus’ work on earth in the gospel of John is to reveal the God who sent him. On the cross, the God who loves the world and who wishes that the wine at a wedding never run out, the blind might see, and the hungry be fed is supremely revealed as a God who will withhold nothing, not even God’s own life for us. The Jesus of John’s gospel is the King of Glory and we, who worship this King of Glory, are now sent into the world to show forth God’s glory, the glory of God made known to us as we give ourselves away, loving others as God loves us. May God sustain and strengthen us all by the power of the Holy Spirit as we take up our holy calling in the months to come.
The Day of Pentecost Acts 2: 1 – 21
Sunday, June 8, 2014 I Corinthians 12: 3b – 13
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 20: 19 – 23
Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.
John 20: 21 - 22
Today is Pentecost, the day we celebrate God’s gift of the Holy Spirit, “the Lord and giver of life,” as we say in the words of the Nicene Creed. And today as we celebrate Lydia Carmine’s baptism, the sixtieth anniversary of worship in this place and the dedication of the pavilion, we are bearing witness to the power of the Holy Spirit which moved folk sixty years ago to build this building, moved the Carmine’s to walk down Main Street one Sunday morning to find a church and moved A.G. and me to come among you four years ago. The Holy Spirit is the power of God bringing forth life and we all celebrate this day the many ways we have seen that Spirit blow through this place.
When I was growing up with The 1928 Book of Common Prayer, this day was called Whitsunday and we professed belief in the Holy Ghost, not the Holy Spirit. No one spoke much about the Holy Ghost because ghosts are scary. And back then baptisms were usually private affairs rather than communal celebrations. All that changed with The 1979 Book of Common Prayer but we are still challenged by this gift of the Holy Spirit which sounds like a rushing wind and looks like tongues of fire, we hear in our reading from Acts, moving the disciples to speak in languages other than their own. Indeed, the gift of the Holy Spirit causes some of the onlookers to accuse the disciples of being drunk!
And yet, one Sunday morning many months ago, the Carmine family walked out of their new home in Bowling Green, determined to find a church. The first church they encountered was St. Asaph’s. Dache had such a good time in Sunday School that day that he got up the following Saturday ready to go to church. Dache was sorely disappointed when his Dad told him he would have to wait one more day. Lance, Eva, Dache and Lydia have been coming ever since. That was the work of the Holy Spirit.
I stand in this pulpit this morning transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit, that Spirit that led A.G. and I into your midst and which cradled us through A.G.’s dying and death. I have seen the power of the Holy Spirit in ways I never could have imagined and preach on this Pentecost as a witness – the Holy Spirit is real and alive and well and is blowing through this place. And yes, this Spirit is scary, as this Spirit moves us into places that are uncomfortable and uncertain and risky. But the Spirit is blowing and the power of God is the power that brings us to life.
The best description of the work of the Holy Spirit I have read was from Alan Jones, former Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Jones writes that the Holy Spirit moves us to fall in love. Dache fell in love, A.G. and I fell in love with this parish and for sixty years, folk have loved this parish, this building and this community. We have three new chairs this morning - two in the church and one in the narthex – that were offered and received by the vestry recently from Carolyn Mason’s family because Carolyn loved this parish. Folk have been falling in love with this place for a very long time.
Falling in love, as we all know, is a fearsome thing. When we fall in love we become vulnerable, exposing ourselves to others for better and for worse. When we fall in love, we sign on for the long haul and the long haul is fraught with conflict and disagreement, unmet expectations and new learnings. This parish has survived many up’s and down’s and lived through any number of disagreements and conflicts and will, God willing, live through many more. That this parish has survived and now celebrates it’s sixtieth anniversary is the work of God. And that Lydia Carmine now is to be baptised into the Church and in our midst is nothing short of the work of God and a witness to the power of the Holy Spirit blowing through this place and bringing us to life.
Lydia will change us as she takes her place in the church. Lydia is growing up in an age that tweets and twitters and stays in touch through Facebook. Lydia is also growing up at a time when many store fronts in Bowling Green are empty. Lydia, unlike most of us, will not know Bowling Green as a quaint turn of the century town but rather as a town presently without a dry cleaners and few options for lunch. Lydia is taking her place in a church that is changing, in a community that is changing and in a world that is changing. I pray that we who witness Lydia’s baptism this day will support Lydia as she grows, encourage her to share her unique gifts and not draw back when Lydia, God willing, invites us to do things differently.
Our passion for this place is a good and holy thing until we bump up against someone else’s passion which may be different from ours. Some of us have a passion for music, others for teaching, organization, and others for pastoral care. Sometimes our passions sit comfortably one next to the other and sometimes those passions collide, causing moaning and groaning. I had a passion to cover our kneelers so that those who choose to kneel could do so comfortably. A.G. had a passion to be helpful as well as a desire to experience Gary Gravatt’s workshop and the kneelers got covered. I also had a passion to use bread rather than wafers in the Eucharist and that passion has resulted in crumbs in the chalice, to the dismay of our Eucharistic ministers! I understand that the mosaic over the altar was a passion for some but not for others. Today we remember, I hope with good humor, those times in our common life when the Spirit led us differently and down diverging roads. Today we celebrate, that in and through our various passions, God is at work among us, drawing us together and making us one. “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good,” we hear Saint Paul tell us this morning in our reading from the First Letter to the Corinthians.
What we remember and celebrate this day is God’s gift to us of the breath of life, the breath that brooded over the dark waters at the dawn of creation and later on the sixth day the breath God breathed into a handful of mud we affectionately call Adam - mudguy. That same breath or Spirit came to rest upon Jesus at his baptism and is now, set loose in the world, moving us to love as Jesus loved. That Spirit is always a gift to us from God and never anything we can control, manipulate or orchestrate. We have seen the work of that Spirit over and over again in this place and can only give thanks.
That same Spirit will continue to blow through, admonishing, exhorting, encouraging and always enlivening because we worship a God of life, not death. We in the twenty-first century, have the same task as did those early disciples in the first century – do not get in the way of the Spirit! Those disciples wrangled over food laws and circumcision; we wrangle over sex, money and the generation gap. But we all have been given the same Spirit to lead us and guide us and encourage us. Our task is the same as was the task of those first disciples – do not get in the way of the Spirit! That Spirit can be contrary to our druthers and will lead us into new places and like love, will leave us breathless, sometimes exasperated but always filled with a joy we will never be able to emulate, if we simply allow that Spirit to blow through our midst. That we have a common life and have had a common life for over sixty years is the work of God’s amazing, exasperating and uncontrollable Holy Spirit.
I would be remiss if I did not tell you how much this place meant to A.G. and means to me. We were changed by this place, changed from folk who liked to take care of ourselves into folk who realized we needed help and others to care for us. I came to see that the boundaries between a rector and a parish can be broken and are not fixed in stone and that the ministers of the church are all of us and not just me. A week ago my sister visited and as she experienced the fellowship at my surprise birthday party, she came away longing to find a church like St. Asaph’s. She, like me, grew up in the Episcopal Church and then followed her husband into the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, a church that never felt like home. She returned to Wisconsin at the end of the week with a dream of finding a church that would welcome her as much as had St. Asaph’s.
My family is here with me this day and they too have learned a few new things about what Church is supposed to look like. The Church and our church is a community drawn together and kept together by the power of God, a community that changes as new folk come among us and old folk keep us from forgetting our roots. You all have loved me and mine really well and we each say “Thank you.” I pray that for the next sixty years, we will keep on loving, through good times and bad, through better and worse, through times of sorrow and times of joy.
Sunday, June 8, 2014 I Corinthians 12: 3b – 13
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 20: 19 – 23
Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.
John 20: 21 - 22
Today is Pentecost, the day we celebrate God’s gift of the Holy Spirit, “the Lord and giver of life,” as we say in the words of the Nicene Creed. And today as we celebrate Lydia Carmine’s baptism, the sixtieth anniversary of worship in this place and the dedication of the pavilion, we are bearing witness to the power of the Holy Spirit which moved folk sixty years ago to build this building, moved the Carmine’s to walk down Main Street one Sunday morning to find a church and moved A.G. and me to come among you four years ago. The Holy Spirit is the power of God bringing forth life and we all celebrate this day the many ways we have seen that Spirit blow through this place.
When I was growing up with The 1928 Book of Common Prayer, this day was called Whitsunday and we professed belief in the Holy Ghost, not the Holy Spirit. No one spoke much about the Holy Ghost because ghosts are scary. And back then baptisms were usually private affairs rather than communal celebrations. All that changed with The 1979 Book of Common Prayer but we are still challenged by this gift of the Holy Spirit which sounds like a rushing wind and looks like tongues of fire, we hear in our reading from Acts, moving the disciples to speak in languages other than their own. Indeed, the gift of the Holy Spirit causes some of the onlookers to accuse the disciples of being drunk!
And yet, one Sunday morning many months ago, the Carmine family walked out of their new home in Bowling Green, determined to find a church. The first church they encountered was St. Asaph’s. Dache had such a good time in Sunday School that day that he got up the following Saturday ready to go to church. Dache was sorely disappointed when his Dad told him he would have to wait one more day. Lance, Eva, Dache and Lydia have been coming ever since. That was the work of the Holy Spirit.
I stand in this pulpit this morning transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit, that Spirit that led A.G. and I into your midst and which cradled us through A.G.’s dying and death. I have seen the power of the Holy Spirit in ways I never could have imagined and preach on this Pentecost as a witness – the Holy Spirit is real and alive and well and is blowing through this place. And yes, this Spirit is scary, as this Spirit moves us into places that are uncomfortable and uncertain and risky. But the Spirit is blowing and the power of God is the power that brings us to life.
The best description of the work of the Holy Spirit I have read was from Alan Jones, former Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. Jones writes that the Holy Spirit moves us to fall in love. Dache fell in love, A.G. and I fell in love with this parish and for sixty years, folk have loved this parish, this building and this community. We have three new chairs this morning - two in the church and one in the narthex – that were offered and received by the vestry recently from Carolyn Mason’s family because Carolyn loved this parish. Folk have been falling in love with this place for a very long time.
Falling in love, as we all know, is a fearsome thing. When we fall in love we become vulnerable, exposing ourselves to others for better and for worse. When we fall in love, we sign on for the long haul and the long haul is fraught with conflict and disagreement, unmet expectations and new learnings. This parish has survived many up’s and down’s and lived through any number of disagreements and conflicts and will, God willing, live through many more. That this parish has survived and now celebrates it’s sixtieth anniversary is the work of God. And that Lydia Carmine now is to be baptised into the Church and in our midst is nothing short of the work of God and a witness to the power of the Holy Spirit blowing through this place and bringing us to life.
Lydia will change us as she takes her place in the church. Lydia is growing up in an age that tweets and twitters and stays in touch through Facebook. Lydia is also growing up at a time when many store fronts in Bowling Green are empty. Lydia, unlike most of us, will not know Bowling Green as a quaint turn of the century town but rather as a town presently without a dry cleaners and few options for lunch. Lydia is taking her place in a church that is changing, in a community that is changing and in a world that is changing. I pray that we who witness Lydia’s baptism this day will support Lydia as she grows, encourage her to share her unique gifts and not draw back when Lydia, God willing, invites us to do things differently.
Our passion for this place is a good and holy thing until we bump up against someone else’s passion which may be different from ours. Some of us have a passion for music, others for teaching, organization, and others for pastoral care. Sometimes our passions sit comfortably one next to the other and sometimes those passions collide, causing moaning and groaning. I had a passion to cover our kneelers so that those who choose to kneel could do so comfortably. A.G. had a passion to be helpful as well as a desire to experience Gary Gravatt’s workshop and the kneelers got covered. I also had a passion to use bread rather than wafers in the Eucharist and that passion has resulted in crumbs in the chalice, to the dismay of our Eucharistic ministers! I understand that the mosaic over the altar was a passion for some but not for others. Today we remember, I hope with good humor, those times in our common life when the Spirit led us differently and down diverging roads. Today we celebrate, that in and through our various passions, God is at work among us, drawing us together and making us one. “To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good,” we hear Saint Paul tell us this morning in our reading from the First Letter to the Corinthians.
What we remember and celebrate this day is God’s gift to us of the breath of life, the breath that brooded over the dark waters at the dawn of creation and later on the sixth day the breath God breathed into a handful of mud we affectionately call Adam - mudguy. That same breath or Spirit came to rest upon Jesus at his baptism and is now, set loose in the world, moving us to love as Jesus loved. That Spirit is always a gift to us from God and never anything we can control, manipulate or orchestrate. We have seen the work of that Spirit over and over again in this place and can only give thanks.
That same Spirit will continue to blow through, admonishing, exhorting, encouraging and always enlivening because we worship a God of life, not death. We in the twenty-first century, have the same task as did those early disciples in the first century – do not get in the way of the Spirit! Those disciples wrangled over food laws and circumcision; we wrangle over sex, money and the generation gap. But we all have been given the same Spirit to lead us and guide us and encourage us. Our task is the same as was the task of those first disciples – do not get in the way of the Spirit! That Spirit can be contrary to our druthers and will lead us into new places and like love, will leave us breathless, sometimes exasperated but always filled with a joy we will never be able to emulate, if we simply allow that Spirit to blow through our midst. That we have a common life and have had a common life for over sixty years is the work of God’s amazing, exasperating and uncontrollable Holy Spirit.
I would be remiss if I did not tell you how much this place meant to A.G. and means to me. We were changed by this place, changed from folk who liked to take care of ourselves into folk who realized we needed help and others to care for us. I came to see that the boundaries between a rector and a parish can be broken and are not fixed in stone and that the ministers of the church are all of us and not just me. A week ago my sister visited and as she experienced the fellowship at my surprise birthday party, she came away longing to find a church like St. Asaph’s. She, like me, grew up in the Episcopal Church and then followed her husband into the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, a church that never felt like home. She returned to Wisconsin at the end of the week with a dream of finding a church that would welcome her as much as had St. Asaph’s.
My family is here with me this day and they too have learned a few new things about what Church is supposed to look like. The Church and our church is a community drawn together and kept together by the power of God, a community that changes as new folk come among us and old folk keep us from forgetting our roots. You all have loved me and mine really well and we each say “Thank you.” I pray that for the next sixty years, we will keep on loving, through good times and bad, through better and worse, through times of sorrow and times of joy.
The First Sunday After Pentecost: Trinity Sunday Genesis 1: 1 – 2: 4a
Sunday, June 15, 2014 2 Corinthians 13: 11 – 13
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 28: 16 – 20
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Matthew 28: 19
Today is Trinity Sunday and while I am grateful for your presence here this morning, most of us I daresay, are not here because today is Trinity Sunday, a day that is, though, for us, a “principal feast,” ranking right up there with Christmas and Easter. Christmas and Easter are just two of seven high holy days we celebrate and today is one of them. Today we celebrate God made known to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God in Three Persons.
Trinity Sunday is a bit of a sleeper in the Episcopal Church, rarely, if ever, drawing the crowds of Christmas and Easter. And yet, on Trinity Sunday we celebrate the distinctive God we worship, the reason we are Christians and not Jews or Muslims. Today we remember and celebrate our claim of faith that God is both One and Three, suspecting perhaps, to say otherwise would constitute heresy but not necessarily feeling that this claim is something to celebrate.
And of course we would be in good company. This whole notion of the Trinity is not just hard to understand but suggests a divide between us and other people of faith, folk who do not profess faith in a Triune God. For many in the church, that divide is good reason to simply forget about the Trinity altogether. For others, the doctrine of the Trinity is the product of sterile theological debates that took place a long time ago and, while those debates may have been important then, have no relevance to the Church of the twenty-first century.
The doctrine of the Trinity is rooted in one rather immoveable phenomenon: the early church worshipped Jesus. And that was a problem. The early Christians were all Jews who knew God was One and knew that to worship anything other than this One God was idolatry. And, yet, good Jews that they were, they gathered together to worship Jesus.
For the early church “God had raised Jesus from the dead,” in the words of Saint Paul, and that meant Jesus was somehow “of God.” Just how Jesus was “of God” took centuries to articulate, but even before those theological claims were worked out, the question: “Who is God?” pressed upon those first Christians who knew God was One but who also knew that through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, this One God had been revealed in a new way.
Centuries passed before the church was able to say in 325 A.D., at a council in Nicaea, that “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,” words we say every Sunday as we repeat the ancient words of the Nicene Creed.
Not long after the creed was formulated, barbarians ransacked Rome and western civilization was plunged into the dark ages. By the time the lights came back on, the doctrine of the Trinity was nothing more than an esoteric theological dictum with “little to do with the Christian life,” in the words of Catholic laywomen Catherine LaCugna. In much of the Church, that situation continues to exist.
And yet, we are made in God’s image and, therefore, knowing something about God should make a difference to us as we seek to know ourselves. If God is an old man in the sky sending down lightning bolts every time we step out of line, we become as rigid and watchful as our image of God. If, on the other hand, God is a communion of love between Father and Son and Spirit who are distinctive Persons in relationships of mutual giving and receiving, then we are created to discover our being as particular persons, not in isolation from others, but rather with others, others who remain other than us.
As the twentieth century dawned, a young Swiss Reformed theologian was coming of age by the name of Karl Barth. Barth encountered a Church that was bankrupt, pulled on the one hand by a liberal Protestantism that privileged the goodness of man over the grace of God and by a Roman Catholicism that believed we could achieve union with God. The Church Barth encountered never blinked an eye when German nationalists sought to tell the Church what to do and what to think. For Barth, the Church had lost sight of who we are and Barth began writing and writing and writing eventually publishing his magnum opus Church Dogmatics, 6 million words altogether, in thirteen volumes, all inspired by the doctrine of the Trinity. When asked to summarize his great work, Barth told interviewers: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
Barth, who died in 1968, opened a new vista for the Church, prompting theologians to consider anew the significance of our central claim of faith: God is both One and Three. Beginning with Barth, the doctrine of the Trinity came out of the closet.
Now, not everyone in the church is inclined to believe that reclaiming this ancient confession of faith will help heal the ills that plague us. But many provocative insights have been tendered.
For some the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity is the whole notion of what we mean by the word person. If God exists as three persons in relation, and if we are made in God’s image, then who we are and how we are needs to be re-thought. We tend to think of ourselves as “individuals” who have relations. What if we cannot know who we are absent our relationships? That suggests that relationships are essential to our identity not an added extra chosen by us for our enjoyment.
And what might we do if we really believed that God was this communion of Three different Persons, Persons who are not the same? What might we do if we really believed that the ground of our being is constituted not out of sameness and “alikeness” but out of difference and otherness? In what way might we strive to build relationships with folk who are other than us, different from us, in light of a God who is constituted by difference?
And what about our understanding of freedom? Freedom for us so often translates into autonomy, being able to do whatever we choose to do. What if, given we are made in God’s image, freedom means not being free from restraints but being free to be with and for others, giving to others and receiving from others all that we are and all that we have?
All tantalizing thoughts for sure. But the point is that what we believe does make a difference. To confess a faith in a Triune God, to worship God made known to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, should make a difference to us. Too often, God is whatever we believe God should be. And your take on God and my take on God are beyond question. I want to say that our take on God as Christians, while clearly not altogether transparent and obvious, clearly makes a difference on our way of being in the world, and needs to be wrestled with. We do have a unique take on God. The Creed we confess on a Sunday morning is, shall we say, “odd.”
Barth saw a church that had forgotten who they were. I want to say we are at the same risk. We worry far too much that the claims of our faith will divide us from others and far too less about the possibility that the claims of our faith, grounded as they are in the witness of Christ, might actually bring us together. Jesus was, if you remember, about breaking boundaries not about keeping those boundaries in place. For sure, we do not all believe the same thing; but to dismiss out of hand that what we believe is wrong or irrelevant is short sighted to say the least. Perhaps the greatest challenge to all of us is trying to get a handle on what we do believe and then to move on to wondering what difference that all makes as we seek to live faithful lives.
I am grateful to those among us in the Church who are taking the time to think through the implications of the doctrine of the Trinity. I do not believe these folk are doing so with the intent of keeping faithful people apart but rather with the intent of keeping faithful people together.
I daresay Trinity Sunday probably will never pack the house so to speak. On the other hand, the God we worship is worthy of glory and praise, a peculiar God who desires to be known and out of love has made us to be creatures who can know and love God, not for our sakes, but for the sake of the whole world.
Sunday, June 15, 2014 2 Corinthians 13: 11 – 13
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 28: 16 – 20
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Matthew 28: 19
Today is Trinity Sunday and while I am grateful for your presence here this morning, most of us I daresay, are not here because today is Trinity Sunday, a day that is, though, for us, a “principal feast,” ranking right up there with Christmas and Easter. Christmas and Easter are just two of seven high holy days we celebrate and today is one of them. Today we celebrate God made known to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, One God in Three Persons.
Trinity Sunday is a bit of a sleeper in the Episcopal Church, rarely, if ever, drawing the crowds of Christmas and Easter. And yet, on Trinity Sunday we celebrate the distinctive God we worship, the reason we are Christians and not Jews or Muslims. Today we remember and celebrate our claim of faith that God is both One and Three, suspecting perhaps, to say otherwise would constitute heresy but not necessarily feeling that this claim is something to celebrate.
And of course we would be in good company. This whole notion of the Trinity is not just hard to understand but suggests a divide between us and other people of faith, folk who do not profess faith in a Triune God. For many in the church, that divide is good reason to simply forget about the Trinity altogether. For others, the doctrine of the Trinity is the product of sterile theological debates that took place a long time ago and, while those debates may have been important then, have no relevance to the Church of the twenty-first century.
The doctrine of the Trinity is rooted in one rather immoveable phenomenon: the early church worshipped Jesus. And that was a problem. The early Christians were all Jews who knew God was One and knew that to worship anything other than this One God was idolatry. And, yet, good Jews that they were, they gathered together to worship Jesus.
For the early church “God had raised Jesus from the dead,” in the words of Saint Paul, and that meant Jesus was somehow “of God.” Just how Jesus was “of God” took centuries to articulate, but even before those theological claims were worked out, the question: “Who is God?” pressed upon those first Christians who knew God was One but who also knew that through Jesus’ life, death and resurrection, this One God had been revealed in a new way.
Centuries passed before the church was able to say in 325 A.D., at a council in Nicaea, that “We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen and in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God,” words we say every Sunday as we repeat the ancient words of the Nicene Creed.
Not long after the creed was formulated, barbarians ransacked Rome and western civilization was plunged into the dark ages. By the time the lights came back on, the doctrine of the Trinity was nothing more than an esoteric theological dictum with “little to do with the Christian life,” in the words of Catholic laywomen Catherine LaCugna. In much of the Church, that situation continues to exist.
And yet, we are made in God’s image and, therefore, knowing something about God should make a difference to us as we seek to know ourselves. If God is an old man in the sky sending down lightning bolts every time we step out of line, we become as rigid and watchful as our image of God. If, on the other hand, God is a communion of love between Father and Son and Spirit who are distinctive Persons in relationships of mutual giving and receiving, then we are created to discover our being as particular persons, not in isolation from others, but rather with others, others who remain other than us.
As the twentieth century dawned, a young Swiss Reformed theologian was coming of age by the name of Karl Barth. Barth encountered a Church that was bankrupt, pulled on the one hand by a liberal Protestantism that privileged the goodness of man over the grace of God and by a Roman Catholicism that believed we could achieve union with God. The Church Barth encountered never blinked an eye when German nationalists sought to tell the Church what to do and what to think. For Barth, the Church had lost sight of who we are and Barth began writing and writing and writing eventually publishing his magnum opus Church Dogmatics, 6 million words altogether, in thirteen volumes, all inspired by the doctrine of the Trinity. When asked to summarize his great work, Barth told interviewers: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
Barth, who died in 1968, opened a new vista for the Church, prompting theologians to consider anew the significance of our central claim of faith: God is both One and Three. Beginning with Barth, the doctrine of the Trinity came out of the closet.
Now, not everyone in the church is inclined to believe that reclaiming this ancient confession of faith will help heal the ills that plague us. But many provocative insights have been tendered.
For some the significance of the doctrine of the Trinity is the whole notion of what we mean by the word person. If God exists as three persons in relation, and if we are made in God’s image, then who we are and how we are needs to be re-thought. We tend to think of ourselves as “individuals” who have relations. What if we cannot know who we are absent our relationships? That suggests that relationships are essential to our identity not an added extra chosen by us for our enjoyment.
And what might we do if we really believed that God was this communion of Three different Persons, Persons who are not the same? What might we do if we really believed that the ground of our being is constituted not out of sameness and “alikeness” but out of difference and otherness? In what way might we strive to build relationships with folk who are other than us, different from us, in light of a God who is constituted by difference?
And what about our understanding of freedom? Freedom for us so often translates into autonomy, being able to do whatever we choose to do. What if, given we are made in God’s image, freedom means not being free from restraints but being free to be with and for others, giving to others and receiving from others all that we are and all that we have?
All tantalizing thoughts for sure. But the point is that what we believe does make a difference. To confess a faith in a Triune God, to worship God made known to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, should make a difference to us. Too often, God is whatever we believe God should be. And your take on God and my take on God are beyond question. I want to say that our take on God as Christians, while clearly not altogether transparent and obvious, clearly makes a difference on our way of being in the world, and needs to be wrestled with. We do have a unique take on God. The Creed we confess on a Sunday morning is, shall we say, “odd.”
Barth saw a church that had forgotten who they were. I want to say we are at the same risk. We worry far too much that the claims of our faith will divide us from others and far too less about the possibility that the claims of our faith, grounded as they are in the witness of Christ, might actually bring us together. Jesus was, if you remember, about breaking boundaries not about keeping those boundaries in place. For sure, we do not all believe the same thing; but to dismiss out of hand that what we believe is wrong or irrelevant is short sighted to say the least. Perhaps the greatest challenge to all of us is trying to get a handle on what we do believe and then to move on to wondering what difference that all makes as we seek to live faithful lives.
I am grateful to those among us in the Church who are taking the time to think through the implications of the doctrine of the Trinity. I do not believe these folk are doing so with the intent of keeping faithful people apart but rather with the intent of keeping faithful people together.
I daresay Trinity Sunday probably will never pack the house so to speak. On the other hand, the God we worship is worthy of glory and praise, a peculiar God who desires to be known and out of love has made us to be creatures who can know and love God, not for our sakes, but for the sake of the whole world.
The Second Sunday after Pentecost Genesis 21: 8 – 21
Sunday, June 22, 2014 Romans 6: 1b – 11
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 10: 24 - 39
“Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
Matthew 10: 34
Jesus disturbs us this morning. “Do not think I have come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” Jesus, the Prince of Peace, is disturbing our peace with words that suggest Jesus is set upon destroying the bonds that bind us to our families.
The gospel of Matthew from which we read this morning was probably written toward the end of the first century for a church, now estranged from the synagogue, and worshipping Jesus in the midst of a major Roman city, perhaps Antioch in Syria. Matthew’s community was a mixed community of Jews and gentiles struggling to be faithful in a Roman world.
As Jews, Matthew’s community would have honored family ties, loyalties that are enshrined in the Ten Commandments with the commandment to honor one’s mother and father. Such sentiments were shared by their Roman overlords who understood the family as a microcosm of an orderly and harmonious society. The family was central to life for Rome, for Jews and clearly for Matthew who includes in his gospel the story of Jesus’ birth and the significance of Mary and Joseph in Jesus’ early life.
On the other hand, we also hear later in the gospel, Jesus claim his disciples as his family. “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Jesus says. “And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’” Jesus is widening the definition of family, including all those who do the will of his Father as members of his family.
So what then is Jesus seeking to disrupt and call us away from? In a Roman family the father was master of the house. Indeed, the father of a Roman family held the power of life and death over all those in his household. A Roman father could sell his children into slavery if he so desired. And when a child was born, the child had to be accepted by the father; if the father chose not to accept the child usually because of physical deformities, the baby was put outside to die. The power of a Roman father was absolute.
For Jesus, such power belongs only to God. Jesus is not attacking the family but rather seeking to call us into relationships one with another which are neither violent nor abusive nor controlling. The “peace” Jesus wants to destroy is the false peace created when power is used to keep others under control. That was for sure the kind of peace that Rome sought to create, crucifying anyone who disrupted the pax Romana, the peace of Rome.
Theologian John Dominic Crossan writes: “The family is society in miniature, the place where we first and most deeply learn how to love and be loved, help and be helped, abuse and be abused…since it involves power, it invites the abuse of power, and it is at that precise point that Jesus attacks it.” Families are intended by God to be schools of love and places of safety, within which the power of each of its members is to be used to help and not harm, to bind up and not tear down, to heal and not wound.
We all know the havoc that is wrecked when a family experiences abuse, neglect or is dominated by someone who must always have things their way. At those times, “the peace of good people,” in the words of commentator Brian Terrell, is a false peace if those folk choose not to raise a fuss, attempting to go along to get along, stay out of trouble and not rock the boat. Every now and again we do need to raise the metaphorical sword in the name of the Prince of Peace.
The abuse of power is a serious issue in our families, in our culture and in the church. Power is a good thing, enabling us to act on behalf of ourselves and others. We all have power whether that power comes from our age or gender, our social position or bank account, our level of education or health or lack thereof. We all have ways we can “throw our weight around.” What we have is not the issue; what we choose to do with what we have is the issue. We can use what we have to intimidate, control or dominate others. Or we can use what we have to help, lift up, and support others. We all have power; what we choose to do with our power is up to us.
This morning in our Old Testament reading from Genesis, Sarah uses her power as Abraham’s wife to cast out their slave girl Hagar and her young son Ishmael. God had promised a child to Abraham and Sarah, but when Sarah failed to conceive, Abraham had a child by his slave Hagar and named him Ishmael. Later, Sarah did conceive, giving birth to Isaac, the child God had promised to Abraham but whose birth came along a whole lot later than Abraham and Sarah had anticipated. Now Sarah is fearful that Ishmael will inherit what belongs to her son Isaac and wants Abraham to cast Hagar and Ishmael out. And Abraham does, sending Hagar to take care of her herself and her son in an unwelcoming wilderness. It was Sarah’s idea when she remained barren that her husband Abraham try for a child with Hagar and Abraham did. But now Sarah is jealous and uses her power to get rid of Hagar and her son. Abraham obliges, God agrees, but refuses to abandon Hagar and her son Ishmael. God does not withhold God’s care from any of us, no matter how wrong headed we might be.
The church is a fragile place and easily broken apart as we all know by hurt feelings, wounded egos and abuses of power. Some of the time the wounds are gaping such as those that came to light in the wake of the Catholic Church’s revelation of child sexual abuse by priests. Other wounds are less noticeable as when we gather and gossip about those in our church family. Or when we resist the ideas of others simply because those ideas are new and “we have never done that before.” We all have the power to destroy our particular churches and we all have the power to keep this local incarnation of the Church growing and thriving.
I was proud of myself this week as I bought and returned two filing cabinets that arrived damaged from Staples, secured a contractor to check out my heat pumps, closed out a credit card in A.G.’s name and opened one in my own name. I was grieved to check the box marked “single” on an application for dental insurance and deeply appreciative that my children are helping me mightily. My next door neighbor is cutting my grass and his daughter just graduated from Caroline High School with all kinds of honors and is headed off to college. And when the lights in Bowling Green went out Thursday night, Susan White called to see if I was O.K. I have all kinds of things to be grateful for, am flexing some muscles I did not know I had and appreciating just how much we need the support of family and friends. What I am learning is that I can do things I never thought I could and those are gifts to me from God. What I am also learning is how much we need one another.
Our need for one another is God ordained for God said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” The sword Christ wields this morning is meant to cut apart relationships that are built upon control and domination rather than freedom and service. We are not to be afraid of one another and we are quite free to disagree. What we are not free to do is to murder others in our hearts or vote others off the island. We are to cherish one another because God has bound us together through the water of baptism. And water, contra popular wisdom, is thicker than blood.
We follow a Lord that was accused by many as being in league with the Devil, whose family thought he was mad and who went to his death abandoned by his friends. And never once did Jesus stop loving friend and enemy alike. Whatever peace Jesus knew came from his Father in heaven, not from his circumstances on earth. And we who follow this Lord, will not always be at peace with life in this world, nor should we be, for life in this world is often harsh, cruel and unjust. The Romans made peace by crucifying their enemies of which our Lord was one. Jesus made peace by commending his enemies into God’s care. You and I who follow this crucified Lord are called to do the same, loving our neighbors as ourselves be they friend or foe, always speaking the truth in love in the words of Saint Paul, but wielding the sword of Christ whenever we encounter an abuse of power which seeks to dominate and control others.
Sunday, June 22, 2014 Romans 6: 1b – 11
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 10: 24 - 39
“Do not think I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.”
Matthew 10: 34
Jesus disturbs us this morning. “Do not think I have come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” Jesus, the Prince of Peace, is disturbing our peace with words that suggest Jesus is set upon destroying the bonds that bind us to our families.
The gospel of Matthew from which we read this morning was probably written toward the end of the first century for a church, now estranged from the synagogue, and worshipping Jesus in the midst of a major Roman city, perhaps Antioch in Syria. Matthew’s community was a mixed community of Jews and gentiles struggling to be faithful in a Roman world.
As Jews, Matthew’s community would have honored family ties, loyalties that are enshrined in the Ten Commandments with the commandment to honor one’s mother and father. Such sentiments were shared by their Roman overlords who understood the family as a microcosm of an orderly and harmonious society. The family was central to life for Rome, for Jews and clearly for Matthew who includes in his gospel the story of Jesus’ birth and the significance of Mary and Joseph in Jesus’ early life.
On the other hand, we also hear later in the gospel, Jesus claim his disciples as his family. “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Jesus says. “And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’” Jesus is widening the definition of family, including all those who do the will of his Father as members of his family.
So what then is Jesus seeking to disrupt and call us away from? In a Roman family the father was master of the house. Indeed, the father of a Roman family held the power of life and death over all those in his household. A Roman father could sell his children into slavery if he so desired. And when a child was born, the child had to be accepted by the father; if the father chose not to accept the child usually because of physical deformities, the baby was put outside to die. The power of a Roman father was absolute.
For Jesus, such power belongs only to God. Jesus is not attacking the family but rather seeking to call us into relationships one with another which are neither violent nor abusive nor controlling. The “peace” Jesus wants to destroy is the false peace created when power is used to keep others under control. That was for sure the kind of peace that Rome sought to create, crucifying anyone who disrupted the pax Romana, the peace of Rome.
Theologian John Dominic Crossan writes: “The family is society in miniature, the place where we first and most deeply learn how to love and be loved, help and be helped, abuse and be abused…since it involves power, it invites the abuse of power, and it is at that precise point that Jesus attacks it.” Families are intended by God to be schools of love and places of safety, within which the power of each of its members is to be used to help and not harm, to bind up and not tear down, to heal and not wound.
We all know the havoc that is wrecked when a family experiences abuse, neglect or is dominated by someone who must always have things their way. At those times, “the peace of good people,” in the words of commentator Brian Terrell, is a false peace if those folk choose not to raise a fuss, attempting to go along to get along, stay out of trouble and not rock the boat. Every now and again we do need to raise the metaphorical sword in the name of the Prince of Peace.
The abuse of power is a serious issue in our families, in our culture and in the church. Power is a good thing, enabling us to act on behalf of ourselves and others. We all have power whether that power comes from our age or gender, our social position or bank account, our level of education or health or lack thereof. We all have ways we can “throw our weight around.” What we have is not the issue; what we choose to do with what we have is the issue. We can use what we have to intimidate, control or dominate others. Or we can use what we have to help, lift up, and support others. We all have power; what we choose to do with our power is up to us.
This morning in our Old Testament reading from Genesis, Sarah uses her power as Abraham’s wife to cast out their slave girl Hagar and her young son Ishmael. God had promised a child to Abraham and Sarah, but when Sarah failed to conceive, Abraham had a child by his slave Hagar and named him Ishmael. Later, Sarah did conceive, giving birth to Isaac, the child God had promised to Abraham but whose birth came along a whole lot later than Abraham and Sarah had anticipated. Now Sarah is fearful that Ishmael will inherit what belongs to her son Isaac and wants Abraham to cast Hagar and Ishmael out. And Abraham does, sending Hagar to take care of her herself and her son in an unwelcoming wilderness. It was Sarah’s idea when she remained barren that her husband Abraham try for a child with Hagar and Abraham did. But now Sarah is jealous and uses her power to get rid of Hagar and her son. Abraham obliges, God agrees, but refuses to abandon Hagar and her son Ishmael. God does not withhold God’s care from any of us, no matter how wrong headed we might be.
The church is a fragile place and easily broken apart as we all know by hurt feelings, wounded egos and abuses of power. Some of the time the wounds are gaping such as those that came to light in the wake of the Catholic Church’s revelation of child sexual abuse by priests. Other wounds are less noticeable as when we gather and gossip about those in our church family. Or when we resist the ideas of others simply because those ideas are new and “we have never done that before.” We all have the power to destroy our particular churches and we all have the power to keep this local incarnation of the Church growing and thriving.
I was proud of myself this week as I bought and returned two filing cabinets that arrived damaged from Staples, secured a contractor to check out my heat pumps, closed out a credit card in A.G.’s name and opened one in my own name. I was grieved to check the box marked “single” on an application for dental insurance and deeply appreciative that my children are helping me mightily. My next door neighbor is cutting my grass and his daughter just graduated from Caroline High School with all kinds of honors and is headed off to college. And when the lights in Bowling Green went out Thursday night, Susan White called to see if I was O.K. I have all kinds of things to be grateful for, am flexing some muscles I did not know I had and appreciating just how much we need the support of family and friends. What I am learning is that I can do things I never thought I could and those are gifts to me from God. What I am also learning is how much we need one another.
Our need for one another is God ordained for God said, “It is not good for man to be alone.” The sword Christ wields this morning is meant to cut apart relationships that are built upon control and domination rather than freedom and service. We are not to be afraid of one another and we are quite free to disagree. What we are not free to do is to murder others in our hearts or vote others off the island. We are to cherish one another because God has bound us together through the water of baptism. And water, contra popular wisdom, is thicker than blood.
We follow a Lord that was accused by many as being in league with the Devil, whose family thought he was mad and who went to his death abandoned by his friends. And never once did Jesus stop loving friend and enemy alike. Whatever peace Jesus knew came from his Father in heaven, not from his circumstances on earth. And we who follow this Lord, will not always be at peace with life in this world, nor should we be, for life in this world is often harsh, cruel and unjust. The Romans made peace by crucifying their enemies of which our Lord was one. Jesus made peace by commending his enemies into God’s care. You and I who follow this crucified Lord are called to do the same, loving our neighbors as ourselves be they friend or foe, always speaking the truth in love in the words of Saint Paul, but wielding the sword of Christ whenever we encounter an abuse of power which seeks to dominate and control others.
The Fifth Sunday after Pentecost Genesis 25: 19 – 34
Sunday, July 13, 2014 Romans 8: 1 – 11
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 13: 1 – 9. 18 – 23
And he told them may things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow.”
Matthew 13: 3
Seeds fall in our gospel reading from Matthew this morning but not all of them bear fruit. Birds, rocks and thorns work to keep seeds from doing what seeds are supposed to do – bear fruit. But some seeds do bear fruit, a goodly amount of fruit, and these are the seeds that fall into good soil.
We hear this morning the parable of the Sower, a parable not only in the gospel according to Matthew but also in the gospel of Mark and Luke. And we also hear an interpretation of the parable – an explanation of what the parable means for us. The seed is the “word of the kingdom” and some hear this word and do not understand, others hear but cannot endure when times get tough, and still others hear this word but are consumed by the cares and concerns of the world. Word of the kingdom of God falls all over the place, taking root and bearing fruit in some hearts but not in others.
Matthew was writing his gospel at a time when the church was new but deeply aware of her Jewish roots. Matthew wrote after the Jews revolted against Rome and the Temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. Matthew was writing at a time when Jews were struggling to maintain their faith in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple and found those who called themselves “Christians” to be too far outside the box to be included any longer in their fellowship. Matthew’s community was struggling to survive and wondering in large part, if indeed God had come in Jesus, why the whole world, and their Jewish brothers and sisters, in particular, were not more welcoming. If God had come in Jesus, why did the people who were long awaiting God’s arrival not leave the synagogues and come to the church?
In the parable of the sower, Jesus likens the sowing of God’s word to the sowing of seed, which does not always fall on fertile ground. When the word of the kingdom falls on good soil, though, the yields are impressive. For Matthew’s community struggling to survive in the Roman Empire and no longer welcome in the synagogues, that interpretation would have been encouraging. Seeds do not always land in friendly places but those that do, bear fruit and abundant fruit.
In 1977, theologian William Vanstone wrote a brief essay entitled The Risk of Love. In that essay, Vanstone makes the observation that we can never know what the outcome of our loving will be. Whenever we love authentically, we never know whether we will be loved in return or spurned. Authentic love, love that loves no matter what, love that does not seek to control, and love that refuses to remain aloof from pain, is an act that takes place without any guarantees our love will be returned. Love, for Vanstone can issue either in triumph or tragedy and those who love authentically will never know beforehand whether or not their love will be returned. I learned that lesson for the first time in high school when my high school sweetheart asked for his ring back after I broke my nose! For many and varied reasons, loving someone does not guarantee they will love us in return. Sometimes the seeds of love fall on unfertile ground.
The sower this morning simply is sowing seed, with full knowledge, as do most sowers, that some seeds will not germinate nor bear fruit. But sow, the sower does. The sower, like God, loves feely and unconditionally, making “his sun rise on the evil and the good,” and sending rain “on the righteous and the unrighteous,” our evangelist tells us in his gospel. Sowing seed, like loving, does not always guarantee that seed will grow or love will be returned.
God is an indiscriminate sower and an indiscriminate lover. And when the word of God came in the person of Jesus, many Jews turned away from this man who challenged their traditions, leaving a fledgling church to wonder about the ways and works of God. In the parable of the sower, Jesus draws upon a natural reality to explain a spiritual truth – in Jesus, God showed forth his love for all of us but left us free to respond in love or not.
The sower keeps sowing, spreading seed not just upon good soil but on the path where the birds come and eat the seed, on rocky ground in which no roots can grow, and among thorns which will choke out the new plants. The sower does not limit where his seed falls, even though the sower knows all seeds will not germinate. The sower’s job is to sow seed without limit, knowing some seed will flourish and some will not.
We all need to love and to be loved. But we can no more make someone love us anymore than we can make a two year old sit still. To be loved is a glorious experience, an experience I hope none of us who have been loved will ever take for granted. To be loved authentically, for who we are and not as someone hopes we will be, to be loved through thick and thin, and to be loved with the sensitivity that suffers when we suffer, is to be loved in the way God loves us. Such love is rare and is always a gift.
Love is risky and we live in a risk adverse culture. We are reluctant to love with careless abandon for fear we may be exploited or manipulated or spurned. Love puts us at the mercy of another and others will not always respond to our love with love. Unlike the sower in our parable, we would prefer to limit the seeds we sow to those places where we know the seeds will grow, loving those who we know will not hurt us. Loving a stranger puts us at risk and we would prefer to limit our exposure.
We are not so different from the crowds who gathered by the Sea of Galilee two thousand years ago to hear Jesus preach. Some in that crowd were probably simply curious about this young Jewish carpenter who was creating a bit of a stir. Others were hoping that Jesus would lead a revolution against Rome and return Israel to her former glory. Only a few actually followed this man, leaving homes and families. Yet, from those few, the church was born, bearing witness from that day to this, to the life, death and resurrection of a man whose ministry was just three short years. God had sown a seed that brought forth fruit.
Why did not everyone in that great crowd fall in love with this man who healed the sick, gave sight to the blind and proclaimed that the kingdom of God had come among them? Jesus, by all accounts, took his family, his friends and his Jewish tradition by surprise. Jesus did not advocate revolt against Rome, overturned tables in the sacred Temple and fellowshipped with prostitutes. Jesus called those who followed him to leave their livelihoods and wander with him through the land, preaching the good news of the kingdom of God and learning to love one another as much as he loved them.
Jesus’ family thought he was mad, the zealots were disappointed and the Jewish hierarchy shocked. And when Jesus died on the cross, no one believed Jesus was the Messiah sent by God to bring this world back round right. The wonder is not that all in that great crowd did not believe Jesus was God’s promised Messiah; the wonder is that some few did.
Jesus left behind no writings – no books, no letters, no emails – and what you and I have received in the New Testament is open to all kinds of interpretation. The New Testament texts are written in Greek and do not translate into English simply. We also have multiple manuscripts and manuscripts that differ one from another. What Jesus actually said and did has been the subject of debate among scholars for centuries.
What we know is that Jesus loved and loved well, especially those folk others found “strange.” What we know is that Jesus would sacrifice everything, even his own life, rather than keep from following the God he called “Father.” What we know is that we are very good at protecting ourselves, limiting our exposure and are not inclined to love others the way Jesus did.
If you have ever been loved well, think on that this day. Remember what you experienced when someone loved you, if even for a moment, for who you are and not for who they wanted you to be; remember times when someone loved you enough to share your burdens with you and cry with you when you needed to cry; remember times when someone was willing to walk with you into a mystery you could not understand and not give you easy answers. Remember when you have been loved well and go in peace to do the same.
Sunday, July 13, 2014 Romans 8: 1 – 11
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 13: 1 – 9. 18 – 23
And he told them may things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow.”
Matthew 13: 3
Seeds fall in our gospel reading from Matthew this morning but not all of them bear fruit. Birds, rocks and thorns work to keep seeds from doing what seeds are supposed to do – bear fruit. But some seeds do bear fruit, a goodly amount of fruit, and these are the seeds that fall into good soil.
We hear this morning the parable of the Sower, a parable not only in the gospel according to Matthew but also in the gospel of Mark and Luke. And we also hear an interpretation of the parable – an explanation of what the parable means for us. The seed is the “word of the kingdom” and some hear this word and do not understand, others hear but cannot endure when times get tough, and still others hear this word but are consumed by the cares and concerns of the world. Word of the kingdom of God falls all over the place, taking root and bearing fruit in some hearts but not in others.
Matthew was writing his gospel at a time when the church was new but deeply aware of her Jewish roots. Matthew wrote after the Jews revolted against Rome and the Temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. Matthew was writing at a time when Jews were struggling to maintain their faith in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple and found those who called themselves “Christians” to be too far outside the box to be included any longer in their fellowship. Matthew’s community was struggling to survive and wondering in large part, if indeed God had come in Jesus, why the whole world, and their Jewish brothers and sisters, in particular, were not more welcoming. If God had come in Jesus, why did the people who were long awaiting God’s arrival not leave the synagogues and come to the church?
In the parable of the sower, Jesus likens the sowing of God’s word to the sowing of seed, which does not always fall on fertile ground. When the word of the kingdom falls on good soil, though, the yields are impressive. For Matthew’s community struggling to survive in the Roman Empire and no longer welcome in the synagogues, that interpretation would have been encouraging. Seeds do not always land in friendly places but those that do, bear fruit and abundant fruit.
In 1977, theologian William Vanstone wrote a brief essay entitled The Risk of Love. In that essay, Vanstone makes the observation that we can never know what the outcome of our loving will be. Whenever we love authentically, we never know whether we will be loved in return or spurned. Authentic love, love that loves no matter what, love that does not seek to control, and love that refuses to remain aloof from pain, is an act that takes place without any guarantees our love will be returned. Love, for Vanstone can issue either in triumph or tragedy and those who love authentically will never know beforehand whether or not their love will be returned. I learned that lesson for the first time in high school when my high school sweetheart asked for his ring back after I broke my nose! For many and varied reasons, loving someone does not guarantee they will love us in return. Sometimes the seeds of love fall on unfertile ground.
The sower this morning simply is sowing seed, with full knowledge, as do most sowers, that some seeds will not germinate nor bear fruit. But sow, the sower does. The sower, like God, loves feely and unconditionally, making “his sun rise on the evil and the good,” and sending rain “on the righteous and the unrighteous,” our evangelist tells us in his gospel. Sowing seed, like loving, does not always guarantee that seed will grow or love will be returned.
God is an indiscriminate sower and an indiscriminate lover. And when the word of God came in the person of Jesus, many Jews turned away from this man who challenged their traditions, leaving a fledgling church to wonder about the ways and works of God. In the parable of the sower, Jesus draws upon a natural reality to explain a spiritual truth – in Jesus, God showed forth his love for all of us but left us free to respond in love or not.
The sower keeps sowing, spreading seed not just upon good soil but on the path where the birds come and eat the seed, on rocky ground in which no roots can grow, and among thorns which will choke out the new plants. The sower does not limit where his seed falls, even though the sower knows all seeds will not germinate. The sower’s job is to sow seed without limit, knowing some seed will flourish and some will not.
We all need to love and to be loved. But we can no more make someone love us anymore than we can make a two year old sit still. To be loved is a glorious experience, an experience I hope none of us who have been loved will ever take for granted. To be loved authentically, for who we are and not as someone hopes we will be, to be loved through thick and thin, and to be loved with the sensitivity that suffers when we suffer, is to be loved in the way God loves us. Such love is rare and is always a gift.
Love is risky and we live in a risk adverse culture. We are reluctant to love with careless abandon for fear we may be exploited or manipulated or spurned. Love puts us at the mercy of another and others will not always respond to our love with love. Unlike the sower in our parable, we would prefer to limit the seeds we sow to those places where we know the seeds will grow, loving those who we know will not hurt us. Loving a stranger puts us at risk and we would prefer to limit our exposure.
We are not so different from the crowds who gathered by the Sea of Galilee two thousand years ago to hear Jesus preach. Some in that crowd were probably simply curious about this young Jewish carpenter who was creating a bit of a stir. Others were hoping that Jesus would lead a revolution against Rome and return Israel to her former glory. Only a few actually followed this man, leaving homes and families. Yet, from those few, the church was born, bearing witness from that day to this, to the life, death and resurrection of a man whose ministry was just three short years. God had sown a seed that brought forth fruit.
Why did not everyone in that great crowd fall in love with this man who healed the sick, gave sight to the blind and proclaimed that the kingdom of God had come among them? Jesus, by all accounts, took his family, his friends and his Jewish tradition by surprise. Jesus did not advocate revolt against Rome, overturned tables in the sacred Temple and fellowshipped with prostitutes. Jesus called those who followed him to leave their livelihoods and wander with him through the land, preaching the good news of the kingdom of God and learning to love one another as much as he loved them.
Jesus’ family thought he was mad, the zealots were disappointed and the Jewish hierarchy shocked. And when Jesus died on the cross, no one believed Jesus was the Messiah sent by God to bring this world back round right. The wonder is not that all in that great crowd did not believe Jesus was God’s promised Messiah; the wonder is that some few did.
Jesus left behind no writings – no books, no letters, no emails – and what you and I have received in the New Testament is open to all kinds of interpretation. The New Testament texts are written in Greek and do not translate into English simply. We also have multiple manuscripts and manuscripts that differ one from another. What Jesus actually said and did has been the subject of debate among scholars for centuries.
What we know is that Jesus loved and loved well, especially those folk others found “strange.” What we know is that Jesus would sacrifice everything, even his own life, rather than keep from following the God he called “Father.” What we know is that we are very good at protecting ourselves, limiting our exposure and are not inclined to love others the way Jesus did.
If you have ever been loved well, think on that this day. Remember what you experienced when someone loved you, if even for a moment, for who you are and not for who they wanted you to be; remember times when someone loved you enough to share your burdens with you and cry with you when you needed to cry; remember times when someone was willing to walk with you into a mystery you could not understand and not give you easy answers. Remember when you have been loved well and go in peace to do the same.
The Sixth Sunday after Pentecost Genesis 28: 10 – 19a
Sunday, July 20, 2014 Romans 8: 12 – 25
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 13: 24 – 30, 36 – 43
“Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
Matthew 28: 15
In our Old Testament reading this morning, Jacob has a dream. Jacobs dreams of a ladder poised between heaven and earth with angels scurrying back and forth. And Jacob hears God telling him: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” In Jacob’s dream, the hope of heaven has come to earth and the tribulations of earth have been heard in heaven.
When we meet Jacob this morning, Jacob is fleeing for his life. Jacob has tricked his brother Esau out of Esau’s birthright and Esau is intent on killing Jacob. Jacob and Esau were the twin sons of Isaac and his wife Rebekah, but Esau was born first. First born sons inherited what belonged to their father and what belonged to Esau’s father Isaac was significant.
Isaac had a significant worldly estate but Isaac also had a substantial spiritual estate for Isaac was the child of the promise. Born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, Isaac was the promised child of God, the first fruits of a promise God made to Abraham when God chose Abraham to begin the healing of God’s very good world which was rent asunder when Eve trusted a snake. When God called Abraham, God promised Abraham that Abraham would have a great family, a land flowing with milk and honey and the assurance that Abraham’s family would be a blessing to all the families of the earth.
That earthy and spiritual estate belonged properly to Esau. But Jacob, his brother, was a schemer and a trickster, and by a cruel deception, as his father lay dying, connived his father into giving Jacob the blessing that belonged to Esau, the first born. When Esau learned that Jacob had cheated him, Esau was out for blood.
And now Jacob is fleeing for his life. And Jacob has a dream. Jacob dreams of a ladder poised between heaven and earth and sees angels ascending and descending.
And the Lord stood beside him and said, ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’
In a dream God gives Jacob the promise of God’s presence, God’s protection and the assurance that through Jacob’s family, the whole world will be blessed. All this is given to a man who is a cheat, a liar and a trickster. No wonder Jacob wakes up and is afraid!
Our story this morning is a part of a great cycle of stories in the book of Genesis, about how God set about to heal the world after Adam and Eve fell from grace. God begins by calling Abraham, promising Abraham a land, a family and the assurance that through Abraham’s family the whole world will be blessed. And then God calls Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, pulling a ram out of a thicket at the last second and Isaac is saved. And now, God passes on to Jacob the promise God made to Abraham, blessing Jacob who cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright, a man few of us would trust to bring our dreams to fruition. God will honor God’s promises but I daresay God will do so in ways that defy all logic.
Jacob goes to sleep afraid for his life and wakes with the assurance that all will be well. Jacob goes to sleep fearing for his life, fleeing from the wrath of his brother. Jacob goes to sleep a hunted man in exile and wakes assured God will make a home for him, the same home God promised to his grandfather Abraham after Adam and Eve were cast out from the garden of Eden.
The story we hear this morning which we often refer to as the story of Jacob’s ladder is really the story of God’s ladder, of God’s desire to bring heaven to earth. Heaven is not a geographical place but the kingdom or realm of God, a kingdom of beauty, truth and goodness. Likewise, earth is not a geographical place but the space in which we live, a mixed space of beauty and ugliness, of truth and falsehood, of goodness and badness. One day, God promises all will be good and true and beautiful, but that day has yet to come.
But for now, Jacob dreams of a ladder between heaven and earth, between God’s space and our space, and in the midst of his fear, his deceit and his treachery, God touches down. And God touches down to honor God’s promise to Jacob’s grandfather Abraham that Abraham’s family would be a blessing to the whole world, even though Jacob has no right to that promise and blessing.
And when Jacob awakes, Jacob builds a shrine, a shrine to mark and to remember the blessing Jacob received that night, a blessing he did not deserve but which God deigned to give Jacob to further God’s purposes.
Heaven and earth – God’s space and our space – do connect from time to time. And when God’s space intersects our space, we are, like Jacob, overwhelmed and awed. Heaven and earth do meet from time to time and we can be mystified.
I am not a mystic and not much of a dreamer but I have seen many things in this world I simply do not understand. I remember a call I received many years ago when I was the chaplain on call at MCV from a Presbyterian pastor who had a parishioner in the hospital. The minister wanted to know what I thought about visions and I said I was not sure. His parishioner was a transplant patient, several times over, and had defied all medical prognoses. And she was having visions of angels surrounding her bed. Would I visit her, he asked, and if I did, he wondered would I call in psychiatry?
I did visit her and I learned that her visions were a comfort not a threat. She seemed sane to me and graced by a reality I had trouble seeing. And when her kidney failed and her pastor offered to give her one of his, I met them early before the surgery and offered a prayer. We are not given to understand all things.
I am convinced that God’s world and our world do intersect – in art, music, poetry, in literature, nature, science, dreams, and especially in and through relationships of love. God seeks us out in any number of ways and we have only to respond with thanksgiving. God seeks us out, as God sought Jacob, not solely for our comfort and consolation but that we, like Jacob, might be the bearers of blessing to others.
Our text does not tell us why God chose Jacob to bear God’s promise forward. Esau deserved the blessing, not Jacob. Jacob is, in the words of Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann, “a fugitive,” a person “in exile” who receives from God in a dream the promise of homecoming. Centuries later, King Herod sought to kill a child who had been born in Bethlehem. And in a dream, an angel comes to Joseph telling Joseph to take the baby and his mother and flee to Egypt. Joseph responded, and God’s promise moved forward in the life of Jesus, who in the gospel of Matthew is named “Emmanuel” which means “God is with us.”
God is with us in many and mysterious ways, seeking us out, inviting us to envision a world made new – a kingdom of goodness and truth and beauty. And when we catch a glimpse of that brave new world, we are called to share that good news with others, all others.
For the kingdom, the power, and the glory, are not ours but God’s, now and forever.
Sunday, July 20, 2014 Romans 8: 12 – 25
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 13: 24 – 30, 36 – 43
“Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.”
Matthew 28: 15
In our Old Testament reading this morning, Jacob has a dream. Jacobs dreams of a ladder poised between heaven and earth with angels scurrying back and forth. And Jacob hears God telling him: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” In Jacob’s dream, the hope of heaven has come to earth and the tribulations of earth have been heard in heaven.
When we meet Jacob this morning, Jacob is fleeing for his life. Jacob has tricked his brother Esau out of Esau’s birthright and Esau is intent on killing Jacob. Jacob and Esau were the twin sons of Isaac and his wife Rebekah, but Esau was born first. First born sons inherited what belonged to their father and what belonged to Esau’s father Isaac was significant.
Isaac had a significant worldly estate but Isaac also had a substantial spiritual estate for Isaac was the child of the promise. Born to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, Isaac was the promised child of God, the first fruits of a promise God made to Abraham when God chose Abraham to begin the healing of God’s very good world which was rent asunder when Eve trusted a snake. When God called Abraham, God promised Abraham that Abraham would have a great family, a land flowing with milk and honey and the assurance that Abraham’s family would be a blessing to all the families of the earth.
That earthy and spiritual estate belonged properly to Esau. But Jacob, his brother, was a schemer and a trickster, and by a cruel deception, as his father lay dying, connived his father into giving Jacob the blessing that belonged to Esau, the first born. When Esau learned that Jacob had cheated him, Esau was out for blood.
And now Jacob is fleeing for his life. And Jacob has a dream. Jacob dreams of a ladder poised between heaven and earth and sees angels ascending and descending.
And the Lord stood beside him and said, ‘I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring; and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south; and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go, and will bring you back to this land; for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.’
In a dream God gives Jacob the promise of God’s presence, God’s protection and the assurance that through Jacob’s family, the whole world will be blessed. All this is given to a man who is a cheat, a liar and a trickster. No wonder Jacob wakes up and is afraid!
Our story this morning is a part of a great cycle of stories in the book of Genesis, about how God set about to heal the world after Adam and Eve fell from grace. God begins by calling Abraham, promising Abraham a land, a family and the assurance that through Abraham’s family the whole world will be blessed. And then God calls Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, pulling a ram out of a thicket at the last second and Isaac is saved. And now, God passes on to Jacob the promise God made to Abraham, blessing Jacob who cheated his brother Esau out of his birthright, a man few of us would trust to bring our dreams to fruition. God will honor God’s promises but I daresay God will do so in ways that defy all logic.
Jacob goes to sleep afraid for his life and wakes with the assurance that all will be well. Jacob goes to sleep fearing for his life, fleeing from the wrath of his brother. Jacob goes to sleep a hunted man in exile and wakes assured God will make a home for him, the same home God promised to his grandfather Abraham after Adam and Eve were cast out from the garden of Eden.
The story we hear this morning which we often refer to as the story of Jacob’s ladder is really the story of God’s ladder, of God’s desire to bring heaven to earth. Heaven is not a geographical place but the kingdom or realm of God, a kingdom of beauty, truth and goodness. Likewise, earth is not a geographical place but the space in which we live, a mixed space of beauty and ugliness, of truth and falsehood, of goodness and badness. One day, God promises all will be good and true and beautiful, but that day has yet to come.
But for now, Jacob dreams of a ladder between heaven and earth, between God’s space and our space, and in the midst of his fear, his deceit and his treachery, God touches down. And God touches down to honor God’s promise to Jacob’s grandfather Abraham that Abraham’s family would be a blessing to the whole world, even though Jacob has no right to that promise and blessing.
And when Jacob awakes, Jacob builds a shrine, a shrine to mark and to remember the blessing Jacob received that night, a blessing he did not deserve but which God deigned to give Jacob to further God’s purposes.
Heaven and earth – God’s space and our space – do connect from time to time. And when God’s space intersects our space, we are, like Jacob, overwhelmed and awed. Heaven and earth do meet from time to time and we can be mystified.
I am not a mystic and not much of a dreamer but I have seen many things in this world I simply do not understand. I remember a call I received many years ago when I was the chaplain on call at MCV from a Presbyterian pastor who had a parishioner in the hospital. The minister wanted to know what I thought about visions and I said I was not sure. His parishioner was a transplant patient, several times over, and had defied all medical prognoses. And she was having visions of angels surrounding her bed. Would I visit her, he asked, and if I did, he wondered would I call in psychiatry?
I did visit her and I learned that her visions were a comfort not a threat. She seemed sane to me and graced by a reality I had trouble seeing. And when her kidney failed and her pastor offered to give her one of his, I met them early before the surgery and offered a prayer. We are not given to understand all things.
I am convinced that God’s world and our world do intersect – in art, music, poetry, in literature, nature, science, dreams, and especially in and through relationships of love. God seeks us out in any number of ways and we have only to respond with thanksgiving. God seeks us out, as God sought Jacob, not solely for our comfort and consolation but that we, like Jacob, might be the bearers of blessing to others.
Our text does not tell us why God chose Jacob to bear God’s promise forward. Esau deserved the blessing, not Jacob. Jacob is, in the words of Old Testament scholar Walter Bruggemann, “a fugitive,” a person “in exile” who receives from God in a dream the promise of homecoming. Centuries later, King Herod sought to kill a child who had been born in Bethlehem. And in a dream, an angel comes to Joseph telling Joseph to take the baby and his mother and flee to Egypt. Joseph responded, and God’s promise moved forward in the life of Jesus, who in the gospel of Matthew is named “Emmanuel” which means “God is with us.”
God is with us in many and mysterious ways, seeking us out, inviting us to envision a world made new – a kingdom of goodness and truth and beauty. And when we catch a glimpse of that brave new world, we are called to share that good news with others, all others.
For the kingdom, the power, and the glory, are not ours but God’s, now and forever.
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost Genesis 29: 15 – 28
Sunday, July 27, 2014 Romans 8: 26 – 39
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 13: 31 – 33, 44 – 52
And he said to them, ‘Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.’
Matthew 13: 52
We are given five parables about the kingdom of heaven in our reading this morning from the gospel according to Matthew – five windows onto a world made new by God. This kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that is sowed in a field ; like yeast that a woman mixes in with three measures of flour; like a treasure hidden in a field; like a pearl of great value; and like a catch of fish, some good and some not .
Each of these parables invites us to see a strange new world, a world transformed by God. Drawing upon ordinary images of sowing and baking, commerce and fishing, Jesus invites us into a world that is breaking in upon us in his life, death and resurrection. And that world, that kingdom of heaven, is not what we might expect.
In the parable of the mustard seed, a tiny seed becomes a great shrub and then a tree. The kingdom of heaven seems to start out small and then grows beyond imagining. But as all gardeners know, mustard is prolific and can become invasive, choking out other plants. In the parable of the yeast, we find a similar image of explosive power as a small bit of yeast is sufficient to leaven a great measure of flour. But, Jesus’ Jewish brothers and sisters would have remembered that yeast was also an image of uncleanness, something they were commanded to remove from their homes during the Passover. And in the parable of the treasure hidden in the field, we meet a questionable character who discovers a treasure in a field that does not belong to him and buys the field without ever alerting the owner of the hidden treasure. That treasure is so important and so valuable that this man sells everything he has in order to buy that field. Similarly, the pearl merchant sells all that he has in order to have the one pearl of great price. The lure of this kingdom is irresistible.
Finally, in the parable of the catch of fish, we discover a sorting and a separation, as good fish and bad fish are divided one from one another. Not all fish are fit to be sold; perhaps not all are able to enter into this kingdom of imperceptible beginnings and worth beyond measure.
What is this kingdom that grows from the tiniest of seeds into a great tree, that is worth more than all that you have and into which some will enter and some will not?
Perhaps we are asking the question the wrong way. This kingdom is not a “what” but a “who.” Jesus says at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” In the person of Jesus, we are given a foretaste of the kingdom of God. And Jesus was the son of a Jewish carpenter, not even a rabbi. Jesus attracted a band of followers who did give up everything to follow him, leaving homes and families and livelihoods. And after this obscure Jew died as a criminal and his tomb was found to be empty, many scoffed, saying the body had been stolen, not resurrected. The kingdom of heaven made known to us in the person of Jesus is a very strange new world.
Jesus simply did not fit the mold of a Savior and the kingdom we come to know in him does not fit the molds we often make about what heaven looks like. Jesus was all about revealing a kingdom here on earth, a kingdom that welcomed prostitutes and tax collectors, healed the sick and the lame, and inviting those who sought that kingdom to give up everything. The kingdom of heaven revealed in Jesus was a community of folk bound together by love, tasked to welcome those others rejected. The kingdom of heaven we come to see in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was not a disembodied realm of spirits enjoying a family reunion.
The kingdom of heaven revealed in the person of Jesus was not something that awaits us only after death but rather the kingdom of heaven can be anticipated now in acts of compassion, demonstrations of justice and the desire for peace among all peoples. And if God can grow a kingdom from a tiny mustard seed, then we can take heart that none of our efforts will be wasted, no matter how small. But we do need to desire that kingdom, that pearl of great price, in the here and now and not just in the hereafter.
“At the end of the age,” Jesus says, “the angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire.” The kingdom of heaven will have no room for evil, no room for suffering and no room for tears. Until that kingdom comes fully, we all live in a world haunted by evil. None of us can escape that reality and none of us ought to presume that the evil we seek to avoid is only “out there” and not lodged within our own hearts. Following Jesus will always convict us of the many ways we seek to evade the demands of the kingdom even as we seek the promise of its riches.
Jesus told parables to invite his hearers to see the world in which they lived in new and startling ways. Jesus told parables to transform his audience, not convict them of their righteousness. And Jesus told parables to good and faithful Jews whose ancient traditions he used to bring out of God’s treasure “what is new and what is old.” Jesus challenged his audience two thousand years ago and he got himself killed.
By all accounts, Jesus led a life that challenged just about everyone from his family to his religious superiors, to his disciples. Who among us would leave our homes and livelihoods to follow a man who stirred up trouble and was convicted of treason against Rome? Not everyone liked what they saw when Jesus threw open the windows onto the kingdom of heaven. And not even the disciples understood what Jesus was trying to show them. Yet, following the resurrection those few disciples continued to gather together, remembering Jesus’ words and discerning together what Jesus’ life, death and resurrection meant as they sought the kingdom Jesus had revealed to them.
Being disciples and making disciples was the task for that early community and is for us. Making sure their souls went to heaven when they died was not on the radar of the early church. Jesus had loved them and was still loving them by the power of the Holy Spirit and one day Jesus would come again and take them to himself. Those early disciples knew they had been saved, delivered from a world of suffering and death and given a glimpse of a world made new.
The kingdom of heaven had indeed come among them in the person of Jesus and now the task was to show forth the glory of that kingdom for all the world to see. The pearl of great price had been given to them to share with a world that only knew cheap imitations.
As that early community struggled to forge a common life what we know is that they took counsel together, often disagreed one with another, and sometimes even parted ways. Jesus opened a window onto a world that looked differently to different people. But everywhere in the New Testament we hear that Jesus alone is the Holy One, as we say in the Gloria, Jesus alone is the Lord and the Most High. No one in that early church ever thought “being in heaven” was anything other than being with Christ, the Holy One of God.
Nowdays, heaven is pretty much whatever we want heaven to be and often very far removed from the ministry of Jesus. Heaven can be for some drinking a beer on a beach which I am sure Jesus would have enjoyed. But heaven is so much more than that! For others, heaven is some kind of spiritual retreat center that we can connect with but which makes no difference to anyone other than us. And for many, heaven is a word with no meaning at all because all they know is what is unheavenly – poverty, war, injustice, violence and tears.
You and I have been given a window into heaven, a window opened for us by Jesus. What we see may be different for each of us but what we see is not for our personal benefit, but to be shared with those who see differently and those who cannot see at all. We have been given a pearl of great price and a treasure hidden in a field and called to be the mustard seed and the leaven that God has given to us to bring healing to our broken world. The kingdom of heaven is not about us but has been given to us to give away, freely, generously and with no thought of saving ourselves. Jesus did that a long time ago, and what Jesus did, Jesus did not just for us but for the whole world.
Sunday, July 27, 2014 Romans 8: 26 – 39
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 13: 31 – 33, 44 – 52
And he said to them, ‘Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.’
Matthew 13: 52
We are given five parables about the kingdom of heaven in our reading this morning from the gospel according to Matthew – five windows onto a world made new by God. This kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that is sowed in a field ; like yeast that a woman mixes in with three measures of flour; like a treasure hidden in a field; like a pearl of great value; and like a catch of fish, some good and some not .
Each of these parables invites us to see a strange new world, a world transformed by God. Drawing upon ordinary images of sowing and baking, commerce and fishing, Jesus invites us into a world that is breaking in upon us in his life, death and resurrection. And that world, that kingdom of heaven, is not what we might expect.
In the parable of the mustard seed, a tiny seed becomes a great shrub and then a tree. The kingdom of heaven seems to start out small and then grows beyond imagining. But as all gardeners know, mustard is prolific and can become invasive, choking out other plants. In the parable of the yeast, we find a similar image of explosive power as a small bit of yeast is sufficient to leaven a great measure of flour. But, Jesus’ Jewish brothers and sisters would have remembered that yeast was also an image of uncleanness, something they were commanded to remove from their homes during the Passover. And in the parable of the treasure hidden in the field, we meet a questionable character who discovers a treasure in a field that does not belong to him and buys the field without ever alerting the owner of the hidden treasure. That treasure is so important and so valuable that this man sells everything he has in order to buy that field. Similarly, the pearl merchant sells all that he has in order to have the one pearl of great price. The lure of this kingdom is irresistible.
Finally, in the parable of the catch of fish, we discover a sorting and a separation, as good fish and bad fish are divided one from one another. Not all fish are fit to be sold; perhaps not all are able to enter into this kingdom of imperceptible beginnings and worth beyond measure.
What is this kingdom that grows from the tiniest of seeds into a great tree, that is worth more than all that you have and into which some will enter and some will not?
Perhaps we are asking the question the wrong way. This kingdom is not a “what” but a “who.” Jesus says at the beginning of Matthew’s gospel: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” In the person of Jesus, we are given a foretaste of the kingdom of God. And Jesus was the son of a Jewish carpenter, not even a rabbi. Jesus attracted a band of followers who did give up everything to follow him, leaving homes and families and livelihoods. And after this obscure Jew died as a criminal and his tomb was found to be empty, many scoffed, saying the body had been stolen, not resurrected. The kingdom of heaven made known to us in the person of Jesus is a very strange new world.
Jesus simply did not fit the mold of a Savior and the kingdom we come to know in him does not fit the molds we often make about what heaven looks like. Jesus was all about revealing a kingdom here on earth, a kingdom that welcomed prostitutes and tax collectors, healed the sick and the lame, and inviting those who sought that kingdom to give up everything. The kingdom of heaven revealed in Jesus was a community of folk bound together by love, tasked to welcome those others rejected. The kingdom of heaven we come to see in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was not a disembodied realm of spirits enjoying a family reunion.
The kingdom of heaven revealed in the person of Jesus was not something that awaits us only after death but rather the kingdom of heaven can be anticipated now in acts of compassion, demonstrations of justice and the desire for peace among all peoples. And if God can grow a kingdom from a tiny mustard seed, then we can take heart that none of our efforts will be wasted, no matter how small. But we do need to desire that kingdom, that pearl of great price, in the here and now and not just in the hereafter.
“At the end of the age,” Jesus says, “the angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire.” The kingdom of heaven will have no room for evil, no room for suffering and no room for tears. Until that kingdom comes fully, we all live in a world haunted by evil. None of us can escape that reality and none of us ought to presume that the evil we seek to avoid is only “out there” and not lodged within our own hearts. Following Jesus will always convict us of the many ways we seek to evade the demands of the kingdom even as we seek the promise of its riches.
Jesus told parables to invite his hearers to see the world in which they lived in new and startling ways. Jesus told parables to transform his audience, not convict them of their righteousness. And Jesus told parables to good and faithful Jews whose ancient traditions he used to bring out of God’s treasure “what is new and what is old.” Jesus challenged his audience two thousand years ago and he got himself killed.
By all accounts, Jesus led a life that challenged just about everyone from his family to his religious superiors, to his disciples. Who among us would leave our homes and livelihoods to follow a man who stirred up trouble and was convicted of treason against Rome? Not everyone liked what they saw when Jesus threw open the windows onto the kingdom of heaven. And not even the disciples understood what Jesus was trying to show them. Yet, following the resurrection those few disciples continued to gather together, remembering Jesus’ words and discerning together what Jesus’ life, death and resurrection meant as they sought the kingdom Jesus had revealed to them.
Being disciples and making disciples was the task for that early community and is for us. Making sure their souls went to heaven when they died was not on the radar of the early church. Jesus had loved them and was still loving them by the power of the Holy Spirit and one day Jesus would come again and take them to himself. Those early disciples knew they had been saved, delivered from a world of suffering and death and given a glimpse of a world made new.
The kingdom of heaven had indeed come among them in the person of Jesus and now the task was to show forth the glory of that kingdom for all the world to see. The pearl of great price had been given to them to share with a world that only knew cheap imitations.
As that early community struggled to forge a common life what we know is that they took counsel together, often disagreed one with another, and sometimes even parted ways. Jesus opened a window onto a world that looked differently to different people. But everywhere in the New Testament we hear that Jesus alone is the Holy One, as we say in the Gloria, Jesus alone is the Lord and the Most High. No one in that early church ever thought “being in heaven” was anything other than being with Christ, the Holy One of God.
Nowdays, heaven is pretty much whatever we want heaven to be and often very far removed from the ministry of Jesus. Heaven can be for some drinking a beer on a beach which I am sure Jesus would have enjoyed. But heaven is so much more than that! For others, heaven is some kind of spiritual retreat center that we can connect with but which makes no difference to anyone other than us. And for many, heaven is a word with no meaning at all because all they know is what is unheavenly – poverty, war, injustice, violence and tears.
You and I have been given a window into heaven, a window opened for us by Jesus. What we see may be different for each of us but what we see is not for our personal benefit, but to be shared with those who see differently and those who cannot see at all. We have been given a pearl of great price and a treasure hidden in a field and called to be the mustard seed and the leaven that God has given to us to bring healing to our broken world. The kingdom of heaven is not about us but has been given to us to give away, freely, generously and with no thought of saving ourselves. Jesus did that a long time ago, and what Jesus did, Jesus did not just for us but for the whole world.
The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost Genesis 32: 22 – 31
Sunday, August 3, 2014 Romans 9: 1 – 5
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 14: 13 – 21
Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.
Matthew 14: 13
This week twenty people died at a United Nations shelter in Palestine when an Israeli shell hit the school. Corpses from the Malaysia airplane that was shot down two weeks ago remain unrecovered as the battle between the Ukraine and Russian separatists continues. Peace Corps volunteers are leaving Liberia following the largest recorded outbreak of the ebola virus. One million Iraqis are now refugees, having been driven away from their homes following a military takeover of that country and the people of Syria continue to be threatened by barrel bombs. The world is in crisis.
All over the world, folk are struggling to survive in the midst of chaos and confusion. Old worlds are passing away and millions of folk have been left at risk, no longer safe in places haunted by violence, hatred and disease. For sure the news this week is not new; the world has always known disease and disorder. And while most of us are not political refugees, all of us experience times when we feel “uprooted,” thrust out of a world we knew and in which we took comfort to wander for a time in a wilderness.
The wilderness was a powerful image for our ancestors in the faith. Led out of slavery in Egypt by Moses, the Israelites wandered in the wilderness of the Sinai desert for forty years. The Israelites grumbled and mumbled and longed to go back to the “fleshpots” of Egypt, where at least they had food and water. The wilderness was a place of trial and tribulation as they sought to trust the God who had called them out of slavery and promised to lead them into a land flowing with milk and honey.
In our gospel reading this morning, Jesus is in a “deserted place.” The Greek word is έρημος and means a desert or a wilderness. Jesus has just learned that King Herod beheaded John the Baptist and now “withdraws” to a deserted place by himself. This King Herod is the son of Herod the Great, who killed all the children under two in Bethlehem after learning of Jesus’ birth. The thirst for blood now continues in his son who kills John the Baptist.
Jesus has been in a deserted place before, just after Jesus was baptized by John and then led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. The wilderness was a place of trial and tribulation and now Jesus returns to that place, upon learning that his friend John has been murdered. And Jesus goes by himself.
But soon the crowds follow. Perhaps those crowds have also learned of John’s murder and are wondering what Jesus will do in the face of such gratuitous violence. Will God’s Messiah lead a revolt against Herod and his Roman overlords? Will God’s Messiah, like Moses, lead God’s people out of their Roman slavery and into freedom? Has the time come for God’s refugees to finally be home, a free people in their promised land?
What the crowds receive in that deserted place is healing of body and spirit as Jesus cures the sick and feeds the crowd abundantly with five loaves of bread and two fish. In the midst of that desolate place, God is present, sustaining God’s people just as God sustained the Israelites in the Sinai desert with manna from heaven and water from a rock. The crowd is sustained in the wilderness, not removed from the wilderness.
Commentator Richard Swanson notes that the Hebrew word for desert or wilderness is midbar, a word whose root comes from the Hebrew word dabar, meaning to speak a word. A midbar is a place “away from words,” he writes, a stark environment in which human life cannot be sustained. The desert is an inhospitable place for humankind and for most plants and animals. The desert is place without a word, the word God spoke when God spoke the creation into being in Genesis, saying “’Let there be light;’ and there was light.” The Hebrew word for desert, in other words, suggests a primeval place much like that “formless void” God spoke into being, creating a world of beauty and order and mutuality.
And now in the midst of a wilderness, a place away from words, the Word of God comes again, sustaining a hungry people with bread and fish until all were filled.
Reading the newspaper this week reminds me anew how much of our world is awash in chaos, confusion and disorder. We seem to be living in a world gone mad, spinning rapidly out of control. When our evangelist Matthew wrote his gospel his world was much the same. Folk could still remember the magnificent Jewish Temple that was nothing more after 70 A.D., than a heap of rubble. Millions of Jews had lost their lives during the Jewish revolt against Rome that began four years earlier. The world was in crisis then and is in crisis now.
And yet, Matthew affirms for us that God is with us. In the midst of desolation and destruction, in the midst of the wildernesses in which we so often find ourselves, Matthew assures us that God is present, sustaining us, bringing forth life out of death, joy out of sorrow. Indeed, Matthew affirms that Jesus, from the day of his birth, was every bit a refugee, hunted by Herod, accused by the Jewish religious leaders of breaking Jewish law and finally killed for crimes against Rome. The world in which Jesus lived and died was no more hospitable than is the world we inhabit.
The story we hear this morning of the feeding of the five thousand looks a lot like a Eucharistic celebration as Jesus takes five loaves of bread and two fish, looks up to heaven, blesses and breaks the loaves and gives them to the disciples. For two thousand years, folk have found sustenance in the breaking of bread and sharing of wine. And this morning, before we share Eucharist, we will observe the rite of healing with the laying on of hands and anointing with oil. As I lay my hands upon you I will pray: “I lay my hands upon you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, beseeching our Lord Jesus Christ to sustain you with his presence, to drive away all sickness of body and spirit, and to give you that victory of life and peace which will enable you to serve him both now and evermore. Amen.” That prayer is a change from what I usually pray on the first Sunday of the month, another option given to me in The Book of Common Prayer and more in keeping with our lesson this morning. Healing is the gift of life and peace even in the midst of chaos and death that we might know that God is with us, not against us.
We are not called to be Pollyannas’ who are blind to the angst of the world nor to the angst that grips our hearts from time to time. But neither are we called to be cynics who refuse to hope for a new day with new possibilities. We are called, as were our ancestors before us, to continue our pilgrimage through this world, sustained by God’s presence in the bread and the wine, in the oil of anointing, and by the prayers of our companions.
This week I took on a task I had been resisting. The challenge was figuring out how to make an insurance claim which required securing a number of different documents from MCV, none of which I understood. Telephone calls to the hospital’s billing department were not helpful as I did not know what exactly I was asking for and they could not give me what I did not know I needed. Did I want the hospital charges or the doctor’s charges? Did I want to speak to someone in the hospital’s billing department or the physician’s billing department? What I did learn is that MCV had no record of A.G.’s death so moving forward in any direction was impossible.
Armed with the death certificate I drove down to Richmond to the office for patient accounts. Still unable to explain very clearly what I needed, a confused receptionist called in reinforcements. A woman named Terry appeared, escorted me into her office and sat calmly as I described my dilemma and the documents I needed to file the insurance claim. Without batting an eye, she got on her computer and within minutes started to print out all the necessary paperwork I needed to file the claim. As Terry was printing out what looked like a mountain of paper, Terry told me her brother had died a month ago and that she was his twin. He had been, she said, her cheerleader, urging her to keep going when times got tough. As she spoke, I could not help thinking that this woman was now my cheerleader, helping me through a wilderness I did not understand. This one woman had given me hope that what I had perceived to be impossible for weeks may yet be doable. Terry had given me sustenance. I may never see Terry again and I have yet to file the claim so the journey continues. But there in the midst of the wilderness was a woman who gave me hope. I have no idea what her religious sentiments are but she clearly was doing the work of Jesus, feeding folk in the wilderness.
The wilderness is a scary place and this week many are meeting that place for the first time. Pray for them and for those who have thrust them into that place. Pray that God will touch down in some way and give to all of them what we seek for ourselves, the victory of life and peace.
Sunday, August 3, 2014 Romans 9: 1 – 5
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 14: 13 – 21
Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.
Matthew 14: 13
This week twenty people died at a United Nations shelter in Palestine when an Israeli shell hit the school. Corpses from the Malaysia airplane that was shot down two weeks ago remain unrecovered as the battle between the Ukraine and Russian separatists continues. Peace Corps volunteers are leaving Liberia following the largest recorded outbreak of the ebola virus. One million Iraqis are now refugees, having been driven away from their homes following a military takeover of that country and the people of Syria continue to be threatened by barrel bombs. The world is in crisis.
All over the world, folk are struggling to survive in the midst of chaos and confusion. Old worlds are passing away and millions of folk have been left at risk, no longer safe in places haunted by violence, hatred and disease. For sure the news this week is not new; the world has always known disease and disorder. And while most of us are not political refugees, all of us experience times when we feel “uprooted,” thrust out of a world we knew and in which we took comfort to wander for a time in a wilderness.
The wilderness was a powerful image for our ancestors in the faith. Led out of slavery in Egypt by Moses, the Israelites wandered in the wilderness of the Sinai desert for forty years. The Israelites grumbled and mumbled and longed to go back to the “fleshpots” of Egypt, where at least they had food and water. The wilderness was a place of trial and tribulation as they sought to trust the God who had called them out of slavery and promised to lead them into a land flowing with milk and honey.
In our gospel reading this morning, Jesus is in a “deserted place.” The Greek word is έρημος and means a desert or a wilderness. Jesus has just learned that King Herod beheaded John the Baptist and now “withdraws” to a deserted place by himself. This King Herod is the son of Herod the Great, who killed all the children under two in Bethlehem after learning of Jesus’ birth. The thirst for blood now continues in his son who kills John the Baptist.
Jesus has been in a deserted place before, just after Jesus was baptized by John and then led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by Satan. The wilderness was a place of trial and tribulation and now Jesus returns to that place, upon learning that his friend John has been murdered. And Jesus goes by himself.
But soon the crowds follow. Perhaps those crowds have also learned of John’s murder and are wondering what Jesus will do in the face of such gratuitous violence. Will God’s Messiah lead a revolt against Herod and his Roman overlords? Will God’s Messiah, like Moses, lead God’s people out of their Roman slavery and into freedom? Has the time come for God’s refugees to finally be home, a free people in their promised land?
What the crowds receive in that deserted place is healing of body and spirit as Jesus cures the sick and feeds the crowd abundantly with five loaves of bread and two fish. In the midst of that desolate place, God is present, sustaining God’s people just as God sustained the Israelites in the Sinai desert with manna from heaven and water from a rock. The crowd is sustained in the wilderness, not removed from the wilderness.
Commentator Richard Swanson notes that the Hebrew word for desert or wilderness is midbar, a word whose root comes from the Hebrew word dabar, meaning to speak a word. A midbar is a place “away from words,” he writes, a stark environment in which human life cannot be sustained. The desert is an inhospitable place for humankind and for most plants and animals. The desert is place without a word, the word God spoke when God spoke the creation into being in Genesis, saying “’Let there be light;’ and there was light.” The Hebrew word for desert, in other words, suggests a primeval place much like that “formless void” God spoke into being, creating a world of beauty and order and mutuality.
And now in the midst of a wilderness, a place away from words, the Word of God comes again, sustaining a hungry people with bread and fish until all were filled.
Reading the newspaper this week reminds me anew how much of our world is awash in chaos, confusion and disorder. We seem to be living in a world gone mad, spinning rapidly out of control. When our evangelist Matthew wrote his gospel his world was much the same. Folk could still remember the magnificent Jewish Temple that was nothing more after 70 A.D., than a heap of rubble. Millions of Jews had lost their lives during the Jewish revolt against Rome that began four years earlier. The world was in crisis then and is in crisis now.
And yet, Matthew affirms for us that God is with us. In the midst of desolation and destruction, in the midst of the wildernesses in which we so often find ourselves, Matthew assures us that God is present, sustaining us, bringing forth life out of death, joy out of sorrow. Indeed, Matthew affirms that Jesus, from the day of his birth, was every bit a refugee, hunted by Herod, accused by the Jewish religious leaders of breaking Jewish law and finally killed for crimes against Rome. The world in which Jesus lived and died was no more hospitable than is the world we inhabit.
The story we hear this morning of the feeding of the five thousand looks a lot like a Eucharistic celebration as Jesus takes five loaves of bread and two fish, looks up to heaven, blesses and breaks the loaves and gives them to the disciples. For two thousand years, folk have found sustenance in the breaking of bread and sharing of wine. And this morning, before we share Eucharist, we will observe the rite of healing with the laying on of hands and anointing with oil. As I lay my hands upon you I will pray: “I lay my hands upon you in the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, beseeching our Lord Jesus Christ to sustain you with his presence, to drive away all sickness of body and spirit, and to give you that victory of life and peace which will enable you to serve him both now and evermore. Amen.” That prayer is a change from what I usually pray on the first Sunday of the month, another option given to me in The Book of Common Prayer and more in keeping with our lesson this morning. Healing is the gift of life and peace even in the midst of chaos and death that we might know that God is with us, not against us.
We are not called to be Pollyannas’ who are blind to the angst of the world nor to the angst that grips our hearts from time to time. But neither are we called to be cynics who refuse to hope for a new day with new possibilities. We are called, as were our ancestors before us, to continue our pilgrimage through this world, sustained by God’s presence in the bread and the wine, in the oil of anointing, and by the prayers of our companions.
This week I took on a task I had been resisting. The challenge was figuring out how to make an insurance claim which required securing a number of different documents from MCV, none of which I understood. Telephone calls to the hospital’s billing department were not helpful as I did not know what exactly I was asking for and they could not give me what I did not know I needed. Did I want the hospital charges or the doctor’s charges? Did I want to speak to someone in the hospital’s billing department or the physician’s billing department? What I did learn is that MCV had no record of A.G.’s death so moving forward in any direction was impossible.
Armed with the death certificate I drove down to Richmond to the office for patient accounts. Still unable to explain very clearly what I needed, a confused receptionist called in reinforcements. A woman named Terry appeared, escorted me into her office and sat calmly as I described my dilemma and the documents I needed to file the insurance claim. Without batting an eye, she got on her computer and within minutes started to print out all the necessary paperwork I needed to file the claim. As Terry was printing out what looked like a mountain of paper, Terry told me her brother had died a month ago and that she was his twin. He had been, she said, her cheerleader, urging her to keep going when times got tough. As she spoke, I could not help thinking that this woman was now my cheerleader, helping me through a wilderness I did not understand. This one woman had given me hope that what I had perceived to be impossible for weeks may yet be doable. Terry had given me sustenance. I may never see Terry again and I have yet to file the claim so the journey continues. But there in the midst of the wilderness was a woman who gave me hope. I have no idea what her religious sentiments are but she clearly was doing the work of Jesus, feeding folk in the wilderness.
The wilderness is a scary place and this week many are meeting that place for the first time. Pray for them and for those who have thrust them into that place. Pray that God will touch down in some way and give to all of them what we seek for ourselves, the victory of life and peace.
The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost Genesis 37: 1 – 4, 12 – 28
Sunday, August 10, 2014 Romans 10: 5 – 15
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 14: 22 – 33
But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”
Matthew 14: 27
“Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Peter seems to be testing the waters this morning in our reading from the gospel of Matthew. Peter together with the other disciples is in a boat in the middle of the Sea of Galilee, battling to get to shore in the midst of a raging storm. Suddenly the disciples see Jesus walking towards them on the turbulent sea and they become terrified, presuming this figure is not real but a ghostly apparition. Immediately Jesus reassures these frightened disciples saying, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”
But Peter is reluctant to take those words to heart and proposes a test. “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” We have heard those words before. “If you are the Son of God,” Satan says to Jesus in the wilderness, “command these stones to become bread.” “If you are the Son of God,” the crowds mock as they pass by the cross, “come down from the cross.” If you Jesus are the Son of God, flex your muscles a bit so that we might believe!
“Come,” Jesus says to Peter. And Peter goes, walking on the water. Until Peter notices the strong wind, becomes afraid and begins to sink. And Jesus reaches out his hand, saving Peter from drowning. Peter tests the waters this morning only to be tested and saved.
In Matthew’s gospel, testing is a way of life. Jesus is tempted by Satan just after his baptism, the religious leaders are tested by Jesus and vice versa, the disciples are tested time and again, Pontius Pilate is tested by the crowds who demand the death of an innocent man and Jesus is tested in the Garden of Gethsemane as he prays to his Father in heaven that his crucifixion might be avoided. About the only character in the gospel of Matthew who is not tested is King Herod who kills all the children in Bethlehem under the age of two without flinching after hearing of the birth of Jesus, King of the Jews. Everyone else in the gospel of Matthew is tested - sorely, severely and persistently.
Our reading this morning comes just after the story of Jesus feeding five thousand folk in the wilderness with five loaves of bread and two fish. One would think Peter would have gotten it by now. Why does Peter need to walk on water when he has just eaten his fill with thousands from only a couple of brown bag lunches? Why can’t Peter take Jesus at his word? “It is I,” Jesus says. Isn’t that enough?
No, Peter says, now you need to enable me to walk on water. And Jesus complies. And saves Peter when he falters.
Interpretations of our text this morning often praise Peter for jumping ship noting that Peter could have kept walking on the water if only Peter had not been overwhelmed by his fears. And the subsequent message for us is that we need to jump out of the boat and into the water knowing Jesus will not let us drown. That Peter left behind the other disciples in a boat that was close to sinking seems not to matter. What Peter does in this story is crazy and what Peter does is crazy because Peter is testing the Lord. When Jesus was tested by the devil and invited to leap off the top of the Temple, Jesus responded saying, “Do not put your Lord your God to the test.” Peter is testing the power of Jesus to keep him afloat, heedless it seems whether the companions he leaves behind in a boat battered by the waves will live or die.
Peter made his first mistake when he tested the truth that Jesus had more power than the power of a turbulent sea over which Jesus was walking; becoming overwhelmed by fear once out in the sea was Peter’s second and near fatal mistake. The focus of our story this day is not Peter’s amazing faith that moved him to jump ship but rather Peter’s not so amazing faith that moved him to want to walk on water like Jesus. After Peter nearly drowns and Jesus rescues him, the others in the boat worship Jesus for the first time in the gospel of Matthew.
For the early church, a boat was often used to image the church and a turbulent sea was an image of the disorder and chaos wrought by evil. When Jesus walks on the sea, Jesus is manifesting a power that belongs only to God – power over evil. Overpowering evil is God’s job, not ours. The temptation, however, to control those things which we cannot is strong and leads us often to believe that we, like Jesus, can simply overcome or at least walk over, the power of evil. In the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, we do not like to accept those things we cannot change and shrink from changing those things which we can change.
I did something new this past Friday. I was invited to wander the halls of Bowling Green Elementary School along with other Caroline County pastors to pray for this school on the eve of a new school year. As we gathered in the school office, I learned that the cafeteria was often a place where fights broke out and was not always a place of sustenance but a place of violence. We were invited to roam around and to pray and I headed down the special education wing. Within minutes I was conversing with a teacher who was setting up her classroom for young special education students a week early. Her classroom was small, filled with an assortment of colorful things and boxes waiting to be unpacked and four plastic partitions that could be joined together to create a “time out” space for out of control children. I learned that many of the children in her classroom came from families who had difficulty parenting children and could not be counted upon to be supportive of her efforts. I also learned that she longed for more space in which to teach children who had trouble sitting still. I met a woman with a passion for teaching children but who was sorely tried by an increasing number of children who need help and a system that is increasingly stressed by all the brokenness that cries out for fixing. “It’s hard to know how to be Christian in this environment,” she concluded.
Her frustration is shared by many who see children growing up in a culture that is increasingly without any kind of order or stability. Children are raising themselves, becoming parents before they have grown up and then leaning upon a system to help them that is being pushed to the breaking point. We can be tempted to row our boats to one of two shores – either the shore of despair which tempts us to believe there are no possibilities to change what is and which will only get worse or the shore of hubris which tempts us to believe that we know exactly what is wrong and what to do about it and all other ideas are foolish and futile. Neither shore recognizes the truth that God is at work in the world and is more powerful than evil which is also at work in the world. We will not be able to fix all that is wrong; but neither are we to despair that we can do nothing.
Friday I wandered the halls of an elementary school for the first time in many years and what I saw and heard was very different from what I remember of elementary school. As I left I wondered if the request for our prayers was not also a request for an exorcism to remove all evil spirits from that place. Perhaps some took flight Friday morning but as we know a house swept clean only invites the return of more spirits. I also came away giving thanks to all those who work and teach and struggle to make a difference in that place and in the lives of the children who soon will begin a new year in that school.
Yesterday, Dale Brittle and I travelled to the Pamunkey Indian Reservation adjacent to King William County about an hour from Bowling Green, to join others from around the diocese to learn more about our native American brothers and sisters. Once more my eyes were opened by a story I had never heard and a plight I never knew existed. And once more I remembered growing up graced by the stories of my family and my roots. For so many of our native American neighbors, their stories have been selectively edited and told by English handlers. To hear their stories in their own voices was powerful. Knowing how to be helpful is a challenge and is not a one way street – our native American brothers and sisters have something to give to us as do the troubled kids in our schools and the teachers and staff who strive to be with them. The challenge is to open our hearts to stories that are hard to hear and to which responses are hard to come by. We live in a world troubled by many turbulent waters but in which we are called to live and work and show forth the glory of God.
I pray the church will be that boat in which we can find sanctuary from the storms of life. I pray the church will be that place where we can come to know that God is with us, always and everywhere. And I pray that the church will give us the courage to persevere in the world God has given us to love and to serve, a world in which there are powers beyond our control which threaten to return to this world to the chaos out of which God brought forth the cosmos, a place of order and beauty and justice and peace. Until God’s kingdom comes, children and teachers and parents and folk whose roots go far deeper than most of ours are crying out to us and anyone else who will listen.
Sunday, August 10, 2014 Romans 10: 5 – 15
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 14: 22 – 33
But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”
Matthew 14: 27
“Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” Peter seems to be testing the waters this morning in our reading from the gospel of Matthew. Peter together with the other disciples is in a boat in the middle of the Sea of Galilee, battling to get to shore in the midst of a raging storm. Suddenly the disciples see Jesus walking towards them on the turbulent sea and they become terrified, presuming this figure is not real but a ghostly apparition. Immediately Jesus reassures these frightened disciples saying, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”
But Peter is reluctant to take those words to heart and proposes a test. “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” We have heard those words before. “If you are the Son of God,” Satan says to Jesus in the wilderness, “command these stones to become bread.” “If you are the Son of God,” the crowds mock as they pass by the cross, “come down from the cross.” If you Jesus are the Son of God, flex your muscles a bit so that we might believe!
“Come,” Jesus says to Peter. And Peter goes, walking on the water. Until Peter notices the strong wind, becomes afraid and begins to sink. And Jesus reaches out his hand, saving Peter from drowning. Peter tests the waters this morning only to be tested and saved.
In Matthew’s gospel, testing is a way of life. Jesus is tempted by Satan just after his baptism, the religious leaders are tested by Jesus and vice versa, the disciples are tested time and again, Pontius Pilate is tested by the crowds who demand the death of an innocent man and Jesus is tested in the Garden of Gethsemane as he prays to his Father in heaven that his crucifixion might be avoided. About the only character in the gospel of Matthew who is not tested is King Herod who kills all the children in Bethlehem under the age of two without flinching after hearing of the birth of Jesus, King of the Jews. Everyone else in the gospel of Matthew is tested - sorely, severely and persistently.
Our reading this morning comes just after the story of Jesus feeding five thousand folk in the wilderness with five loaves of bread and two fish. One would think Peter would have gotten it by now. Why does Peter need to walk on water when he has just eaten his fill with thousands from only a couple of brown bag lunches? Why can’t Peter take Jesus at his word? “It is I,” Jesus says. Isn’t that enough?
No, Peter says, now you need to enable me to walk on water. And Jesus complies. And saves Peter when he falters.
Interpretations of our text this morning often praise Peter for jumping ship noting that Peter could have kept walking on the water if only Peter had not been overwhelmed by his fears. And the subsequent message for us is that we need to jump out of the boat and into the water knowing Jesus will not let us drown. That Peter left behind the other disciples in a boat that was close to sinking seems not to matter. What Peter does in this story is crazy and what Peter does is crazy because Peter is testing the Lord. When Jesus was tested by the devil and invited to leap off the top of the Temple, Jesus responded saying, “Do not put your Lord your God to the test.” Peter is testing the power of Jesus to keep him afloat, heedless it seems whether the companions he leaves behind in a boat battered by the waves will live or die.
Peter made his first mistake when he tested the truth that Jesus had more power than the power of a turbulent sea over which Jesus was walking; becoming overwhelmed by fear once out in the sea was Peter’s second and near fatal mistake. The focus of our story this day is not Peter’s amazing faith that moved him to jump ship but rather Peter’s not so amazing faith that moved him to want to walk on water like Jesus. After Peter nearly drowns and Jesus rescues him, the others in the boat worship Jesus for the first time in the gospel of Matthew.
For the early church, a boat was often used to image the church and a turbulent sea was an image of the disorder and chaos wrought by evil. When Jesus walks on the sea, Jesus is manifesting a power that belongs only to God – power over evil. Overpowering evil is God’s job, not ours. The temptation, however, to control those things which we cannot is strong and leads us often to believe that we, like Jesus, can simply overcome or at least walk over, the power of evil. In the words of Reinhold Niebuhr, we do not like to accept those things we cannot change and shrink from changing those things which we can change.
I did something new this past Friday. I was invited to wander the halls of Bowling Green Elementary School along with other Caroline County pastors to pray for this school on the eve of a new school year. As we gathered in the school office, I learned that the cafeteria was often a place where fights broke out and was not always a place of sustenance but a place of violence. We were invited to roam around and to pray and I headed down the special education wing. Within minutes I was conversing with a teacher who was setting up her classroom for young special education students a week early. Her classroom was small, filled with an assortment of colorful things and boxes waiting to be unpacked and four plastic partitions that could be joined together to create a “time out” space for out of control children. I learned that many of the children in her classroom came from families who had difficulty parenting children and could not be counted upon to be supportive of her efforts. I also learned that she longed for more space in which to teach children who had trouble sitting still. I met a woman with a passion for teaching children but who was sorely tried by an increasing number of children who need help and a system that is increasingly stressed by all the brokenness that cries out for fixing. “It’s hard to know how to be Christian in this environment,” she concluded.
Her frustration is shared by many who see children growing up in a culture that is increasingly without any kind of order or stability. Children are raising themselves, becoming parents before they have grown up and then leaning upon a system to help them that is being pushed to the breaking point. We can be tempted to row our boats to one of two shores – either the shore of despair which tempts us to believe there are no possibilities to change what is and which will only get worse or the shore of hubris which tempts us to believe that we know exactly what is wrong and what to do about it and all other ideas are foolish and futile. Neither shore recognizes the truth that God is at work in the world and is more powerful than evil which is also at work in the world. We will not be able to fix all that is wrong; but neither are we to despair that we can do nothing.
Friday I wandered the halls of an elementary school for the first time in many years and what I saw and heard was very different from what I remember of elementary school. As I left I wondered if the request for our prayers was not also a request for an exorcism to remove all evil spirits from that place. Perhaps some took flight Friday morning but as we know a house swept clean only invites the return of more spirits. I also came away giving thanks to all those who work and teach and struggle to make a difference in that place and in the lives of the children who soon will begin a new year in that school.
Yesterday, Dale Brittle and I travelled to the Pamunkey Indian Reservation adjacent to King William County about an hour from Bowling Green, to join others from around the diocese to learn more about our native American brothers and sisters. Once more my eyes were opened by a story I had never heard and a plight I never knew existed. And once more I remembered growing up graced by the stories of my family and my roots. For so many of our native American neighbors, their stories have been selectively edited and told by English handlers. To hear their stories in their own voices was powerful. Knowing how to be helpful is a challenge and is not a one way street – our native American brothers and sisters have something to give to us as do the troubled kids in our schools and the teachers and staff who strive to be with them. The challenge is to open our hearts to stories that are hard to hear and to which responses are hard to come by. We live in a world troubled by many turbulent waters but in which we are called to live and work and show forth the glory of God.
I pray the church will be that boat in which we can find sanctuary from the storms of life. I pray the church will be that place where we can come to know that God is with us, always and everywhere. And I pray that the church will give us the courage to persevere in the world God has given us to love and to serve, a world in which there are powers beyond our control which threaten to return to this world to the chaos out of which God brought forth the cosmos, a place of order and beauty and justice and peace. Until God’s kingdom comes, children and teachers and parents and folk whose roots go far deeper than most of ours are crying out to us and anyone else who will listen.
The Tenth Sunday After Pentecost Genesis 45: 1 – 15
Sunday, August 17, 2014 Romans 11: 1 – 2a, 29 – 32
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 15: 10 – 28
Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”
Matthew 15: 22
In 1965, the musical Fiddler on the Roof opened on Broadway to great acclaim. The play was based upon the story of a Jewish family at the turn of the century, struggling to keep their faith alive in Tsarist Russia in a small village named Anatevka. As the musical opens, the head of the family, a man named Tevye, speaks about what keeps him and his family together, in the midst of changing political and social realities, realities that by the end of the musical will force all Jewish families in the village of Anatevka to leave their homes.
“You may ask,” Tevye says, “why do we stay up there if its so dangerous? We stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word - Tradition.” “Because of our traditions,” Tevye continues, “everyone knows who he is and what God expects of him.”
Our gospel reading begins this morning with a dispute over traditions. The Pharisees are taking Jesus to task for not observing the tradition of washing one’s hands before one eats. This tradition was not grounded in concerns for one’s health, but rather in the purity laws, which sought to insure that what was unclean did not mix with what was clean. Eating with unwashed hands risked taking into one’s body what was unclean and contaminating the whole of your body, making you unclean, or, in other words, unholy. Jesus and his disciples are not washing their hands before they eat and the Pharisees, the keepers of the tradition, want to know why.
“Listen and understand:” Jesus tells the crowd, “it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.” And upon hearing these words, we stand up and cheer because Jesus has got it right and the Pharisees have got it all wrong. Down with tradition!
But then Jesus meets a Canaanite woman. A Canaanite woman was a non-Jew, a pagan. A Canaanite was not only a pagan but an enemy of Israel, kind of like the Tsar in Fiddler on the Roof. In the previous verses, Jesus the Jew is debating with his Jewish elders over the purity laws, a kind of family squabble if you will. Now a non-Jew and enemy of Israel confronts Jesus, begging him for mercy.
And Jesus does not come off looking particularly gracious. The woman asks Jesus to have mercy on her and Jesus ignores her. When Jesus’ disciples want Jesus to send this woman away, Jesus tells them, and presumably this woman, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And finally when this woman throws herself at Jesus’ feet, pleading: “Lord, help me,” Jesus responds with the words: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” At the height of this woman’s desperation, Jesus calls her a dog. In the words of one commentator, Jesus’ words to this woman become an obstacle, not an encouragement, to faith.
For the Pharisees, Jesus was an obstacle because Jesus broke with tradition; for this Canaanite woman, Jesus becomes an obstacle because she is not Jewish and Jesus tells her he “was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” In our reading this morning, Jesus first seems to break through traditions that no longer mean anything, and then turns around insisting upon the tradition that the Messiah, when the Messiah came, would come to save Israel, God’s chosen people, not the whole world.
“Because of our traditions,” father Tevye in the Fiddler on the Roof says, “everyone knows who he is and what God expects of him.” That was true not only for the Pharisees but for Jesus as well. Unfortunately, the consequence of holding fast to tradition is that the plea of this desperate mother will go unheard and her daughter unhealed.
This Canaanite woman calls into question the very mission of Jesus. Jesus was indeed sent “to the lost sheep of Israel” because they, God’s chosen people, “were like sheep without a shepherd.” The people Israel was, by the grace of God, brought out of slavery in Egypt and called by God to be a light to the nations, to show forth God’s mercy and peace for the sake of the world. God had given them the commandments, the Law, to set them apart, to create light in the midst of a dark world.
But keeping the law, the traditions, had become a weapon in the hands of some of the religious leaders, a way of testing who was “in” and who was “out.” And in our reading this morning, the Pharisees accuse Jesus of not being “one of us” because Jesus did not observe the ritual purity laws. The Law, which God gave to the Jews as a gift had become, for some, a curse.
This Canaanite woman is clearly not one of the “in crowd” and Jesus knows that. But this woman really seems to believe that Jesus can heal her daughter. This woman trusts that the mercy of the God who called Israel out of slavery into freedom, will be merciful to her and her daughter as well. Her trust was not misplaced.
We will never know if this woman and her plea for mercy took Jesus by surprise, causing him to re-think his mission. What we do know is that by the time the gospels were written gentiles were worshipping with Jews. And we also have Paul’s letters, which pre-date all the gospels, and which speak eloquently of what it means to be a chosen people. For Paul, the mystery of salvation, to the Jew first and then to the gentiles, is grounded in the grace of God and not in our worth. “For by grace,” Paul writes in Ephesians, “you have been saved through faith, and this is not your doing; it is the gift of God.” This gift of deliverance, of rescue, of salvation, was freely given by God to the Jews first and then, through Christ, to all of us. The Jews did nothing to merit God’s favor upon them and neither have we.
The Church has not always remembered that we, like this Canaanite woman, have done nothing to deserve the mercy of God. Once the Roman Emperor Constantine was converted in the fourth century, the Church assumed a certain respectability in the world, even a place of privilege. Our traditions began to trump those of others, particularly those of the Jews who were increasingly marginalized. Many Christians did not realize just how demonic a place of privilege can become until the horror of the holocaust when “good” Christians systematically slaughtered not only Jews but homosexuals and the disabled.
As Tevye acknowledges in Fiddler on the Roof, our traditions give us an identity, a sense of community with others who share the same traditions. But traditions are “only” traditions, ways of honoring an identity which has been given to us freely by God. Tradition does not make us who we are; God makes us who we are.
Traditions can be both a blessing and a curse. Our traditions set us apart from others, shaping us into a particular people unlike other peoples. But traditions can become a stumbling block to others, others who come among us with different traditions. At those times will we privilege our traditions or the grace of God that brings us together and will call others into our midst?
What saves this Canaanite woman this morning is her faith – her trust in God’s mercy. Traditions shape us and form us but do not have the power to save us. That power comes only from God. This woman acknowledged the tradition but knew full well that the tradition could not dispel her daughter’s demon. That power belonged only to God and the One whom God had sent.
Sunday, August 17, 2014 Romans 11: 1 – 2a, 29 – 32
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 15: 10 – 28
Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”
Matthew 15: 22
In 1965, the musical Fiddler on the Roof opened on Broadway to great acclaim. The play was based upon the story of a Jewish family at the turn of the century, struggling to keep their faith alive in Tsarist Russia in a small village named Anatevka. As the musical opens, the head of the family, a man named Tevye, speaks about what keeps him and his family together, in the midst of changing political and social realities, realities that by the end of the musical will force all Jewish families in the village of Anatevka to leave their homes.
“You may ask,” Tevye says, “why do we stay up there if its so dangerous? We stay because Anatevka is our home. And how do we keep our balance? That I can tell you in one word - Tradition.” “Because of our traditions,” Tevye continues, “everyone knows who he is and what God expects of him.”
Our gospel reading begins this morning with a dispute over traditions. The Pharisees are taking Jesus to task for not observing the tradition of washing one’s hands before one eats. This tradition was not grounded in concerns for one’s health, but rather in the purity laws, which sought to insure that what was unclean did not mix with what was clean. Eating with unwashed hands risked taking into one’s body what was unclean and contaminating the whole of your body, making you unclean, or, in other words, unholy. Jesus and his disciples are not washing their hands before they eat and the Pharisees, the keepers of the tradition, want to know why.
“Listen and understand:” Jesus tells the crowd, “it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.” And upon hearing these words, we stand up and cheer because Jesus has got it right and the Pharisees have got it all wrong. Down with tradition!
But then Jesus meets a Canaanite woman. A Canaanite woman was a non-Jew, a pagan. A Canaanite was not only a pagan but an enemy of Israel, kind of like the Tsar in Fiddler on the Roof. In the previous verses, Jesus the Jew is debating with his Jewish elders over the purity laws, a kind of family squabble if you will. Now a non-Jew and enemy of Israel confronts Jesus, begging him for mercy.
And Jesus does not come off looking particularly gracious. The woman asks Jesus to have mercy on her and Jesus ignores her. When Jesus’ disciples want Jesus to send this woman away, Jesus tells them, and presumably this woman, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” And finally when this woman throws herself at Jesus’ feet, pleading: “Lord, help me,” Jesus responds with the words: “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” At the height of this woman’s desperation, Jesus calls her a dog. In the words of one commentator, Jesus’ words to this woman become an obstacle, not an encouragement, to faith.
For the Pharisees, Jesus was an obstacle because Jesus broke with tradition; for this Canaanite woman, Jesus becomes an obstacle because she is not Jewish and Jesus tells her he “was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.” In our reading this morning, Jesus first seems to break through traditions that no longer mean anything, and then turns around insisting upon the tradition that the Messiah, when the Messiah came, would come to save Israel, God’s chosen people, not the whole world.
“Because of our traditions,” father Tevye in the Fiddler on the Roof says, “everyone knows who he is and what God expects of him.” That was true not only for the Pharisees but for Jesus as well. Unfortunately, the consequence of holding fast to tradition is that the plea of this desperate mother will go unheard and her daughter unhealed.
This Canaanite woman calls into question the very mission of Jesus. Jesus was indeed sent “to the lost sheep of Israel” because they, God’s chosen people, “were like sheep without a shepherd.” The people Israel was, by the grace of God, brought out of slavery in Egypt and called by God to be a light to the nations, to show forth God’s mercy and peace for the sake of the world. God had given them the commandments, the Law, to set them apart, to create light in the midst of a dark world.
But keeping the law, the traditions, had become a weapon in the hands of some of the religious leaders, a way of testing who was “in” and who was “out.” And in our reading this morning, the Pharisees accuse Jesus of not being “one of us” because Jesus did not observe the ritual purity laws. The Law, which God gave to the Jews as a gift had become, for some, a curse.
This Canaanite woman is clearly not one of the “in crowd” and Jesus knows that. But this woman really seems to believe that Jesus can heal her daughter. This woman trusts that the mercy of the God who called Israel out of slavery into freedom, will be merciful to her and her daughter as well. Her trust was not misplaced.
We will never know if this woman and her plea for mercy took Jesus by surprise, causing him to re-think his mission. What we do know is that by the time the gospels were written gentiles were worshipping with Jews. And we also have Paul’s letters, which pre-date all the gospels, and which speak eloquently of what it means to be a chosen people. For Paul, the mystery of salvation, to the Jew first and then to the gentiles, is grounded in the grace of God and not in our worth. “For by grace,” Paul writes in Ephesians, “you have been saved through faith, and this is not your doing; it is the gift of God.” This gift of deliverance, of rescue, of salvation, was freely given by God to the Jews first and then, through Christ, to all of us. The Jews did nothing to merit God’s favor upon them and neither have we.
The Church has not always remembered that we, like this Canaanite woman, have done nothing to deserve the mercy of God. Once the Roman Emperor Constantine was converted in the fourth century, the Church assumed a certain respectability in the world, even a place of privilege. Our traditions began to trump those of others, particularly those of the Jews who were increasingly marginalized. Many Christians did not realize just how demonic a place of privilege can become until the horror of the holocaust when “good” Christians systematically slaughtered not only Jews but homosexuals and the disabled.
As Tevye acknowledges in Fiddler on the Roof, our traditions give us an identity, a sense of community with others who share the same traditions. But traditions are “only” traditions, ways of honoring an identity which has been given to us freely by God. Tradition does not make us who we are; God makes us who we are.
Traditions can be both a blessing and a curse. Our traditions set us apart from others, shaping us into a particular people unlike other peoples. But traditions can become a stumbling block to others, others who come among us with different traditions. At those times will we privilege our traditions or the grace of God that brings us together and will call others into our midst?
What saves this Canaanite woman this morning is her faith – her trust in God’s mercy. Traditions shape us and form us but do not have the power to save us. That power comes only from God. This woman acknowledged the tradition but knew full well that the tradition could not dispel her daughter’s demon. That power belonged only to God and the One whom God had sent.
The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost Exodus 1: 8 – 2: 10
Sunday, August 24, 2014 Romans 12: 1 – 8
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 16: 13 - 20
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Romans 12: 2
This past Tuesday I attended a meeting for community leaders in Caroline County. This group has met monthly for over a year, ever since the burial of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston bomber who was a Muslim and was buried in a Muslim cemetery near Dawn. That event triggered angry feelings for some of our neighbors and the chair of the Board of Supervisors invited leaders of faith communities to meet in the hope of being able to respond to future crises in the county.
We are a diverse group of Baptists, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, Catholics, Episcopalians and Jews; male and female; black and white. Attendance varies from month to month and we have yet to meet many of the faith leaders in the county. Our task these past months has been simply to get to know one another and to forge relationships with folk who are different from ourselves.
Our shared conversations are bearing fruit. When the hot air balloon crashed early this spring, the sheriff’s office was able to connect the family of those who died who were Catholic with a Catholic priest because a member of the sheriff’s office had met Father Biber of St. Mary’s Church in Ladysmith at our meetings. The family was deeply grateful.
On Tuesday evening, the events of the past days in Ferguson, Missouri, provoked an impassioned conversation, perhaps the most impassioned we have had to date. Folk had strong feelings about what was unfolding in that small Midwestern town and as our level of trust in the relationships we are forming grows, more willing to share those passions. We are committed to one another and, we are finding, we are also deeply committed to our theologies, our experiences and our cultures.
Holding onto both our passions and one another challenged us on Tuesday.
On Thursday, our Bishops sent out a request to all parishes to pray for the people of Ferguson, Missouri, this morning which we will do during The Prayers of the People, using the collect “For the Human Family.” And along with that request, came an invitation to hear deeply the words of Saint Paul in our reading from Romans this morning.
Paul is writing to a church Paul did not found and which is experiencing some tension. In 49 A.D., the Roman Emperor Claudius expelled all Jews, including Jewish Christians from Rome. The Church continued but without folk with Jewish roots. When Emperor Nero ascended the throne in 54 A.D., the decree was annulled and Jews began to return to Rome. By this time the churches in Rome were predominately gentile and now had to forge a common life with folk whose roots lay in Judaism. When Paul writes his letter to the Romans, those with Jewish roots were worshipping Christ alongside those with no Jewish roots. When we meet Paul this morning his words are directed to those who are struggling to forge a common life together but whose backgrounds are worlds apart.
How do we live with folk who are different from us?
First, Paul argues, not as the world does. “Do not be conformed to this world,” Paul writes, because his Roman world at the time privileged free men, giving them absolute power over women and slaves. All authority to determine what was done and not done in a Roman family was given to the father. Paul, however, calls the community to “discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.” The community, not the father or the Roman Emperor, was the locus of authority and equipped by God to be just that.
“Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought to think,” Paul admonishes those in this Roman congregation, “For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” For Paul, our bonds of affection are grounded in our baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, not in our blood lines.
For Jews, the bonds of blood were strong and for the gentiles, free men had power over women and slaves. Into this mix comes Paul saying, we are the body of Christ. Therefore, the community is responsible to determine what is acceptable and what is not and no one is privileged simply because of your gene pool. Paul was challenging the culture of both Jew and gentile, calling them to be the new creation they now were in Christ. No longer were they to be Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, males and females, as Paul wrote in Galatians, but “one in Christ Jesus.” Paul was about as counter cultural as it gets.
As I have listened to conversations about the events in Ferguson, Missouri, I have heard folk leaning in two different directions. There are folk concerned about the ability of law enforcement to do their job often in circumstances that are exceedingly difficult. They share the pain of a good officer crucified by a zealous press. And then I have heard from folk who have experienced life under curfew and from those who have not always been treated impartially by law enforcement. I have been reminded this week that we see things differently and can often privilege our positions on issues over maintaining relationships with others, especially those others who see things differently than we do.
The violence in Ferguson, Missouri, is a clear illustration that we as a people are not one and that much work remains to be done to bridge the barriers that separate us. Ignoring that reality will not make it go away. But unity is not conformity and we are not called to all look alike, think alike and feel alike. Saint Paul celebrates our differences as necessary to the proper functioning of the body of Christ.
Paul’s letters which predate all the gospels alert us to the truth that the early church struggled to build a common life among people who came from very different backgrounds. As Jews and gentiles came together to worship Christ under the shadow of the Roman Empire, all sorts and kinds of issues needed to be addressed from the kinds of food the community could share to the status of slaves and women. God had called them together through the waters of baptism and given them one to another to love. They, no less than we, were tasked to do so.
Recently a Yale seminarian named Jesse Zink wrote a book describing his travels through the Anglican Communion, travels that took him to five different continents. In Backpacking Through the Anglican Communion, Zink offers us a glimpse into the different histories and contexts of the churches that participate in our Anglican Communion. At times hopeful, at other times despairing, Zink wonders about the future of our currently fragile communion. In his concluding remarks, Zink references Paul’s words which we hear this morning and writes:
The Bible makes clear that the most significant way in which Christians demonstrate their distinctiveness is in the nature of their life together. How the Christian community’s members interact with one another, engage in discourse, and welcome others, for instance, are all part of their witness to God.
Our relationships one with another, in other words, is our witness in a world that is bent upon voting others off islands or worse rather than engage in the hard work of forging and maintaining relationships, especially with those with whom we may disagree.
Many passions have been stirred this week – passions for justice, for peace, and for the rule of law. Such passions are good and noble – indeed, holy - but can easily become infected by anger and arrogance. Anger and arrogance can quickly turn a holy passion into its exact opposite - an unholy and demonic passion that seeks to destroy the other. May we who remember the people of Ferguson this morning as we pray for the whole human family also remember this community of Caroline which is not immune from the tensions and turmoil we have watched explode into violence this week in Missouri. May our common life bear witness that we who are many can be one by the power of the Holy Spirit, not minimizing our differences but striving together to discern what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Sunday, August 24, 2014 Romans 12: 1 – 8
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 16: 13 - 20
Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.
Romans 12: 2
This past Tuesday I attended a meeting for community leaders in Caroline County. This group has met monthly for over a year, ever since the burial of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the Boston bomber who was a Muslim and was buried in a Muslim cemetery near Dawn. That event triggered angry feelings for some of our neighbors and the chair of the Board of Supervisors invited leaders of faith communities to meet in the hope of being able to respond to future crises in the county.
We are a diverse group of Baptists, Methodists, Disciples of Christ, Catholics, Episcopalians and Jews; male and female; black and white. Attendance varies from month to month and we have yet to meet many of the faith leaders in the county. Our task these past months has been simply to get to know one another and to forge relationships with folk who are different from ourselves.
Our shared conversations are bearing fruit. When the hot air balloon crashed early this spring, the sheriff’s office was able to connect the family of those who died who were Catholic with a Catholic priest because a member of the sheriff’s office had met Father Biber of St. Mary’s Church in Ladysmith at our meetings. The family was deeply grateful.
On Tuesday evening, the events of the past days in Ferguson, Missouri, provoked an impassioned conversation, perhaps the most impassioned we have had to date. Folk had strong feelings about what was unfolding in that small Midwestern town and as our level of trust in the relationships we are forming grows, more willing to share those passions. We are committed to one another and, we are finding, we are also deeply committed to our theologies, our experiences and our cultures.
Holding onto both our passions and one another challenged us on Tuesday.
On Thursday, our Bishops sent out a request to all parishes to pray for the people of Ferguson, Missouri, this morning which we will do during The Prayers of the People, using the collect “For the Human Family.” And along with that request, came an invitation to hear deeply the words of Saint Paul in our reading from Romans this morning.
Paul is writing to a church Paul did not found and which is experiencing some tension. In 49 A.D., the Roman Emperor Claudius expelled all Jews, including Jewish Christians from Rome. The Church continued but without folk with Jewish roots. When Emperor Nero ascended the throne in 54 A.D., the decree was annulled and Jews began to return to Rome. By this time the churches in Rome were predominately gentile and now had to forge a common life with folk whose roots lay in Judaism. When Paul writes his letter to the Romans, those with Jewish roots were worshipping Christ alongside those with no Jewish roots. When we meet Paul this morning his words are directed to those who are struggling to forge a common life together but whose backgrounds are worlds apart.
How do we live with folk who are different from us?
First, Paul argues, not as the world does. “Do not be conformed to this world,” Paul writes, because his Roman world at the time privileged free men, giving them absolute power over women and slaves. All authority to determine what was done and not done in a Roman family was given to the father. Paul, however, calls the community to “discern what is the will of God – what is good and acceptable and perfect.” The community, not the father or the Roman Emperor, was the locus of authority and equipped by God to be just that.
“Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought to think,” Paul admonishes those in this Roman congregation, “For as in one body we have many members, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” For Paul, our bonds of affection are grounded in our baptism into Christ’s death and resurrection, not in our blood lines.
For Jews, the bonds of blood were strong and for the gentiles, free men had power over women and slaves. Into this mix comes Paul saying, we are the body of Christ. Therefore, the community is responsible to determine what is acceptable and what is not and no one is privileged simply because of your gene pool. Paul was challenging the culture of both Jew and gentile, calling them to be the new creation they now were in Christ. No longer were they to be Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, males and females, as Paul wrote in Galatians, but “one in Christ Jesus.” Paul was about as counter cultural as it gets.
As I have listened to conversations about the events in Ferguson, Missouri, I have heard folk leaning in two different directions. There are folk concerned about the ability of law enforcement to do their job often in circumstances that are exceedingly difficult. They share the pain of a good officer crucified by a zealous press. And then I have heard from folk who have experienced life under curfew and from those who have not always been treated impartially by law enforcement. I have been reminded this week that we see things differently and can often privilege our positions on issues over maintaining relationships with others, especially those others who see things differently than we do.
The violence in Ferguson, Missouri, is a clear illustration that we as a people are not one and that much work remains to be done to bridge the barriers that separate us. Ignoring that reality will not make it go away. But unity is not conformity and we are not called to all look alike, think alike and feel alike. Saint Paul celebrates our differences as necessary to the proper functioning of the body of Christ.
Paul’s letters which predate all the gospels alert us to the truth that the early church struggled to build a common life among people who came from very different backgrounds. As Jews and gentiles came together to worship Christ under the shadow of the Roman Empire, all sorts and kinds of issues needed to be addressed from the kinds of food the community could share to the status of slaves and women. God had called them together through the waters of baptism and given them one to another to love. They, no less than we, were tasked to do so.
Recently a Yale seminarian named Jesse Zink wrote a book describing his travels through the Anglican Communion, travels that took him to five different continents. In Backpacking Through the Anglican Communion, Zink offers us a glimpse into the different histories and contexts of the churches that participate in our Anglican Communion. At times hopeful, at other times despairing, Zink wonders about the future of our currently fragile communion. In his concluding remarks, Zink references Paul’s words which we hear this morning and writes:
The Bible makes clear that the most significant way in which Christians demonstrate their distinctiveness is in the nature of their life together. How the Christian community’s members interact with one another, engage in discourse, and welcome others, for instance, are all part of their witness to God.
Our relationships one with another, in other words, is our witness in a world that is bent upon voting others off islands or worse rather than engage in the hard work of forging and maintaining relationships, especially with those with whom we may disagree.
Many passions have been stirred this week – passions for justice, for peace, and for the rule of law. Such passions are good and noble – indeed, holy - but can easily become infected by anger and arrogance. Anger and arrogance can quickly turn a holy passion into its exact opposite - an unholy and demonic passion that seeks to destroy the other. May we who remember the people of Ferguson this morning as we pray for the whole human family also remember this community of Caroline which is not immune from the tensions and turmoil we have watched explode into violence this week in Missouri. May our common life bear witness that we who are many can be one by the power of the Holy Spirit, not minimizing our differences but striving together to discern what is good and acceptable and perfect.
All Saints’ Sunday Ecclesiasticus 2: 1 – 11
Sunday, November 2, 2014 Ephesians 1: 11 – 23
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 6: 20 – 36
“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”
Luke 6: 27 - 28
“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.” “Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.” On this All Saints’ Day, we hear some difficult commands from the gospel of Luke, commands which are hard to follow, except perhaps if you were indeed a saint. Most of the rest of us ordinary folk would be reluctant to let our stuff be taken without making a fuss and also know that giving freely to all who beg may simply make us complicit in feeding addictive and dysfunctional behaviors. Jesus may be calling us to be saints this day, but most of us, I daresay, would prefer some other vocation!
Every year on All Saints’ Day, I am reminded of a prayer I inherited from my grandmother which begins: “Lord, thou knowest better than I know myself that I am growing older, and will someday be old. Keep me from getting talkative and particularly from the fatal habit of thinking I must say something on every subject and on every occasion.” The prayer continues with a number of petitions, one of which reads: “Keep me reasonably sweet. I do not want to be a saint. Some of them are so hard to live with, but a sour man or woman is one of the crowning marks of the devil.”
My grandmother was a New England Congregationalist and apparently associated saintliness with sourness. New England Congregationalists could for sure be perceived to be sour as they were heirs to a Puritan legacy that often decried such things as card playing, dancing and alcohol. My mother’s maiden name was “Conant” and Roger Conant founded the town of Salem, Massachusetts, later known for the infamous Salem witch trials. Puritanical zeal was not always sweet and I suspect gave birth to a number of “sour” saints.”
We need not be a Congregationalist, though, to feel that saintliness is sourness, a rather dreary and joyless affair of purging ourselves from anything fun and all things that might lead us to ruin which can include everything from bridge to line dancing. Sainthood, we often believe, is reserved for those few folk who happen to want to live in the slums of Calcutta, India, like Mother Teresa or die a martyr’s death as did Saints Peter and Paul. The rest of us ordinary folk enjoy our creature comforts and hope to avoid a violent death.
On All Saints’ Day I enjoy reminding folk and myself, that we are saints by virtue of our baptism and watching the beads of sweat that suddenly appear on our foreheads and faces turn red. You and I are saints. We are saints, because in the words of Saint Paul, we are “in Christ” and have received through Christ, sainthood. Our hope, Paul tells us in our reading from Ephesians, is in Christ, not in ourselves. We can abstain from playing bridge or dancing or drinking but none of that matters. What matters is Christ and casting our lot with the One who did what we can never do – be worthy before God.
We are saints by virtue of our baptism. You are a saint. Done deal. Finished business. Get used to being called a saint. But lo how we resist saying “I cannot be a saint because I ….. – fill in the blank. That is the stuff for confession not exception from the vocation of sainthood. You are a saint. What we need to do is get used to that name and claim it for ourselves. Keeping sainthood at a distance only reinforces that we do not really believe that Christ died for us, for you and me, and for all the many ways we have failed to live up to what God expects of us.
Christ died for you and in baptism you acknowledge Christ’s forgiveness and become, through Christ, a saint. Our task is to live into that high calling, no longer needing to prove our merit before God but rather honoring the reality that God is at work in our lives, calling us to be the people God would have us be.
Saints are not spiritual athletes but ordinary folk who lived extraordinary lives following the example of Jesus and through whom we come to see something of the glory of God. The Episcopal Church has always recognized saints but in 2010, published a book Holy Women, Holy Men for trial use which greatly expanded the folk we remember as saints. This book, in the words of then Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold:
seeks to expand the worshipping community’s awareness of the communion of saints, and to give increased expression to the many and diverse ways in which Christ, though the agency of the Holy Spirit, has been present in the lives of men and women across the ages, just as Christ continues to be present in our own day. Faced with circumstances most often different from our own, these courageous souls bore witness to Christ’s death-defying love, in service, in holiness of life, and in challenge to existing practices within both the church and society.
In Holy Women, Holy Men, we remember Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth century mystic and nun as well as Martin Luther King, the twentieth century’s civil rights activist; Saint Paul from the first century and Amelia Bloomer from the nineteenth; Jonathan Daniels, a seminarian killed in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, and Clive Lewis, a former atheist turned Christian who recounts his conversion experience in a book titled Surprised by Joy.
These holy men and women were not holy because they purged from their lives all evil but rather these men and women were holy because they took seriously that God does indeed lay a hold on us, calling to do and to be more than we ever thought we could. These women and men were responding to their identities as saints, not trying to put on spiritual straight-jackets. More often than not, these men and women were breakers of the law, not keepers of the law. And we remember them so that we may be inspired to use the gifts God has given us to make the world in which we live more just, more beautiful and more compassionate. These men and women were not trying to be saints but rather knew themselves as saints, tasked to further God’s purposes in the world in the ways they could. They were and usually are “courageous” souls, whose passions led them into difficult and often troubling waters.
The saints we remember are midwives of the Spirit. The saints bring to birth in us that hope and longing that leads us to decry injustice, bemoan suffering and yearn for beauty. The saints urge us on, offering to us concrete examples of lives lived that simply were not complacent and refused to make peace with intolerance, violence and ugliness. The saints “inspire” us, making us aware of the Holy Spirit of God within each one of us, God’s gift to us given in baptism.
My grandmother was a down to earth woman by all accounts and had little patience for folk she perceived as wanting to be more righteous than others, more holy, above the hue and cry of our common humanity. And so she prayed not to be saint because saints were, well, sanctimonious. My grandmother was a child of the great reformation insight that only One of us is holy – “For you alone are the Holy One,” in the words of the Gloria. None of the rest of us can even come close.
But what my grandmother forgot is that the Risen Christ is very much alive and at work among us and through us. Every now and again, we discover some deep mystery moving us one way rather than another, enabling and empowering us to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being,” in the words of our baptismal covenant. The saints bear witness to us that we can and are called to be more than we know ourselves to be – fragile, frail and weak human beings. God knows us differently and God is calling you this day, “a saint.” Next time you are asked to introduce yourself, begin by saying: “I am a saint” and see what happens. I suspect you will be given an opportunity to “bless those who curse you.”
Sunday, November 2, 2014 Ephesians 1: 11 – 23
The Rev. Bambi Willis Luke 6: 20 – 36
“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”
Luke 6: 27 - 28
“But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also.” “Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again.” On this All Saints’ Day, we hear some difficult commands from the gospel of Luke, commands which are hard to follow, except perhaps if you were indeed a saint. Most of the rest of us ordinary folk would be reluctant to let our stuff be taken without making a fuss and also know that giving freely to all who beg may simply make us complicit in feeding addictive and dysfunctional behaviors. Jesus may be calling us to be saints this day, but most of us, I daresay, would prefer some other vocation!
Every year on All Saints’ Day, I am reminded of a prayer I inherited from my grandmother which begins: “Lord, thou knowest better than I know myself that I am growing older, and will someday be old. Keep me from getting talkative and particularly from the fatal habit of thinking I must say something on every subject and on every occasion.” The prayer continues with a number of petitions, one of which reads: “Keep me reasonably sweet. I do not want to be a saint. Some of them are so hard to live with, but a sour man or woman is one of the crowning marks of the devil.”
My grandmother was a New England Congregationalist and apparently associated saintliness with sourness. New England Congregationalists could for sure be perceived to be sour as they were heirs to a Puritan legacy that often decried such things as card playing, dancing and alcohol. My mother’s maiden name was “Conant” and Roger Conant founded the town of Salem, Massachusetts, later known for the infamous Salem witch trials. Puritanical zeal was not always sweet and I suspect gave birth to a number of “sour” saints.”
We need not be a Congregationalist, though, to feel that saintliness is sourness, a rather dreary and joyless affair of purging ourselves from anything fun and all things that might lead us to ruin which can include everything from bridge to line dancing. Sainthood, we often believe, is reserved for those few folk who happen to want to live in the slums of Calcutta, India, like Mother Teresa or die a martyr’s death as did Saints Peter and Paul. The rest of us ordinary folk enjoy our creature comforts and hope to avoid a violent death.
On All Saints’ Day I enjoy reminding folk and myself, that we are saints by virtue of our baptism and watching the beads of sweat that suddenly appear on our foreheads and faces turn red. You and I are saints. We are saints, because in the words of Saint Paul, we are “in Christ” and have received through Christ, sainthood. Our hope, Paul tells us in our reading from Ephesians, is in Christ, not in ourselves. We can abstain from playing bridge or dancing or drinking but none of that matters. What matters is Christ and casting our lot with the One who did what we can never do – be worthy before God.
We are saints by virtue of our baptism. You are a saint. Done deal. Finished business. Get used to being called a saint. But lo how we resist saying “I cannot be a saint because I ….. – fill in the blank. That is the stuff for confession not exception from the vocation of sainthood. You are a saint. What we need to do is get used to that name and claim it for ourselves. Keeping sainthood at a distance only reinforces that we do not really believe that Christ died for us, for you and me, and for all the many ways we have failed to live up to what God expects of us.
Christ died for you and in baptism you acknowledge Christ’s forgiveness and become, through Christ, a saint. Our task is to live into that high calling, no longer needing to prove our merit before God but rather honoring the reality that God is at work in our lives, calling us to be the people God would have us be.
Saints are not spiritual athletes but ordinary folk who lived extraordinary lives following the example of Jesus and through whom we come to see something of the glory of God. The Episcopal Church has always recognized saints but in 2010, published a book Holy Women, Holy Men for trial use which greatly expanded the folk we remember as saints. This book, in the words of then Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold:
seeks to expand the worshipping community’s awareness of the communion of saints, and to give increased expression to the many and diverse ways in which Christ, though the agency of the Holy Spirit, has been present in the lives of men and women across the ages, just as Christ continues to be present in our own day. Faced with circumstances most often different from our own, these courageous souls bore witness to Christ’s death-defying love, in service, in holiness of life, and in challenge to existing practices within both the church and society.
In Holy Women, Holy Men, we remember Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth century mystic and nun as well as Martin Luther King, the twentieth century’s civil rights activist; Saint Paul from the first century and Amelia Bloomer from the nineteenth; Jonathan Daniels, a seminarian killed in Selma, Alabama, in 1965, and Clive Lewis, a former atheist turned Christian who recounts his conversion experience in a book titled Surprised by Joy.
These holy men and women were not holy because they purged from their lives all evil but rather these men and women were holy because they took seriously that God does indeed lay a hold on us, calling to do and to be more than we ever thought we could. These women and men were responding to their identities as saints, not trying to put on spiritual straight-jackets. More often than not, these men and women were breakers of the law, not keepers of the law. And we remember them so that we may be inspired to use the gifts God has given us to make the world in which we live more just, more beautiful and more compassionate. These men and women were not trying to be saints but rather knew themselves as saints, tasked to further God’s purposes in the world in the ways they could. They were and usually are “courageous” souls, whose passions led them into difficult and often troubling waters.
The saints we remember are midwives of the Spirit. The saints bring to birth in us that hope and longing that leads us to decry injustice, bemoan suffering and yearn for beauty. The saints urge us on, offering to us concrete examples of lives lived that simply were not complacent and refused to make peace with intolerance, violence and ugliness. The saints “inspire” us, making us aware of the Holy Spirit of God within each one of us, God’s gift to us given in baptism.
My grandmother was a down to earth woman by all accounts and had little patience for folk she perceived as wanting to be more righteous than others, more holy, above the hue and cry of our common humanity. And so she prayed not to be saint because saints were, well, sanctimonious. My grandmother was a child of the great reformation insight that only One of us is holy – “For you alone are the Holy One,” in the words of the Gloria. None of the rest of us can even come close.
But what my grandmother forgot is that the Risen Christ is very much alive and at work among us and through us. Every now and again, we discover some deep mystery moving us one way rather than another, enabling and empowering us to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being,” in the words of our baptismal covenant. The saints bear witness to us that we can and are called to be more than we know ourselves to be – fragile, frail and weak human beings. God knows us differently and God is calling you this day, “a saint.” Next time you are asked to introduce yourself, begin by saying: “I am a saint” and see what happens. I suspect you will be given an opportunity to “bless those who curse you.”
The Second Sunday after Christmas Day Jeremiah 31: 7 – 14
Sunday, January 5, 2014 Ephesians 1; 3 – 6, 15 – 19a
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 2: 1 – 12
On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage.
Matthew 2: 11a
Our Christmas celebration ends tomorrow on January sixth with the Feast of the Epiphany. We are anticipating that day a bit early as we hear the reading from the gospel of Matthew this morning of the visit of the wise men, enjoy a meal after this morning’s service and the cutting of the customary Kings’ Cake. “Epiphany” is a Greek word meaning revelation, and we begin this morning wondering about this child who was born on Christmas day even as we wonder, more concretely, who will be baking our Kings’ Cake next year.
This day, we hear of wise men from the East visiting the infant Jesus. We know little about these “wise men” or magi, except to say they came from the East after seeing the rising of a star. These magi read the stars in order to discern the significance of events taking place on earth. In the ancient world, such folk were at times, honored for their knowledge and insight; at other times, scorned as little more than magicians. For our evangelist Matthew, these magi come from outside of Jerusalem looking for the “king of the Jews” and, in the words of one commentator, “are mysterious wise foreigners who, having mastered secret lore, are able to recognize who it is that will be king – and in Matthew 2 testify to Jesus.”
The star has revealed to the wise men that the King of the Jews has been born. And, in turn, they reveal to King Herod that the King of the Jews has been born. The wise men bring gifts to the newborn King; King Herod, on the other hand, orders that all children under the age of two in and around Bethlehem be killed. The visit of the wise men, which we hear this morning, is immediately followed by the story of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt and the subsequent story of the slaughter of the innocents.
Our evangelist Matthew wants us to hear echoes of another story, a story which begins in the book of Exodus, when the pharaoh of Egypt, dismayed by the growing number of Hebrew slaves in his land, orders all male Hebrew children to be killed. The infant Moses is saved, however, placed into a basket by his mother and hidden in the reeds on the bank of a river. Many years later, Moses will confront the Pharoah, demanding that Pharoah: “Let God’s people go!” For our evangelist Matthew, Jesus is the new Moses and like Moses, was threatened from the beginning.
The revelation of God, which came to Moses who led the Hebrews out of slavery into freedom, now comes to the magi, who, by inquiring of King Herod where this child was to be born, alert king Herod that he now has a rival. Like the Pharoah of Egypt, King Herod, is not about to give up his power without a fight. And so, the magi not only bring gifts to the newborn King but also unleash a slaughter of innocent children in Bethlehem, whose mothers we hear, in verses not long after those we hear this morning “refused to be consoled.”
Perhaps this newborn King should never have been revealed.
The wisdom of the world might suggest that the children of Bethlehem would have been better off had the magi never come to Jerusalem. But the magi do come and do inquire of King Herod and set in motion a story of great joy as we greet our Redeemer King but in which also we begin to see that our redemption will come at a cost and innocent blood will be shed. This child is going to disturb our peace.
In 1927, the late twentieth century Nobel Prize winner in literature and Anglican, T.S. Eliot, wrote a poem called “Journey of the Magi.” The poem is written from the perspective of one of the magi, traveling from the east to Jerusalem in the dead of winter. In the poem, the journey is described as long and arduous, the camels grow weary of plodding through snow, the cities through which they journey are dirty and unfriendly, and the exhausted magi, are haunted by voices “singing in their ears” “that this was all folly.” We hear of no grand procession of The Three Kings in Eliot’s poem and no presentation of gifts. What we hear is a sobering and wearying journey that leads them finally into a “temperate valley” “smelling of vegetation” but in which they see “three trees on the low sky.” Those three trees are not just any three trees, but represent the crosses upon which Jesus and two criminals were crucified. Eliot means for us to hear echoes of the crucifixion as the magi arrive at their destination. After a long and difficult journey, what the magi discover is a place not just of birth but also a place of death, as Eliot keeps before us not just the birth of Christ but also echoes of the Passion. “Were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” the magi wonders.
Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” captures the spirit of our evangelist Matthew who wants us to remember how this story will end, even as we marvel at how this story begins. A King has been revealed to us, a King who will not use his power to save himself, a King who will be killed by those who will use their power to save themselves.
After paying homage to the new born King of the Jews, the magi return to their own country “by another road,” not returning to Herod who longs to know where they found the child who was his rival. The magi, most probably gentiles and not Jews, return to their world where astrologers looked to the heavens to make sense of events on earth. Many still do, while others look to Tarot cards, tea leaves or the palm of one’s hand to see beyond this world into some other. Eliot ends his poem with the magi reflecting back upon their journey, now back at home in their own kingdom, but no longer at ease, discomforted by this child who was born a King and died a criminal. The story of this child disturbs and disrupts, putting to flight all easy roads to heaven, all attempts to figure out what makes for a good life.
What this child will do is go to his death trusting in God, not knowing what God will do. If Jesus was indeed fully human, born of the flesh of the Virgin Mary, Jesus did not know he would be raised on the third day. Because Jesus was fully human, Jesus died, as our evangelist Matthew will tell us, asking: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus died forsaken by all, even the God Jesus had worshipped his whole life long. Or so he believed.
You and I, of course, know the rest of the story but this is Epiphany and not Easter. Epiphany is the season of revelation, of surprise, a time when boats are rocked and worlds are shaken. This child is not going to grow up behaving as we think he should! This Prince of Peace is going to say: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” This sweet babe in the manger is going to challenge us every bit as much as Jesus challenged his disciples, his family, the religious authorities and and the empire of Rome in the first century and later the magi in T.S. Eliot’s poem.
What is being revealed to us is that we, like Christ, will find life through death, not by trying to escape death. We believe, as we say in the Creed, that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, is “the giver of life” and will give life to this world after all of us and everything else has passed away. For now, that same Holy Spirit brings us to life whenever we die to our need to control what happens to us, when we die to our fear that God is not always and everywhere holding us in the palm of his hand, and when we die to our desire not to be disturbed by strangers, be those strangers people or events. Only when we die can we begin to live. No tea leaf will ever tell you that.
As we begin our Epiphany journey this day, remember that the magi came one way and went home to their own country “by another road.” Their journey to the star caused them to change directions and find a different road home. They did not go back the way they came. As we make our way through Epiphany which will take us through January and February and the first Sunday in March, just before Ash Wednesday, may we, too have the courage to find different roads, to change direction if necessary and be transformed by a revelation that philosophers have found foolish, astrologers have no room for, and magicians would love to re-create. This revelation is no sleight of hand but a very real encounter with the living God. For our ancestors in the faith, encounters with the living God left them in fear and trembling, bidding them to take off their shoes for they were standing on holy ground. Epiphany is holy ground. Shoes are optional.
Journey of the Magi
T.S. Eliot
"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
Sunday, January 5, 2014 Ephesians 1; 3 – 6, 15 – 19a
The Rev. Bambi Willis Matthew 2: 1 – 12
On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage.
Matthew 2: 11a
Our Christmas celebration ends tomorrow on January sixth with the Feast of the Epiphany. We are anticipating that day a bit early as we hear the reading from the gospel of Matthew this morning of the visit of the wise men, enjoy a meal after this morning’s service and the cutting of the customary Kings’ Cake. “Epiphany” is a Greek word meaning revelation, and we begin this morning wondering about this child who was born on Christmas day even as we wonder, more concretely, who will be baking our Kings’ Cake next year.
This day, we hear of wise men from the East visiting the infant Jesus. We know little about these “wise men” or magi, except to say they came from the East after seeing the rising of a star. These magi read the stars in order to discern the significance of events taking place on earth. In the ancient world, such folk were at times, honored for their knowledge and insight; at other times, scorned as little more than magicians. For our evangelist Matthew, these magi come from outside of Jerusalem looking for the “king of the Jews” and, in the words of one commentator, “are mysterious wise foreigners who, having mastered secret lore, are able to recognize who it is that will be king – and in Matthew 2 testify to Jesus.”
The star has revealed to the wise men that the King of the Jews has been born. And, in turn, they reveal to King Herod that the King of the Jews has been born. The wise men bring gifts to the newborn King; King Herod, on the other hand, orders that all children under the age of two in and around Bethlehem be killed. The visit of the wise men, which we hear this morning, is immediately followed by the story of the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt and the subsequent story of the slaughter of the innocents.
Our evangelist Matthew wants us to hear echoes of another story, a story which begins in the book of Exodus, when the pharaoh of Egypt, dismayed by the growing number of Hebrew slaves in his land, orders all male Hebrew children to be killed. The infant Moses is saved, however, placed into a basket by his mother and hidden in the reeds on the bank of a river. Many years later, Moses will confront the Pharoah, demanding that Pharoah: “Let God’s people go!” For our evangelist Matthew, Jesus is the new Moses and like Moses, was threatened from the beginning.
The revelation of God, which came to Moses who led the Hebrews out of slavery into freedom, now comes to the magi, who, by inquiring of King Herod where this child was to be born, alert king Herod that he now has a rival. Like the Pharoah of Egypt, King Herod, is not about to give up his power without a fight. And so, the magi not only bring gifts to the newborn King but also unleash a slaughter of innocent children in Bethlehem, whose mothers we hear, in verses not long after those we hear this morning “refused to be consoled.”
Perhaps this newborn King should never have been revealed.
The wisdom of the world might suggest that the children of Bethlehem would have been better off had the magi never come to Jerusalem. But the magi do come and do inquire of King Herod and set in motion a story of great joy as we greet our Redeemer King but in which also we begin to see that our redemption will come at a cost and innocent blood will be shed. This child is going to disturb our peace.
In 1927, the late twentieth century Nobel Prize winner in literature and Anglican, T.S. Eliot, wrote a poem called “Journey of the Magi.” The poem is written from the perspective of one of the magi, traveling from the east to Jerusalem in the dead of winter. In the poem, the journey is described as long and arduous, the camels grow weary of plodding through snow, the cities through which they journey are dirty and unfriendly, and the exhausted magi, are haunted by voices “singing in their ears” “that this was all folly.” We hear of no grand procession of The Three Kings in Eliot’s poem and no presentation of gifts. What we hear is a sobering and wearying journey that leads them finally into a “temperate valley” “smelling of vegetation” but in which they see “three trees on the low sky.” Those three trees are not just any three trees, but represent the crosses upon which Jesus and two criminals were crucified. Eliot means for us to hear echoes of the crucifixion as the magi arrive at their destination. After a long and difficult journey, what the magi discover is a place not just of birth but also a place of death, as Eliot keeps before us not just the birth of Christ but also echoes of the Passion. “Were we led all that way for Birth or Death?” the magi wonders.
Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” captures the spirit of our evangelist Matthew who wants us to remember how this story will end, even as we marvel at how this story begins. A King has been revealed to us, a King who will not use his power to save himself, a King who will be killed by those who will use their power to save themselves.
After paying homage to the new born King of the Jews, the magi return to their own country “by another road,” not returning to Herod who longs to know where they found the child who was his rival. The magi, most probably gentiles and not Jews, return to their world where astrologers looked to the heavens to make sense of events on earth. Many still do, while others look to Tarot cards, tea leaves or the palm of one’s hand to see beyond this world into some other. Eliot ends his poem with the magi reflecting back upon their journey, now back at home in their own kingdom, but no longer at ease, discomforted by this child who was born a King and died a criminal. The story of this child disturbs and disrupts, putting to flight all easy roads to heaven, all attempts to figure out what makes for a good life.
What this child will do is go to his death trusting in God, not knowing what God will do. If Jesus was indeed fully human, born of the flesh of the Virgin Mary, Jesus did not know he would be raised on the third day. Because Jesus was fully human, Jesus died, as our evangelist Matthew will tell us, asking: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Jesus died forsaken by all, even the God Jesus had worshipped his whole life long. Or so he believed.
You and I, of course, know the rest of the story but this is Epiphany and not Easter. Epiphany is the season of revelation, of surprise, a time when boats are rocked and worlds are shaken. This child is not going to grow up behaving as we think he should! This Prince of Peace is going to say: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” This sweet babe in the manger is going to challenge us every bit as much as Jesus challenged his disciples, his family, the religious authorities and and the empire of Rome in the first century and later the magi in T.S. Eliot’s poem.
What is being revealed to us is that we, like Christ, will find life through death, not by trying to escape death. We believe, as we say in the Creed, that the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, is “the giver of life” and will give life to this world after all of us and everything else has passed away. For now, that same Holy Spirit brings us to life whenever we die to our need to control what happens to us, when we die to our fear that God is not always and everywhere holding us in the palm of his hand, and when we die to our desire not to be disturbed by strangers, be those strangers people or events. Only when we die can we begin to live. No tea leaf will ever tell you that.
As we begin our Epiphany journey this day, remember that the magi came one way and went home to their own country “by another road.” Their journey to the star caused them to change directions and find a different road home. They did not go back the way they came. As we make our way through Epiphany which will take us through January and February and the first Sunday in March, just before Ash Wednesday, may we, too have the courage to find different roads, to change direction if necessary and be transformed by a revelation that philosophers have found foolish, astrologers have no room for, and magicians would love to re-create. This revelation is no sleight of hand but a very real encounter with the living God. For our ancestors in the faith, encounters with the living God left them in fear and trembling, bidding them to take off their shoes for they were standing on holy ground. Epiphany is holy ground. Shoes are optional.
Journey of the Magi
T.S. Eliot
"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we lead all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
The Second Sunday of Advent Isaiah 40: 1 – 11
Sunday, December 7, 2014 2 Peter 3: 8 – 15a
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 1: 1 – 8
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Mark 1: 1
On this, the Second Sunday of Advent, John the Baptist calls all of Israel out into the wilderness to make ready for the One who is to come. Israel had been in the wilderness before, wandering in the desert of Mount Sinai for forty years after God had freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Israel had not liked life in the wilderness, a place of desolation without food or water and the Israelites longed to return to the “fleshpots” of Egypt. In the wilderness, the Israelites were free, no longer slaves in Egypt, but were now completely at the mercy of God to sustain their life. God did sustain the Israelites in the desert, raining down manna from heaven and bringing forth water from a rock.
But God also was free and simply would not act on demand.
The wilderness or the desert (same word in the Greek) was a place of vulnerability, a place that was inhospitable to human life. For Israel, the wilderness came to signify testing and tribulation, an experience that tries our faith that God loves us and is for us and not against us. For forty years, Israel wondered if indeed God had freed them from slavery in Egypt only to let them die in the desert sands. Thousands of years later, the Israelites were exiled into Babylon and would wonder again if God had forgotten God’s chosen people.
God had not and the words of comfort we hear from the prophet Isaiah this morning were written after Israel was freed from their exile in Babylon by King Cyrus of Persia and allowed to return home to Jerusalem.
Israel knew a lot about testing and tribulation and struggled not to lose hope in the God who had promised to lead them into a good and fair land, a land flowing with milk and honey. When Israel grew weary of waiting, Israel would simply make peace with whatever or whomever oppressed them, hoping for the best if not an act of God. When our evangelist Mark wrote his gospel, Israel was ruled over by Rome and when the Jews revolted in 66 A.D., Rome burned their sacred Temple to the ground.
Mark’s gospel is the earliest gospel and was written pretty soon after that devastating event. And Mark begins his gospel calling all of Israel back into the wilderness. This, Mark tells us, is “the beginning of the good news.” All of Israel is trying to make sense of the catastrophic loss of life during the Jewish revolt, the destruction of the Temple, and the significance of a young Jewish carpenter who had died about a generation earlier. And for Mark, the good news is that God has come in the person of Jesus; in the midst of death and destruction, God has brought forth life.
This week was, for me, difficult. Thanksgiving found me and my family struggling to be together without A.G. On Tuesday I learned that a dear mentor named Jonathan had been riding his bicycle on his day off, collided with a car and was now in a permanent vegetative state. On Thursday, Glenda Archer called to say her dear daughter Amy had died, succumbing to cancer of the stomach. This week I was in the desert wondering if indeed there was a good and loving God and if so, when would God show up?
Advent is the season in which we prepare for the coming of the Christ child, for the coming of our Savior. And this Advent, more than any before, reminds me just how much we need a Savior, someone to rescue us and bring this world back round right. Advent, like Lent, is a season of grief, grief over all the ways the world in which we live is a wilderness, a desert that is often inhospitable to life. I am lamenting this Advent and giving into tears that we live in a world in which folk suffer and die.
Our evangelist does not leave us in the wilderness but promises that One is coming, more powerful than John the Baptist, who will drown us in the Holy Spirit. And being drowned in the Holy Spirit, means in the words of one of our Eucharistic prayers, opening our eyes to the hand of God at work in the world even now.
God did show up this week as I worked at Glory Outreach and laughed with Susan White, Virginia Scher and Dale Brittle. God showed up as I discovered some left over paint with which I was able to heal some wounded walls in my new house. God showed up at Bible study as we learned some new things about the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. God showed up in my clergy group on Thursday as I wondered if I was paralyzed by my grief and my colleagues assured me I was not.
Jonathan’s abiding advice to me was not to become distracted. Jonathan was the priest of the church I served while attending seminary and distractions abounded. I had moved into an apartment in Alexandria, was separated from my family, learning Greek and had no clue if I would find a job after graduation. Distractions abounded and those two years were difficult for both me and my family. We were all in the wilderness.
Don’t get distracted Jonathan said. Preach the good news. This week I have been distracted by the loss of my husband, concerns for my family, the loss of a dear mentor, and the pain and suffering that is awash in our midst. This week, I have had to work a bit harder than usual to hear good news. This week I was cast out yet again into the wilderness, hoping God would show up and make good on God’s promises.
In this wilderness, I could find no blue Advent candles for my Advent wreath nor any Christmas cards that did not reduce Christmas to a bland holiday of glad tidings for our families and friends but left strangers strangely out of our purview. And I almost gave up.
But I kept on looking, finding blue candles at Hobby Lobby and Christmas cards from the monks of Conception Abbey in Missouri. For now that is enough.
I have healed a few walls and will send out Christmas cards and will wonder how God will be with me this Christmastide. I am, in good keeping with my ancestors in the faith, grumbling a lot about wandering around in a wilderness wondering when God is going to show up and feed me. I like the Israelites want to go back to the “fleshpots of Egypt.”
John the Baptist calls us out into the wilderness this day to remember the things and the people we love and not settle in a world that bids us to compromise and hope only for second best. John the Baptist wants us to remember who and whose we are. And if during this season of Advent, you are reminded of your loves – past and present, give thanks.
John the Baptist wants us to hold dear the promises of God and not lose hope that God will act and deliver on the promises God made long ago to lead us all into the promised land, a land flowing with milk and rich with honey. John the Baptist calls us out into the wilderness in order to lead us home. Sometimes you have to leave home in order to find home.
Longing for home is the real meaning of Advent. Yearning for that place that is flowing with milk and honey and all joy and all peace and in which death will be no more, no more crying and pain, is the desire of this season. That desire is what will catapult us into Christmas. Without that desire, we do not need a Savior and we have no need for Christmas. Spend a little time this Advent grieving over what is not quite right in your world and dreaming about what might yet be.
And pay attention to the mercies of God, which surround us on all sides. Enjoy the lights and the blow up yard decorations, the frenzied parents in search of the perfect gift for their children and the ministrations of the store clerks wishing you a Merry Christmas oblivious to our Advent lamentations. Pay attention also to those who cannot pay their light bill nor have a hope of finding any gift at all for their children. Pay attention to everything - the good, the bad and ugly – remembering we are awaiting a Savior, a Savior for you and for me and for the whole world. Make a way this Advent for God to come.
Sunday, December 7, 2014 2 Peter 3: 8 – 15a
The Rev. Bambi Willis Mark 1: 1 – 8
The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Mark 1: 1
On this, the Second Sunday of Advent, John the Baptist calls all of Israel out into the wilderness to make ready for the One who is to come. Israel had been in the wilderness before, wandering in the desert of Mount Sinai for forty years after God had freed the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Israel had not liked life in the wilderness, a place of desolation without food or water and the Israelites longed to return to the “fleshpots” of Egypt. In the wilderness, the Israelites were free, no longer slaves in Egypt, but were now completely at the mercy of God to sustain their life. God did sustain the Israelites in the desert, raining down manna from heaven and bringing forth water from a rock.
But God also was free and simply would not act on demand.
The wilderness or the desert (same word in the Greek) was a place of vulnerability, a place that was inhospitable to human life. For Israel, the wilderness came to signify testing and tribulation, an experience that tries our faith that God loves us and is for us and not against us. For forty years, Israel wondered if indeed God had freed them from slavery in Egypt only to let them die in the desert sands. Thousands of years later, the Israelites were exiled into Babylon and would wonder again if God had forgotten God’s chosen people.
God had not and the words of comfort we hear from the prophet Isaiah this morning were written after Israel was freed from their exile in Babylon by King Cyrus of Persia and allowed to return home to Jerusalem.
Israel knew a lot about testing and tribulation and struggled not to lose hope in the God who had promised to lead them into a good and fair land, a land flowing with milk and honey. When Israel grew weary of waiting, Israel would simply make peace with whatever or whomever oppressed them, hoping for the best if not an act of God. When our evangelist Mark wrote his gospel, Israel was ruled over by Rome and when the Jews revolted in 66 A.D., Rome burned their sacred Temple to the ground.
Mark’s gospel is the earliest gospel and was written pretty soon after that devastating event. And Mark begins his gospel calling all of Israel back into the wilderness. This, Mark tells us, is “the beginning of the good news.” All of Israel is trying to make sense of the catastrophic loss of life during the Jewish revolt, the destruction of the Temple, and the significance of a young Jewish carpenter who had died about a generation earlier. And for Mark, the good news is that God has come in the person of Jesus; in the midst of death and destruction, God has brought forth life.
This week was, for me, difficult. Thanksgiving found me and my family struggling to be together without A.G. On Tuesday I learned that a dear mentor named Jonathan had been riding his bicycle on his day off, collided with a car and was now in a permanent vegetative state. On Thursday, Glenda Archer called to say her dear daughter Amy had died, succumbing to cancer of the stomach. This week I was in the desert wondering if indeed there was a good and loving God and if so, when would God show up?
Advent is the season in which we prepare for the coming of the Christ child, for the coming of our Savior. And this Advent, more than any before, reminds me just how much we need a Savior, someone to rescue us and bring this world back round right. Advent, like Lent, is a season of grief, grief over all the ways the world in which we live is a wilderness, a desert that is often inhospitable to life. I am lamenting this Advent and giving into tears that we live in a world in which folk suffer and die.
Our evangelist does not leave us in the wilderness but promises that One is coming, more powerful than John the Baptist, who will drown us in the Holy Spirit. And being drowned in the Holy Spirit, means in the words of one of our Eucharistic prayers, opening our eyes to the hand of God at work in the world even now.
God did show up this week as I worked at Glory Outreach and laughed with Susan White, Virginia Scher and Dale Brittle. God showed up as I discovered some left over paint with which I was able to heal some wounded walls in my new house. God showed up at Bible study as we learned some new things about the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke. God showed up in my clergy group on Thursday as I wondered if I was paralyzed by my grief and my colleagues assured me I was not.
Jonathan’s abiding advice to me was not to become distracted. Jonathan was the priest of the church I served while attending seminary and distractions abounded. I had moved into an apartment in Alexandria, was separated from my family, learning Greek and had no clue if I would find a job after graduation. Distractions abounded and those two years were difficult for both me and my family. We were all in the wilderness.
Don’t get distracted Jonathan said. Preach the good news. This week I have been distracted by the loss of my husband, concerns for my family, the loss of a dear mentor, and the pain and suffering that is awash in our midst. This week, I have had to work a bit harder than usual to hear good news. This week I was cast out yet again into the wilderness, hoping God would show up and make good on God’s promises.
In this wilderness, I could find no blue Advent candles for my Advent wreath nor any Christmas cards that did not reduce Christmas to a bland holiday of glad tidings for our families and friends but left strangers strangely out of our purview. And I almost gave up.
But I kept on looking, finding blue candles at Hobby Lobby and Christmas cards from the monks of Conception Abbey in Missouri. For now that is enough.
I have healed a few walls and will send out Christmas cards and will wonder how God will be with me this Christmastide. I am, in good keeping with my ancestors in the faith, grumbling a lot about wandering around in a wilderness wondering when God is going to show up and feed me. I like the Israelites want to go back to the “fleshpots of Egypt.”
John the Baptist calls us out into the wilderness this day to remember the things and the people we love and not settle in a world that bids us to compromise and hope only for second best. John the Baptist wants us to remember who and whose we are. And if during this season of Advent, you are reminded of your loves – past and present, give thanks.
John the Baptist wants us to hold dear the promises of God and not lose hope that God will act and deliver on the promises God made long ago to lead us all into the promised land, a land flowing with milk and rich with honey. John the Baptist calls us out into the wilderness in order to lead us home. Sometimes you have to leave home in order to find home.
Longing for home is the real meaning of Advent. Yearning for that place that is flowing with milk and honey and all joy and all peace and in which death will be no more, no more crying and pain, is the desire of this season. That desire is what will catapult us into Christmas. Without that desire, we do not need a Savior and we have no need for Christmas. Spend a little time this Advent grieving over what is not quite right in your world and dreaming about what might yet be.
And pay attention to the mercies of God, which surround us on all sides. Enjoy the lights and the blow up yard decorations, the frenzied parents in search of the perfect gift for their children and the ministrations of the store clerks wishing you a Merry Christmas oblivious to our Advent lamentations. Pay attention also to those who cannot pay their light bill nor have a hope of finding any gift at all for their children. Pay attention to everything - the good, the bad and ugly – remembering we are awaiting a Savior, a Savior for you and for me and for the whole world. Make a way this Advent for God to come.
