tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71353019659904028882024-03-14T00:48:21.613-07:00Sermons and ReflectionsFr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comBlogger330125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-19470987038052234312015-07-29T13:50:00.002-07:002015-07-29T13:50:53.052-07:00A Still More Excellent WayScripture for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost includes Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15 and 2:23-24; II Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43<br />
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What’s going on in that reading from St. Paul’s 2nd Letter to the Corinthians? More than meets the ear.<br />
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We think of Paul as a man of high principles and sharp opinions. Listening in to his email to the Church at Corinth reveals him to have been also an insightful persuader, and a gifted fundraiser.<br />
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It makes the fundraiser’s job easier when there’s a high purpose at stake. The campaign that Paul is waging is not to erect a cathedral or endow a diocese. The catacombs and private upper rooms were sufficient for gathering the Jesus followers on the Lord’s Day, and there were no long-range plans to finance in this first generation of Church. The immediacy of the present drove their mission, and the trustworthiness of the Spirit of God shaped their attitudes and their theologies.<br />
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As a result, the whole enchilada—mission, attitude, theology—was being served up by a community of people who had no institutional walls to contain them. The places they met in were like safe houses: they had to be, since the emperor could be trusted to be seriously prejudiced against any religion that dared believe in and proclaim and serve a divine power higher than the emperor. <br />
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But these first-generation Christians didn’t mistake what happened within the safety of those gathering spots as being their mission. What happened in the breaking of the bread and the praying together and the reading of e-mail from other churches and itinerant apostles was joyful renewal of their powers of faith and hope and love, recharging their batteries from the risen and present Christ whom they pressed in on to but touch the hem of his clothing, the fabric of their fellowship, the table cloth of his altar, the napkins they would fill with broken bread left over, to be taken home as daily bread around their kitchen tables, and holy take-out to the sick, the frightened, the imprisoned.<br />
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All that was not so much their mission as their sabbath renewal for mission. Just as their Lord had moved about in towns and villages practicing healing touch and transformative encounter and radical sharing of food and friendship, so this first generation of church knew itself called to locate mission beyond protective walls. In a brutal and self-serving imperial culture, such generosity went far, awakening humane instincts, buffing up the image of God within, inspiring the experience of Spirit among, revealing God at work under the crust of Roman rule and right in the grind of the daily struggle.<br />
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And more: What makes grace amazing to St. Paul is how it knocks down barriers: Here he is, in this letter today, writing to a mostly Gentile Greek community in Corinth, encouraging them to follow the example of the Macedonian followers of Jesus and generously take part in the collection Paul is overseeing, raising funds for the poverty-stricken believers in Jerusalem, a mostly Jewish community of Jesus followers. <br />
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What’s so worth catching in that layer of the story is how the church’s mission is to facilitate relationship, reconciliation, between the camps of an Us and Them world: Gentile Greek Jesus-believers are being asked to support and assist Jewish Jesus-believers (and I’ll bet that included their extended families, whether Jesus-believers or not). This story is about the Spirit of God at work coaching the church to get it right for the sake of the world. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for strangers… to lay down old estrangement for the sake of new unity.<br />
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This is excellent background music on a day when we are privileged to welcome Brooke Mead, the Program Coordinator at the Berkshire Immigrant Center in Pittsfield. The Berkshire Immigrant Center provides citizenship assistance, immigration information, advocacy, referrals and counseling to the growing immigrant communities in Berkshire County. Brooke has been immersed in this work for thirteen years.<br />
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At BIC, she manages a caseload of more than five hundred clients annually and her many roles range from workshop provider to immigration case specialist. She runs immigration law clinics, meets with local schools, social services and law enforcement officials, supervises student interns and volunteers, and provides assistance with resettlement issues as well as helping clients navigate tough immigration law. <br />
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We are bipolar in our attitudes towards immigrants. Nationally, the conversation appears to be set in a collision of cultures, politically an Us against Them sort of world. Locally, we seem to remember that everyone needs a hand at some point, and that each of us, through our forebears, came from somewhere else. Migration is as commonly human as birth and death. The threat of death plays its part in migration, and the hope of new life surely motivates such a risky venture. While it may be simple-minded of me to put it this way, it appears that at the same moment that the national debate is fraught and fractured, local understanding and compassion seem free to move. What the politicians in Washington don’t get (or can’t admit they do), the locals get.<br />
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And then there’s Donald Trump. He really doesn’t get it. On the other hand, there may be a silver lining in well-publicized absurdity: maybe the fear of open borders will be eclipsed by a dread of being associated with closed-mindedness.<br />
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It is St. Paul’s open-mindedness that I admire. Do you recall his most famous words? “If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” I Corinthians, chapter 13, verse 1. That powerful verse follows verse 31 of chapter 12: “Strive for the greater gifts. And I will show you a still more excellent way.”<br />
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The commentator says that much of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians is “devoted to countering their tendency to use every occasion to see if they can one-up each other (for example, who is wise, who has the freedom to eat what, who has which spiritual gift.” Excelling was an indoor sport for the Corinthian Christians.<br />
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In today’s portion of his second letter, notice how Paul reels them in: “Now as you excel in everything—in faith, in speech, in knowledge, in utmost eagerness, and in our love for you—so we want you to excel also in this generous undertaking”—the collection for the victims of crisis in Jerusalem.<br />
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Generous outreaching stewardship is not peripheral to the Jesus movement. It is central to our mission of reconciling love. As Paul sings the good news today, Jesus Christ’s generosity to us gives the pitch we are to rise to as we sing his praise by our actions.<br />
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“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear,” insists our patron St. John (I John 4:18). In that spirit, Paul urges his hearers to complete (one could say perfect) their eagerness to excel and to do so according to their means. He says, “I do not mean that there should be relief for others from across borders and pressure on you here at home, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. As it is written, ‘The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little.’”<br />
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That quotation comes from the Book of Exodus, where the Israelites, immigrants fleeing oppression in Egypt, discover an edible substance like frost on the ground, and would forever extol God’s providence in feeding them bread from heaven, manna in the wilderness, evidence that God goes with his migrating people.<br />
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But this manna could not be stored, hoarding it spoiled it. Its purpose was to provide sufficient daily bread, each person finding enough.<br />
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We celebrate today the work and witness of all who help immigrants find enough for the journey and the resettling. What roles are there for more of us to help that need-meeting, that manna-giving? And for more ways to be open to experiencing their abundance of courage, enthusiasm, and joy?<br />
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Paul teaches us to recognize the abundance we will one day find shared with us by the same people we have helped. Twenty of us had a taste of this mutuality on Tuesday, when Bishop Abraham Nhial of South Sudan visited us here. One of the famous Lost Boys of Sudan, he found his way to this country where the opportunities of college and seminary came to him like manna, like a dream made real. He was made a bishop while still in his thirties, perhaps the youngest in Anglican history.<br />
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While he does not dwell on the past, he makes his point: that crossing deserts barefoot, eluding predators on two legs and on four, swimming across crocodile-infested rivers forever changes one’s priorities, appreciation of grace, clarity of perspective, definition of excellence.<br />
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His abundance is best described by Paul’s language: faith, hope, love, the greatest of these being love. Hence his commitment to help South Sudan embrace a process of truth-telling and reconciliation like the one in post-Apartheid South Africa and post-genocide Rwanda. And love, the queen of graces, informs also his commitment to the education of girls in South Sudan, and his passion for insisting that while there are two Sudanese nations, there is one Sudanese Episcopal Church that will resist the building of walls that reinforce the paradigm of an Us-against-Them kind of world.<br />
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There is a story of what one person’s immigration may accomplish in amazing circles of grace drawn whole, complete, excellent. His story makes the point St. Paul drives home to the Corinthians, a point explained so well by commentator J. Paul Sampley that I want his to be the closing words in this sermon.<br />
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“Paul’s notion that we, recipients of God’s grace, must pass it on, that we must finish the circle by redirecting it through us to someone else, is awesome. Think about what it says about human life in its daily routine: It says that every encounter with another person is an opportunity to be a channel of God’s grace. In fact, not to think of grace that way is probably to cheat God and certainly to cheat others, because it arrogates grace to us as a sort of possession whose goal and end is us as individuals and not us as community. God’s grace is not to be trifled with or to be taken lightly. It comes into the world, finding expression through people. Grace achieves its goal, it becomes the grace it was intended to be, only as it reaches ever more and more people. That is why the collection for the saints (in Jerusalem) was not just an option that (one church or another) might choose to engage in; it was a joyful obligation…”<br />
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That is also why we give time today to learn about immigration and what is needed to welcome and assist our newest neighbors.<br />
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(J. Paul Sampley’s commentary on the Second Letter to the Corinthians is found in Volume XI of “The New Interpreter’s Bible”, Abingdon Press, 2000.)<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-18617636681500761162015-06-23T13:29:00.004-07:002015-06-23T13:29:37.393-07:00Wet with Our TearsScripture for the 4th Sunday after Pentecost includes Job 38:1-11; II Corinthians 6:1-13; Mark 4:35-41<br />
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One day last week, I met with Asher and his Dad. That was because I thought it might be good if Asher and I had a little face time together before today. Not long ago, either Bill or Alix asked me a question about their son’s baptism: I think it was, “How do you baptize a four-year-old?” And I answered, “With a squirt gun.” It didn’t take long to realize that this was a bit flippant, and their question really was an invitation to me to think it through. What better way than to spend some time together?<br />
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So Asher helped me water the palm tree that we’ve had recently at the font. Then we replenished the water in the bowl of the prayer nook, where people float the candles they’ve lit in prayer. By then, we’d begun naming many ways that water is part of our lives. We wash dishes. We wash cars. We sweat. We take baths. And, of course, we drink water. Without it, we would shrivel up and blow away.<br />
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We didn’t think of rain falling on thirsty gardens and lawns.<br />
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Nor did we get as far as sailing boats on it. Or surviving great windstorms when waves beat into the boat. But if the object is to appreciate why water is used in holy baptism, navigation and survival deserve to be named.<br />
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And tears. We got sweat, but we didn’t think of tears. Yet the broken hearts of our nation this past week surely make tears such an important part of the significance of water. As we cry, we grieve, we heal. And we wonder how many tears will it take to cleanse this nation of racial hatred.<br />
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When the water of baptism is poured and blessed at the font in a few minutes, we will be reminded of yet more meanings of the gift of water.<br />
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“Over it the Holy Spirit moved in the beginning of creation.” And today’s reading from the Book of Job insists that God’s claim upon the earth, the stars, and the sea puts us in our place not as owners but as stewards of life.”<br />
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“Through water, God led the children of Israel out of their bondage… into the land of promise.” In its own way, this reminds us how obscene racial hatred is, lacking compassion for fellow human beings whose journeys across hazardous oceans brought them into bondage, not freedom—economic bondage which still, despite the oceans of tears shed in our Civil War, and the flood of tears shed throughout generations of Jim Crow, economic bondage still claims a vise grip on so many.<br />
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“In water, Jesus received the baptism of John and was anointed by the Holy Spirit as the Messiah, the Christ, to lead us, through his death and resurrection, from the bondage of sin into everlasting life.” Asher and Bill and I saw that story drawn in glass above the altar, at the top of that second window. And right below, Jesus is seated with children in his lap and at his feet, showing clearly how he gives to each of us, from as early in life as can be, the very same love that God has given him.<br />
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That love, God’s love for us, each of us, one at a time, is what we celebrate in every baptism. And as one person comes to the font today to set his sights on learning that love, practicing that love, growing that love, in the same moments of his baptism, each one of us is invited to renew the baptismal agreement (for which “covenant” is a fancier word), the agreement God wants from us.<br />
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Still wet from the tears of these past few days, we renew today our agreement to persevere in resisting evil… to seek and serve Christ in all persons… to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being.”<br />
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Wednesday night, in Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, eleven people offered this very kind of love, God’s love, to Dylann Roof, but he had no room, no use, no respect, no desire for such love as came to him in that circle of generosity created by Cynthia Hurd, Tywanza Sanders, Pastor Clementa Pinckney, Myra Thompson, Ethel Lee Lance, Susie Jackson, The Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons, DePayne Middleton- Doctor, Felecia Sanders, Cynthia Taylor, and Sharonda Coleman- Singleton.<br />
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He broke that circle with his hatred, and with the gun he carried he broke the life and the family circle of nine of those people who had made a place for him among them.<br />
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Still wet in the blood of Roof’s gun violence, our nation must again choose either to reform or to keep condoning the appalling ease with which guns are obtained and carried and used. <br />
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Still wet in the water of baptism today, we will make good on our promises to practice the love that will prove stronger than death, the love that will be the antidote to what poisons the well of this nation.<br />
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This is also the love that knows how to answer the question Jesus asks of each of us: “Why are you afraid?”<br />
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We are in the same boat as those disciples. We have ample reason to be afraid. Bad enough when brutal senseless mind-numbing violence occurs half a globe and two or three oceans away; but when it swamps our own boat—and I expect you’ll agree that this attempted desecration of one house of prayer is an invasion of all spaces, both sacred and civic—when this hatred worms its way into spaces we have pledged to make safe for all, then it is natural to fear. <br />
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But Jesus will not let us get away with locking the doors of this house of prayer which have been open at least daytimes for all its 121 years. The answer is not to circle our wagons. Nor is it to issue IDs for admission to bible study. Jesus will teach us precisely what he taught his disciples in that boat: that to be human is to be vulnerable, and to know ourselves to be vulnerable creatures is how we will face both reality and eternity honestly and openly.<br />
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Jesus calls us to trust him. To trust his presence not to protect us from vulnerability, but to equip us for the reality of the present moment that is fully known to him, and to equip us for eternal life which, we rejoice to affirm today, is given to us as sheer gift, amazing grace.<br />
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“Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?” they ask him. And so do we. <br />
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Yet it will never be otherwise with this precious gift of life. The religion opened to Asher today through his baptism does not pretend otherwise. As St. Paul puts it, in the language of our second reading, “What part of afflictions, hardships, and calamities do you not understand? If these happened to me, they will happen to you. Be ready for them. When they come, keep trusting the one who knows the next step.”<br />
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Jesus hears his disciples ask whether he cares that they are perishing. What else can he be thinking but, “And so am I.” And it’s right then that what he demonstrates to them is courageous leadership facing into the windstorm and a deep marshaling of the ability to bestow peace and still chaos. His vulnerability does not limit his powers. His vulnerability inspires countless generations to believe that they—we—are the hands and feet, the body, the eyes of Jesus in our day. We are practitioners of his powers.<br />
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How the nation and the world need those powers now. How we need the baptismal agreement to renew in us the conviction that these powers are given, planted in baptism, cultivated by parents and siblings, Godparents and community. How fortunate we are, in the shadow and aftermath of these days of our tears, to get wet today with Asher in his baptism. <br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-55072645377345267292015-06-16T09:05:00.000-07:002015-06-16T09:05:02.083-07:00Essence of ChurchScripture for the 3rd Sunday after Pentecost includes Ezekiel 17:22-24; II Corinthians 5:6-17; Mark 4: 26-34<br />
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“With many such parables Jesus spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; he did not speak to them except in parables, but he explained everything in private to his disciples.”<br />
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What do you think it’s like, being a teacher who has to explain everything to the supposedly star pupils in the class?<br />
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What’s it like, being identified as high achievers in the class, but nonetheless needing everything to be explained?<br />
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And what’s the dynamic at work among all the rest of the students who aren’t invited to those private sessions?<br />
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The four Gospels can’t tell the Gospel story, the Good News, without commenting on certain facts of life. Like, that some who encounter Jesus are quick studies, while some require coaching, and yet others will walk away from the encounter clueless as to what it was all about.<br />
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Put that another way: There is more than one kind of intelligence, more than one form of aptitude, and (as the apostle Paul was fond of saying) a variety of spiritual gifts. Intelligence comes in a rainbow of styles: cognitive, social, emotional, intuitive, organizational. Aptitude embraces artistic ability, language fluency, mechanical skill, leadership. And St. Paul’s several lists of spiritual gifts and spiritual fruits could keep us going all morning.<br />
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Put in yet another way, the Jesus movement is forever remembered by its fruits, its results in fulfilling its mission to (says our collect of the day) “proclaim God’s truth with boldness and minister God’s justice with compassion.” The Jesus movement shapes an apostolic community, in which those who get it give it. Those who get the message know they are entrusted with proclaiming it. Those who are loved by Jesus into new knowledge of who and whose they are give away that love to others as generously as they’ve gotten it. Those who are forgiven forgive. We know we are called to reconcile—to set right—all people to one another and to God. We come to know ourselves as people sent to embody the ministry of Jesus Christ in the world. <br />
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All this knowing engages the whole human being. We know not through one hemisphere of a brain dominated by either logical and analytical and objective processing of information or by the other hemisphere’s intuitive, conceptual, and subjective kinds of knowing; our knowing occurs through both hemispheres of the brain communicating to one another and working together.<br />
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The whole of our knowing requires a reconciling within us that may start within the brain’s hemispheres talking to one another; but surely our customary inventory includes the heart’s ways of knowing, and the instincts of the gut, the ethics of the backbone, and the reflexes of our muscles. All told, and all functioning, our knowings process our encounters and make relational sense of our world. In doing that wondrous work, imagination and belief play their roles as we encounter not just the immanence of flesh but also the transcendence of spirit.<br />
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Imagination and belief played a big part in our Vestry’s recent Day Away at Sheep Hill Farm, home of Williamstown’s Rural Lands Foundation. Our Wardens, Claudia Ellet and Margot Sanger, with the help of Canon Pam Mott from the Bishop’s staff, organized a decidedly different sort of Day Away.<br />
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It was a come-alive gorgeous day on May 30, and we had the run of the place. What had been arranged for us goes by the nickname Visual Explorer. Taking over the old main barn, Pam had spread out on tables and across wide swaths of the floor, 250 pictures, some photographs, some paintings, some archival drawings, just the most eclectic batch of images you’d ever expect to see. Our task was to consider and explore every image, silently, until each person had found one that best illustrates the essence of Church. The essence of Church. We then found out way into threesomes to share what it was each of us had found in the image that had spoken so clearly.<br />
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I could never have expected to choose what I did: a 19th-century painting of an Italian village of that same period, the town’s residents gathered on the plaza outside the parish church and adjacent school. I couldn’t tell exactly what was happening on that plaza, except that the town’s young men were being sent off—perhaps to war (though no one had alarm in their faces), perhaps on a more peaceable mission (a football tournament, who knows?)—wives kissing their husbands, children offering their fathers bouquets, and the young men shouldering great backpacks, evidence of an important mission ahead. Better than 249 other images, this one (quirky as it was) conveyed to me the essence of Church: A responsive community of people who know they are called, and are acting on it.<br />
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Verbalizing what each image represented was part of our task. How often the word “community” was heard. One Vestry member had chosen—I’m not making this up-- a photo of a cluster of meerkats. Meerkats! Those sleek creatures with four legs but famously vertical, each of the cats looking off at a different angle suggesting that the essence of Church is a community whose individual members support the whole by looking in different directions as they search, anticipating opportunity or danger. Another member’s image conveyed a similar insight: that community is a working-together of groups that become aware that each individual brings value to the whole, and it is often the outliers who signal what we need to know.<br />
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Other takes on the essence of Church: God’s workshop where each one of us is essential. Helping others connects the Church to the wider world. Being bathed in the light of God’s love for all. A community of save haven to face life’s challenges. And a photo of an open air market inspired this: The Church is God’s produce brought to be useful and available by the hands of his people. (That’s a timely image, since last week the first twelve bags of lettuce and spinach were harvested from the Garden of Eatin’ out back, and brought to the Friendship Center food pantry.)<br />
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This was the morning task, imagining, reflecting, sharing. In the afternoon, the same pattern, to find the image that best shows the outward and visible sign of the Church’s essence. Actually, I believe the instruction was to free ourselves from the constraints of church budgets and the press of maintaining church buildings, then ask ourselves what this essence would look like.<br />
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Again, what I chose surprised me, but seeing all 249 images again, I knew it was this: A close-up photo of five African children, early elementary ages, their faces full of promise, their posture an eager waiting, perhaps for a school door to open. Putting this to words, for me the outward and visible sign of our essence is our community’s caring not just for itself here at home, but equally for the emergent communities of the world rising from poverty, and those that need help doing so.<br />
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Around the circle of Vestry, other answers came, one after another. One said that for her the sign is our heading out into deeper waters away from the safety of the shore. Another, moving forward on the road to do God’s work and ours, confidently, competently, cheerfully. The verbs “share” and “support” were frequent, the sign of our essence being the sharing of our gifts and the bounties of creation to support others to accomplish their goals. And for another, the sign is our offering a place and a community to explore transcendence.<br />
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I said that this was a distinctly different sort of Day Away. We didn’t learn a body of information. We didn’t build a plan. We didn’t analyze a problem. We purposely catered to both hemispheres of our brains, took into account the varied ways of knowing we use. We enjoyed a day together that also gave us time and space apart as individuals. I guess you could say we spent the day being bathed in images, playing with parables: puzzling metaphors that tease the mind to think and imagine and recognize and believe. <br />
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And throughout this day a drama was unfolding in the tall grasses just off the edge of the pond, right near where several small groups were meeting. A young fawn (turns out just a week old) was nestled in those grasses. Every so often, when human voices rose, so did the fawn, looking around, toddling onto its legs but staying tight to its spot. A doe had been seen climbing Sheep Hill earlier that morning, and we dared hope—no, we truly needed it to be—that she had gone foraging and would be back. <br />
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The hours passed. Two hours, three, four, five. The fawn kept rustling, rising, looking about, no doe. Then, at the last, someone called out, “She’s back!” And as we gathered in the doorway to watch, there was the doe, standing over her fawn who was nursing. We don’t get to see that every day.<br />
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On the other hand, perhaps we could. Perhaps we would see more evidence of grace, more birthing of new life, more drama of redemption, if we sought more communion between our human hemispheres of explanation and awareness, more communion between daily life and the kingdom of God.<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-79354957265633148602015-06-01T14:42:00.003-07:002015-06-01T14:42:49.584-07:00Imagine and BelieveScripture for Trinity Sunday includes Isaiah 6:1-8; Romans 8:12-17; John 3:1-17<br />
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I need visuals to help us consider the Nicodemus story. If you can’t see what these words say, let me help you with that: One says Believe, the other Imagine. They’ve sat in our library for a long time, awaiting their debut. We need them today, as we unpack the story of a secret disciple who makes an interesting companion on Trinity Sunday.<br />
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Nicodemus is introduced as a Pharisee. Pharisees have gotten bad press in ages past. Reappraised more recently, they’re understood now as having been progressive agents of change in the first century, helping shape what would become modern Judaism. <br />
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It could be that Episcopalians and Pharisees have more in common than we’d guessed. By whatever path he got there, Nicodemus displayed both a privileged life and a sense of social responsibility that made of him a leader. But he seems secretive in his approach to Jesus, coming to him under the cover of night. And if there’s one more trait that might make him one of us, he has a kind of puffy use of the pronoun “we”: “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God…” I can hear our Lord’s disciples muttering, “Oh? Who’s that “we”? For whom is Nicodemus making this claim? Is he leading a temple coup among the Pharisees, or is he a lone ranger covering his tracks and making himself sound grander than he is?”<br />
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One might even wonder whether Nicodemus, this man of substance who wears the mantle of authority and carries social approval, might be hoping to co-opt Jesus, an itinerant street preacher from impoverished Galilee, known to hang out with all the wrong sorts, a fellow “we” think has great potential if he would just go to the right seminary and polish his approach, get a little less other-worldly and help us keep the peace here on earth…<br />
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Notice how flattering Nicodemus’s words can be taken, and how Jesus does not take them: he cuts to the chase and confronts with his own spiritual purposes whatever agenda Nicodemus has: “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”<br />
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Here is where Nicodemus, to believe, must imagine. Imagine what Jesus might mean by being born from above. This stumps Nicodemus. Astonishes him. I think it even offends him at some level of his propriety. <br />
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And yet… Astonishment is one reason Nicodemus has sought out Jesus. “No one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” When Nicodemus is face to face with Jesus’s actions—his healings, exorcisms, feedings—the resulting astonishment does not block the Pharisee’s believing: in fact, it quickens his faith. But when he encounters Jesus himself, hears Jesus’s words, experiences Jesus’s attitude, finds himself in face to face relationship with Jesus, the resulting astonishment pushes the edge of the envelope. And suddenly, he is arguing with Jesus.<br />
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Nicodemus’s mind appears to be hemmed-in by his literal thinking, his insistence that one word must mean one thing. You could say that he lacks imagination. To believe, he must be freed to imagine. To be freed, he must welcome and experience the compassionate faithfulness of God that is being made intimately available to him in Jesus Christ, as it is to each of us.<br />
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I wonder if something very basic is going on in Nicodemus’s resistance. When Jesus chose not to respond to Nicodemus’s flattery, he answered the Pharisee with words that I imagine pushed him right out of his comfort zone. Words that we recognize as being about baptism—“You must be born from above”, and if that’s not clear enough, “born of water and Spirit.” To speak of baptism at that point in time was to evoke the image of John the Baptizer, that ragged firebrand who violated the propriety that would have mattered to this Pharisee. John the Baptizer attracted all sorts and conditions of people, by the hundreds and perhaps thousands, including the great unwashed lower classes. And what John preached was radical: “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do likewise.” Tax collectors were told to stop collecting more than was due, and soldiers were ordered to stop extorting bribes and issuing threats. Soldiers of the occupying Roman imperial army were being ordered around by the likes of this wild man, John. What is the world coming to?<br />
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And Jesus is implying that Nicodemus must wade into the muddy water of the Jordan River, rubbing shoulders with all that teeming humanity, to what end? To lose face, to be branded as a wild-eyed revolutionary, to be targeted by Rome? <br />
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Doesn’t Jesus know that if he wants to establish a movement, he must make it easy for people, not harder than it already will be? What is he imagining, Nicodemus wonders.<br />
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I imagine that Nicodemus can’t yet shake free from his pride, his self-sufficiency, and his fear.<br />
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Nicodemus and Jesus are on two different wavelengths. The one is focused on the earthy, the other on the heavenly, the spiritual. Nicodemus can say to Jesus, “We know that you have come from God…” Jesus can say, “We speak of what we know…yet you do not receive our testimony.”<br />
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As true as it is to say that to believe, Nicodemus must imagine, it is also true that in order to imagine (in order to image what is challenging and puzzling) this human power needs to be yoked to belief, be inspired by believing, be guided by faith.<br />
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Nicodemus’s story makes an intriguing partner with Trinity Sunday. Today, the Church celebrates a doctrine, the one time in the rotation of fifty-two Sundays that we do this. Timing is everything, and it’s right on the heels of Pentecost, God’s giving of the Spirit to ignite the Church to respond to its calling to help God renew the face of the earth. It’s as if we watch God add the dynamic of the Holy Spirit to an equation that already has in it God the Creator and Jesus Christ the beloved, and the Church recognizes, “Yes! That’s it! Those are the three key ways we have come to know God, the one God in three aspects, three self-revealings, three ways to relate to the one God who chooses to relate to us with a singular love that casts out fear and challenges pride.”<br />
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Like Nicodemus, to believe we must imagine, and to imagine we need to hitch our wagon to the star of faith. Unlike Nicodemus, we do this spiritual work not secretly but transparently in fellowship with one another and in communion with God, both celebrating this doctrine of the Holy Trinity and puzzling over its meaning. This includes astonishment that Jesus, the Son of Man, must be lifted high upon the cross, amazement that eternal life is thrown open so graciously, and awe that the world—with all its teeming humanity and all its shimmering web of life—is to be made whole in him. <br />
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How it will happen, this renewal of the face of the earth and all its glorious mantle of life, will depend in no small part on our using our God-given gracious powers to believe and to imagine.<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-37644052587313993052015-05-27T12:22:00.001-07:002015-05-27T12:22:57.529-07:00Spiritual Redemption from Spiritual BondageScripture for the Day of Pentecost includes Acts 2:1-21; Romans 8:22-27; John 15:26-27, 16:4b-15<br />
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We need one more thing happening here today. I’m kidding. Nor am I complaining. Pentecost should be a day of deep movement, both of God’s Spirit and of ours, hence also a day of much activity as bodies and minds join forces to turn the Easter momentum into powerful traction as Good News takes hold. And I especially won’t complain about a well-packed schedule today because my colleague Rabbi Rachel Barenblat was up until 4:00 this morning leading her congregation in prayer and Torah study in celebration of Shavu’ot.<br />
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That’s the ancient Jewish festival that gained the nickname Pentecost, meaning 50 days, in the Jewish context 50 days after the Passover. Its Hebrew name, Shavu’ot, means Festival of Weeks (seven weeks times seven days, seven being a number with mystical cachet), and it ranks second among the three annual Jewish festivals (Passover being the first, Sukkot the third). For Christians, Pentecost is among our three major festivals, too. And this year, Pentecost falls on the same day for both religions.<br />
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For Jews, Shavu’ot recalls the first harvesting of wheat, evidence of how much can happen in just those 50 days from the seedtime of Passover to the presentation of the first fruits in the temple at Jerusalem.<br />
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But where the rubber hits the road for both Christians and Jews is that this day is all about God’s giving: for Jews, God’s giving the Torah at Mount Sinai. Passover had freed the Hebrew people from bondage physically; Pentecost marks God’s giving Israel its signature code of law and its foundational holy scripture, the Torah, redeeming Israel spiritually from idolatry and immorality. <br />
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For Christians, Pentecost celebrates God’s giving the divine Spirit to all races and nations. We do get clubby about that, sometimes speaking as if the Holy Ghost descended only upon card-carrying Christian apostles—overlooking the fact that as of this day there were none of those yet. This was the day that whistled them into being, breathed into them the will and the courage and the faith to see the vision, dream the dream, prophesy the truth of God’s global embrace in Jesus Christ, not by might nor by human power, but by God’s Spirit.<br />
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This is where Jews and Christians celebrate the same divine action today: spiritual redemption from spiritual bondage. St. Paul gives a name to that redemption: he calls it adoption, a powerful metaphor of intimacy with God, who chooses to draw us into an embrace that releases us from our addictions to greed, to violence, to narcissism, to prejudice, to isolation, to idolatry (worshiping as if God what is decidedly not God). By adoption, God has restored to us our identity as children of God, and our awareness of who and whose we are empowers us to get with the program of love, reconciling love, redeeming love.<br />
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Hence the salient details of Pentecost. The rush of a mighty wind, shaking us free from past compulsions and habits that stand in the way of the Spirit. Tongues of fire burning away the crud of our worst mistakes, lighting and showing what our best choices will be. And tongues in the other sense, freedom and conviction to express our gratitude, our faith and hope and love, telling, testifying—across old boundaries of language and ethnic division-- showing where and how we sense God at work in the world. And joy, such exuberance that the self-appointed guardians of good taste dismissed all this Pentecostal revelry as just that, drunkenness. <br />
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And one last Pentecostal detail: They were all together in one place. It’s estimated somewhere that they were about 120 in number. We could fit that number handily here, filling some of these empty spots. They had been called in out of the cold rain of their fears and their grieving at the death of their master; we too are called in here to reaffirm who and whose we are, members of one Body, fed from one loaf, bound by one love, harnessed to one mission.<br />
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A mighty rush, a shaking free, many tongues, transcendent joy, unity in mission—these are all traits of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, its triennial legislative assembly, to meet this summer in Salt Lake City. Representing our sister Diocese of Massachusetts, our sister Sarah Neumann, a sophomore at Williams, will be seated in the 900-member House of Deputies, whose work is to debate and perfect literally hundreds of pieces of legislation shaping our Church internationally and locally. I’d put money on the likelihood that she will be the youngest Deputy there, and perhaps ever in the long history of the House of Deputies. On this her last Sunday in town before summer break, we will bless her on her way and look forward to her helping us unpack General Convention in the fall.<br />
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Our Easter Series presents its third and final speaker today on the subject of Climate Change and Creation Care. Ethan Zuckerman will address the same three questions we’ve put to all our speakers: How are you thinking about these realities? How are you praying about them? What are you doing about them?<br />
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Because we know these are the same basic questions we need to ask of ourselves, next Sunday we’ll offer an opportunity for series participants to stay on right after the 10:00 service, here in the church, to reflect on what you’ve heard in the series. This will be a chance to identify ideas and insights that we’ve taken home with us, from Bill Moomaw’s visit, from Rabbi Rachel Barenblat’s and Chaplain Rick Spalding’s presentation, and from Ethan’s today. I promise that this reflection session will not prevent you from getting in some coffee hour time.<br />
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Ethan Zuckerman is well placed to speak to us today about climate change from a global perspective. He is Director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and a principal research scientist at MIT's Media Lab, where he heads research on Media Cloud, a system for quantitative analysis of agenda setting in digital media, and Promise Tracker, a platform that allows citizens to monitor powerful institutions using mobile and web technologies. He is the author of "Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection", published by W.W. Norton. Ethan co-founded international blogging community Global Voices, which showcases news and opinions from citizen media in over 150 nations and thirty languages. I think that makes Ethan Pentecostal!<br />
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And today Bishop Fisher begins his long walk through the Berkshires. He’s doubtless striding along Route 2 on his way here for lunch at 12:30. At 1:30 he and his companions will be driven south to the Store at Five Corners, where his walk resumes at 1:45. By 5:30, he’s expected at St. Luke’s for evening prayer. <br />
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You and I are invited to join him, one way or another. Come for lunch, when we’ll bless him on his way. We’re grateful to the several Vestry members who are overseeing the lunch in our upper room. And/or… meet him at the Store at Five Corners and walk with him a while. Just please don’t leave your car parked at the store—the lot isn’t roomy enough—if you’d like a ride to the store, that we can provide. And, as long as it’s within the six miles south of Five Corners, we’ll provide roadside pickup when you’ve reached your limit. In the printed announcements today, you’ll find several ideal spots for pickup. And, whether you walk there or drive there, join the Bishop for evening prayer in Lanesboro.<br />
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Why is our Bishop walking? That’s answered in the recent issue of our diocesan magazine, “Abundant Times”:<br />
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"In ancient days bishops walked their territories – staff in hand – as a visible sign of the universal Church embodied in its leader. The Bishop continues to be that witness of presence and the bridge between local congregations and the larger Church. Although Bishop Fisher has visited each of the 60 congregations at least once in the past two years, he is setting out on foot to:<br />
o LISTEN to the experiences and hopes of the people he meets<br />
o TALK about the Gospel informally<br />
o PRAY with people where they are – beyond church walls<br />
o BLESS all who serve the poor, the imprisoned, the sick, the homeless and all who seek justice." <br />
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On Memorial Day weekend, our thoughts turn to the long walk towards justice in this nation, as we recall how this federal holiday originally (when it was called Decoration Day) remembered all who gave their lives in the Civil War, both Union and Confederate forces. That war ultimately accomplished the abolition of slavery, and a reunited nation found it just to solemnly recognize the ultimate price paid by both sides. <br />
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In the 20th century, the concept of Memorial Day broadened to include all the men and women who gave their lives to safeguard freedom and reprove injustice, in whatever wars of that war-weary century (and future centuries) in which they served. <br />
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Memorial Day has become a sort of gateway on the path to summer, a time to visit and tend the graves of loved ones, whether they served in the armed forces or not. It’s in keeping with a democracy that we include everyone. It’s in keeping with Pentecost that boundaries be porous and that our embrace in the name of God be ever widening, to include all, absolutely all.<br />
Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-23038657680599662382015-05-19T14:13:00.000-07:002015-05-19T14:13:01.159-07:00Drawn to His FeetScripture for the 7th Sunday of Easter includes Acts 1:15-17, 21-26; I John 5:9-13; John 17:6-19<br />
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“He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” So says the Nicene Creed, capturing a moment that would have gone viral if YouTube had been available in the first century. Instead, it was by the social media of the New Testament that the Ascension became the culminating feature, truly the high point, in the Gospel story of Jesus Christ.<br />
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In the middle ages, paintings—another form of social media—depicted the Ascension, sometimes giving the impression that Jesus was levitating. These paintings have in common a hill top, a band of disciples huddled around an empty central spot, craning their necks to see rising above that central spot their Lord Jesus, not in an action hero pose of ascent, but, well, levitating, rising, as if in no rush, as if intending to be seen, persuasively seen, one hand holding a scepter, the other raised in blessing. You can see a good example of this scene in the next to last window in the Gospel series above our altar. And, unavoidably, perhaps strategically, in some of these paintings one’s eye is drawn… to his feet. There they are, dangling in mid-air. <br />
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This would be a good moment to remind you that next Sunday our Bishop begins his walk through Berkshire County, starting in North Adams for eucharist at All Saints, coming here for lunch at 12:30, leaving by 1:30 heading south, his goal for that day being St. Luke’s, Lanesboro, for evening prayer at 5:30. <br />
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In his ascension, Jesus is glorified, exalted far above all earthly power and authority, showing that his rule transcends all other dominion, his love embraces all. There’s a Greek name for this exaltation. Apotheosis, making God-like what was previously hidden. <br />
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The story of Cinderella has an apotheosis, the servant girl who sweeps the hearth sweeps up the heart of a prince and, through gradual revelation and the overcoming of obstacles, she is freed to rise and claim a new life, a throne, a kingdom.<br />
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The story of a real person, George Washington, comes complete with apotheosis. What a rise to glory, from feisty teenager trying out his tree-felling skills in his neighbor’s orchard, to accomplished military officer, to first President of the United States (remember that many were so taken by him that they wanted to ditch democracy and make him king). At least one artist of the time, attempting to capture the moment of Washington’s death, showed him rising from his deathbed to ascend into heaven. Talk about ranking high in the popularity polls!<br />
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Apotheosis: making like God what was once hidden. Exalting the humble. Revealing the true and ultimate worth, the highest degree of development. The last shall be first, the least the greatest.<br />
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Our Bishop is demonstrating some of these themes in his plein air pilgrimage. He is allowing hidden worth and importance to be revealed along highways and town roads we’ve driven countless times without looking up, without looking-in to see who is there, without getting out of the car to set our feet on the earth, without hallowing the ground by actually seeing what’s there and how it might delight God by its beauty or disturb God by its condition, might in some as yet undetected way matter more to God than it does to us, might therefore be inviting us to recognize opportunity to learn, to serve, to love.<br />
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I believe that our Bishop, in these three long walks the full lengths of our three geographic valleys, is walking for all of us, nudging us all to wonder and imagine, recognize and consider, how the work of the church and the work of the world are related, how what lies hidden might be holy, how ultimate worth might be revealed, and the highest degree of development encouraged. How what we think of last when we think of the mission of the Church might deserve to be put first, and how what we tend to put first stacks up against the wider world, with its needs and opportunities, its realities. All of this is the work of apotheosis.<br />
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Exaltation is the English word that best translates the ancient Greek word. Our collect of the day says that the King of glory, God, has exalted his son Jesus to his kingdom in heaven. Just when we might be wondering, Is this like Dad (or Mom) passing on the family business to his (or her) next generation, or handing-on the deed to the family ranch?, just then we hear the collect shift the focus to us. Send us your Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior Christ has gone before. <br />
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We are going to be promoted to headquarters. That is the Holy Spirit’s job: readying us for management. Management of our own body-mind-spirit complex, management of our multiple relationships, management of our life in community, management of this fragile earth, our island home. Or is it that we have already been promoted? I believe that’s more in line with the message of St. John in his letter today: “This is the testimony: God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life…”<br />
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The final verse in a hymn we sang here on Ascension Day (this past Thursday) catches this puzzling theme of our own exaltation: “Thou hast raised our human nature on the clouds to God’s right hand: There we sit in heavenly places, there with thee in glory stand. Jesus reigns, adored by angels; Man with God is on the throne; mighty Lord, in thine ascension, we by faith behold our own.”<br />
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Jesus embraces all, absolutely all. All who embrace him-- by baptism, by faith, by practicing his love—whoever has the Son-- has life. And life, says St. John in his Gospel just two or three verses before today’s portion, is for glorifying God on earth by finishing the work we have been given to do. One might say finishing the work of reconciliation and redemption, and on a good day seeing that we can do this through the finishing of our own work.<br />
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Not working in ways that silence the Spirit, or distract us from the Spirit, or result in our rejecting the Spirit: That would be the opposite of exaltation. No, in today’s Gospel Jesus makes it clear that we are not to be dominated by demands and obligation and duty, but we are to have his joy made complete in ourselves. We are to stop, from time to time, and look up—to clear our senses, gain fresh perspective, allow room and space in our work for joy and laughter, wonder and imagination, openness and inspiration. For these will rank high among the spiritual gifts that equip us to reach our fullest development and train us to trust God’s reach. For by that unerring grasp we shall be exalted, as his ascension becomes our own. <br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-52807594320255234002015-05-04T08:46:00.000-07:002015-05-04T08:46:10.342-07:00Radical Equality, Radical ReverenceScripture for the 5th Sunday of Easter includes Acts 8:26-40; I John 4:7-21; John 15:1-8<br />
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Read the New Testament and it won’t take you long to notice how often the Hebrew Bible is quoted in the Christian writings of the early Church. The Jesus Movement happened within first-century Judaism. What by mid-century came to be called Christian was first Jewish, for the pioneer and perfecter of our faith is a Jew, Jesus of Nazareth. <br />
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And the Book of the Prophet Isaiah is, along with the Book of Psalms, a frequent source of these quotations. A quick scan reveals 22 locations where Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul, the top rock band of the New Testament, sing to a new tune the old yet ever-new lyrics of Isaiah and actually credit him as their source. Who knows how many, many, more times Isaiah’s thought is paraphrased, working its way into the Good News organically because these troubadors of Christ had heard the prophet since their childhood?<br />
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And it’s not as if these liftings are minor footnotes to the Christian story. Here are five examples. <br />
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“ Jesus left Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled: ‘Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles--the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.’” (Matthew 4:13-16)<br />
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“(And he) cured all who were sick. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah, ‘He took our infirmities and bore our diseases.’” (Matthew 8:16-17)<br />
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“Many crowds followed Jesus… and he ordered them not to make him known. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah: ‘Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. He will not wrangle or cry aloud, nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets. He will not break a bruised reed or quench a smoldering wick until he brings justice to victory.” (Matthew 12:15b-20)<br />
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“As it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, ‘The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”’” (Luke 3:4-6)<br />
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“When Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release of the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all… were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’” (Luke 4:16-21)<br />
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These are not minor brush strokes: These are solid background and lustrous foreground on the canvas of the Good News of God in Jesus Christ. And what do our New Testament authors’ use of Isaiah illuminate? They show who the Christ is, what he comes for, and what our mission is within the new life he opens to us. <br />
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This is big stuff. And there’s no more exciting example of this transformative messaging than today’s story of the Ethiopian royal treasurer. You notice how I introduce this man, who is without a name. I mean, who ever would introduce such an important person by calling attention to a missing body part? The long shelf life of that disadvantage he suffered, the institutionalized violence he would bear for a lifetime, makes sense only if this is understood to be a story of what God wants us to do about human discrimination, about the injustice of keeping marginalized people under control.<br />
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What is he reading? He has borrowed from the royal library—or perhaps is well-off enough that he can afford his own—a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. “Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter, and like a lamb silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who can describe his generation? For his life is taken away from the earth.”<br />
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“About whom does the prophet speak?” he asks the apostle Philip, who has popped up on this wilderness road, despatched by the Holy Spirit, and has accepted the Ethiopian’s invitation to step up into his chariot and help him understand what the scripture means. “Does the prophet say this about himself, or about someone else?”<br />
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Here is where I once heard brilliant teaching by Lutheran preacher and scholar Barbara Lundblad. She surprised an audience of several hundred of us at the Chautauqua Institute, one steamy summer day. We were used to the idea that Isaiah gets quoted a lot in the New Testament in order to strengthen the Christian claim that Jesus Christ fulfills the Jewish law and prophets. Barbara went deeper.<br />
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“Dry trees,” she told us. That’s what they called men who had been made eunuchs in order to serve in the royal harem. Barbara invited us to imagine the snickering that went with that put-down. In a culture that equated having many children with having God’s favor, a culture that saw its children ensuring the future of family, tribe, and nation, a dry tree was counted as less than a whole person, no present standing in the eyes of God or the nation, no future claim to live on in his children. The Ethiopian stands in a long time line of people, many people, especially resident aliens, being counted not as whole persons, but as three-fifths of a person, and treated accordingly.<br />
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Barbara Lundblad had pretty much climbed up into that chariot by now, and said, “Boys, let me show you something. You’re trying to understand Chapter 53 of Isaiah. If you scroll down to chapter 56, listen to what you find there: “Do not let the foreigner joined to the LORD say, ‘The LORD will surely separate me from his people;’ and do not let the eunuch say, ‘I am just a dry tree.’ For thus says the LORD: To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths, who choose the things that please me and hold fast my covenant, I will give, in my house and within my walls, a monument and a name better than sons and daughters; I will give them an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD, to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD, and to be his servants, all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it, and hold fast my covenant—these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer… for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples…” (Isaiah 56:3-7)<br />
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The Ethiopian’s heart resonates perfectly with Isaiah’s portrait of a man suffering humiliation and the denial of justice. “About whom, may I ask you, does the prophet says this, about himself or about… someone else?” <br />
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The early Church’s evangelists wanted their hearers to say, “It is about Jesus that Isaiah writes!” Barbara Lundblad sensed that the eunuch was daring to wonder, “Could this be true of me? Can the humiliating power of discrimination be overcome in me?”<br />
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Philip’s answer must have persuaded this man of the radical equality of all people in the eyes of God, whose only requirement of us is that we embrace the covenant love that embraces us, and extend that great chain of giving respect and care, freely, generously, and unearned, to all people and to all creatures. The Ethiopian embraces this new vision, this new life: When he sees a pool of water, he cries out, “What is to prevent me from being baptized?”<br />
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To that, the answer is only that he stop his chariot, step off the treadmill of his old thinking, recognize in himself and in others the image of God, let God flush away the toxins swallowed over years of ill treatment, prejudice, exclusion, and contempt.<br />
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Just don’t miss this, added Barbara: This was a wilderness road, a desert road. One does not expect to find pools of water along a road like this. It is purely by God’s grace that this man goes down into water he could never have expected, and rises new.<br />
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Such grace had prompted Philip to be on that road, to be open to whomever he found there, to renounce the safe distance people keep from each other. Such grace had stirred the Ethiopian to hunger and thirst for right understanding of the way of God, and such grace had humbled him to welcome help towards that understanding.<br />
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Such grace keeps happening because of the love of God for the whole creation. It keeps happening because Jesus Christ walks our wilderness roads with us. Such grace keeps happening because faith and hope and love are inherently and relentlessly stronger than fear.<br />
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Such grace reveals the radical equality of all people, and the power of radical reverence for all life. How we build with these givens, how they free us and bind us must be worked out on city streets, in the chambers of government, in our response to global crises, in sharp debate, in the rainbow of the arts and in the stewardship of science, in the ethics of private wealth and commonwealth, in the power of peacemaking and in the peaceable use of power. <br />
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Because given to us also are the responsibility and the opportunity and the desperate need to build the all-embracing community of justice seen and served by Isaiah and the prophets, by Jesus and the apostles, and the countless circle of people over many centuries who have let themselves be embraced by the love of God.<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-76588504639962480422015-04-27T09:24:00.001-07:002015-04-27T09:24:38.525-07:00Good ShepherdingScripture for the 4th Sunday of Easter includes Ezekiel 34:1-10; I John 3:16-24; John 10:11-18<br />
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I’ll bet you won’t be surprised to hear that this Sunday is nicknamed Good Shepherd Sunday. While there are plenty more scriptural references to sheep and shepherds than those we’ve heard today, we don’t need more to highlight the importance of shepherding as a real winner—at least in the ancient world-- in conveying the nature of care. Real, genuine, authentic care. <br />
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That care is fearless, keeps the wolf at bay, seeks out the straying and lost, values the individual. The good shepherd risks life and limb to deliver this care. It’s no wonder that this metaphor holds strong in both the Hebrew Bible and in Christian scriptures. It trains us to dare believe that it describes accurately and indelibly the nature and passionate purpose of God.<br />
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Equally clear, especially in the hands of old Ezekiel, is how the metaphor calls us to practice this very same care. It pleases us, to recognize God in the shepherd’s caring. It pleases God, to recognize the shepherd’s caring in and through us. <br />
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And what delights me about this metaphor is its cross-species reach. This will be a good moment in our Easter focus on climate change and creation care to remind ourselves that the vows of Christian baptism embrace not only care for the human species, but for the whole of the created order.<br />
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The baptismal covenant expects of us agreement to enter and extend God’s ever-fresh reconciling, restoring, renewing of all creation, the whole shimmering web of life. We do this work by showing in our lives what we profess by our faith. We heard St. John nail it in his letter: “Let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.”<br />
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Listen to these expressions of our baptismal profession:<br />
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“Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God? I renounce them.”<br />
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We pray for those about to be baptized: “Send them into the world in witness to your love.” <br />
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Immediately upon a person’s being baptized, we pray, “Sustain her, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give her an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.”<br />
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And wherever the contemporary creed from Iona is said, Christians are called to the front lines of creation care: “…though we are sometimes fearful and full of doubt, in God we trust; and, in the name of Jesus Christ, we commit ourselves, in the service of others, to seek justice and live in peace, to care for the earth and to share the commonwealth of God’s goodness…”<br />
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So let’s get back to those sheep. I have lived a sheltered life, when it comes to sheep. I know little first-hand about them. I do know that they have a reputation for not being the brightest bulbs on the Ark. I know that in the quest for using the Internet to enhance communication between human beings and other sentient beings, a touchscreen network is being designed for intelligent animal species to communicate directly with humans and each other. Pioneers on this frontier used a TED talk to introduce this idea that the Internet can be used to communicate with the many remarkable beings with which (with whom?) we share the planet. (Imagine getting an e-mail from your cat.) Cockatoos, dolphins, octopuses, great apes, parrots, elephants have all been identified as likely communicators. But I haven’t heard sheep mentioned in this regard. <br />
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I know that on one memorable Easter Sunday we invited a lovely family of shepherds from Pownal to bring their lambs to church, where, as you’d expect, they fascinated everyone. From that day I have declined every opportunity to eat lamb. If I ever do relax that discipline, there’s no one I’d rather buy lamb from than the Barsottis of Longview Farm. They run their business as a CSA, the wider community supporting a farm, enjoying its accomplishments, sharing its risks. They insist on feeding grass to their sheep, not grains. When one of their ewes died giving birth, the Barsottis raised the twin lambs, bottle-feeding, diapering, and giving them free range of the first floor of their house, until they were strong enough to join the flock. (And we keep searching for effective models of Christian formation? Here’s the prototype.)<br />
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From here out, I only think I know that while the default mode for goats is to scatter when they graze, the instinct of sheep is to cluster, more often than not. They just need occasional help doing that centering (and who among us does not?), hence the roles of shepherds and of sheep dogs—and if we had more of a cross-species version of Jesus’s sheep and shepherds parables, who knows what images of God (and of our own mission) those dogs might give us?<br />
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I think I know that shepherds in the Middle East liked to give names to their sheep. Perhaps that endearing practice works better with small flocks than with large industrial sheep farms. If Danielle and Adam Busby in Houston were challenged to find five excellent names for their recently born quintuplets—Olivia, Ava, Hazel, Parker, Riley, five girls, two of them identical twins—well, you get my point.<br />
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And yet is there anything more personal than one’s own name? The quintessential story about this truth is St. John’s Easter Day narrative. First at the tomb that morning, while it was still dark, courageous Mary Magdalene comes to anoint Jesus’s body, and finds the great stone rolled away from the grave. She runs back to where the not-yet-apostolic band of men are huddled in fear and blurts out what she has seen. <br />
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Two of them run to see for themselves, and apparently Mary runs that route one more time, for she is there in the story, at the grave, after the men leave. She is weeping, and through her tears she sees two figures in white, sitting on the ledge where Jesus’s body had briefly lain. They ask her why she is crying. Through her sobbing, she expresses her bewilderment: “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.”<br />
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Suddenly, something draws her to turn around. He is present to her. She doesn’t recognize him, as he asks her the question of the angels: “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” He appears to be calling her to her senses—not away from her emotions, but into them and through them, asking her, inviting her, expecting her to look deeply into the reality of the present. To see him as he is, to recognize the encounter they’re having for what it is, to occupy the precious present.<br />
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It takes time. Through the scrim of her tears, she still cannot see clearly who this is. And perhaps there is so much changed about him, given the (literally) hell of a week he has just had. Then he utters this one word that wipes the fog from the glass: “Mary!” Hear the exclamation mark. Instinctively, naturally, like a seedling turning toward the light of the sun, she responds, “Rabbouni (Teacher)!” Again, hear the light punctuate the darkness. And recognize the pattern: the risen Christ encounters the individual person in his or her bewilderment, and in that meeting of Spirit conveys the knowing (You will never have to explain to me, he says, the impact of the kind of week you’re having—I know!) and does this conveying simply calling you by name. It’s all you need to hear.<br />
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Faith is not so much about seeing as it is about hearing, says Mary’s story. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen,” but heard in the Word made flesh, heard best by name, and by a known voice. No accident, that there is a common Latin root for two verbs, to hear and to obey.<br />
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We are blessed today to hear two known voices. One belongs to Rabbi Rachel Barenblat, spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Israel, accomplished poet, and widely read blogger under the name The Velveteen Rabbi. She wears well. And anyone with such respect for the importance of worn spots in life is no stranger to the Easter story. In fact, Rabbi Rachel and her husband Ethan have sat in these pews on more than one Easter, and I will never forget the experience of reading her posted reflections on worshiping with us, a beautiful piece of appreciative inquiry. I hope to always remember also the richly engaging Passover Seder when Diana and I were guests at Rachel’s and Ethan’s table.<br />
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A second known and treasured voice belongs to The Rev. Dr. Richard Spalding, Chaplain to all at Williams College. I’ve known Rick for just a bit more than the fifteen years he has served at Williams. Diana served on the search committee that brought him to Williamstown, and I’ll confess I took an early opportunity to meet Rick on his then home turf in Cambridge. It took so little time to discover in him a trusted, open, and steady colleague and friend.<br />
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These two speakers have much in common. They are highly and deeply respected. They are adept at climbing over walls that could separate, and, like good shepherds, they know how to center communities of people. They do not come to us today as experts on the subjects of climate change and creation care. They are not here to present information that we don’t already have, but to name and probe the lived experience for ordinary people who are discovering themselves called, more and more, to be good shepherds in daily life.<br />
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Diane Ackerman's book "The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us" was helpful in preparing this sermon.<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-6136374695320505502015-04-13T09:54:00.000-07:002015-04-13T09:56:17.872-07:00Holy MomentumScripture for the 2nd Sunday of Easter includes Acts 4:32-35; I John 1:1-2:2; John 20:19-31<br />
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This Sunday has often been called Low Sunday. After a full church on Easter Day, the Second Sunday of Easter can look like the day after the Second Coming. Like in the movie “Left Behind,” we who are left in church on this Sunday wonder what has become of all those good people we welcomed last weekend? And we have a hunch they haven’t all been raptured. <br />
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Our Bishop, Doug Fisher, has called us out of that head-scratching mode by calling all the parishes of Western MA to make this Momentum Sunday. Retire the sad old nickname Low Sunday. Momentum Sunday it is: forward in the strength and grace of the resurrection.<br />
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How we are doing that today is by launching an Easter Series of education and encouragement under the heading, “Climate Change and Creation Care”. Whatever you make of the science and politics of climate change, creation care is at the heart of what you and I sign up for whenever we renew our vows of holy baptism. The baptismal agreement is to enter and extend/promote/serve God’s new covenant of reconciliation, restoring, renewing all creation, the whole shimmering web of life. And, as the collect of the day puts it, we do this work by showing forth in our lives what we profess by our faith.<br />
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Listen to these words of our baptismal profession:<br />
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“Do you renounce the evil powers of this world which corrupt and destroy the creatures of God? I renounce them.”<br />
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We pray for those about to be baptized: “Send them into the world in witness to your love.” Not send them into the church… or send them back to bed to hide under the covers… but into the world.<br />
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Immediately upon a person’s being baptized, we pray, “Sustain her, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give her an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works.”<br />
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And wherever the contemporary creed from Iona is said, Christians are called to the front lines of creation care: “…though we are sometimes fearful and full of doubt, in God we trust; and, in the name of Jesus Christ, we commit ourselves, in the service of others, to seek justice and live in peace, to care for the earth and to share the commonwealth of God’s goodness…”<br />
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We are very fortunate to have Bill Moomaw with us this morning, to help us launch this series. Its purpose: to sustain us as we inquire and discern, to encourage us to will and persevere.<br />
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The Moomaw Family coat of arms must have the verb Persevere on it. Bill’s life’s-work has shown a model and set the pace for what he asked of the senior class at Williams in 2013, when he was honored with a Bicentennial Medal from his alma mater. “Create a social and economic momentum to change the destructive path the world is on,” he urged. “Be mindful of the implications of how and what we all do affects the planet. Do what you can personally… lead by example.” <br />
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Six years earlier, Bill’s work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, under the aegis of the United Nations, placed him in a circle of people who would be startled to learn that they were sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U. S. Vice President Al Gore.<br />
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Our Bishop’s call to make this Momentum Sunday recognizes and celebrates how Jesus led by example, and gets us inquiring and discerning what sort of momentum, what kind of movement, our Lord set in motion.<br />
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Our readings today are peppered with pointers and clues. First, as we have seen in our Collect, it is a movement into reconciliation. Our Prayer Book Catechism teaches that the mission of the Church is to restore all people (and we have seen already the scope of our baptism including the restoring of all creation) to unity with God and each other in Christ.<br />
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Our first reading from the Book of Acts shows the social and spiritual movement of Jesus to be one of great power and grace rooted in the knowledge that it is not we who own the earth, but God. And it is not the building of our own wealth that demands our primary allegiance, but strengthening that commonwealth the Iona Creed names, a fellowship that cares for its members (especially its most vulnerable) while caring equally for neighbors outside that fellowship, indeed, says John, the whole world and therefore all that is in it (especially its most vulnerable).<br />
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Our second reading from one of the letters of John shows the movement Jesus has created to be one of radical respect and high regard for matter, for the outward and visible, for what is inquired into and discerned by the senses that recognize, the mind that weighs and comprehends, the heart that can feel reverence, repentance, responsibility and joy. Matter and spirit move together in this new creation launched by the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ.<br />
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And our Gospel insists that this is not a movement either based on or furthered by fear. Jesus moves to open locked doors, to breathe new life into God’s people and God’s creation, and to make his wounds known to us so we will see and believe that he is already at work ahead of us, around us, through us. Transparency, freedom, inspiration, confidence are all traits and powers of his movement.<br />
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These are not the powers and traits of a victim mowed down by a movement stronger than he, or a passive soul caught in some unalterable downward spiral. Holy Week is not the story of someone struggling against death and finally giving into it. The emphasis in all four Gospels is upon Jesus’s death as a free act. Jesus was not killed. He died. He gave up his Spirit, purposefully. He knew himself to be Spirit expressing itself through body. He had learned how to let his Spirit control and guide the total reality of his person.<br />
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Those words aren’t mine, though I agree with them. They come from Holy Week meditations by Richard Holloway, former Bishop of Edinburgh and Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in Scotland. He finds fault with the view that Jesus was a victim, because that encourages us to believe various victim theories about our own nature, including how we think about our death.<br />
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What we learn from Christ, he says, is not that death happens to us, it is not a submission to something we can do nothing about. “That is not what we learn from Christ and those who have lived with something of his courage,” Holloway writes. “For them life becomes something that they live, not something that simply happens to them. Death itself becomes a free, personal act… It is the final act of a person who controls his life. According to our Lord’s example, death is something we can freely choose, indeed must choose, because it corresponds to the reality of personality as free spirit. Death has been defeated and robbed of its sting, and is something we can now make our own. This is what he did. His last word (from the cross) was a giving back to God of that life which had come from God. ‘Father, into thy hands I return my spirit.’ This was the way of Christ, the free man, probably the only really free person, the only really complete person. So his death, as well as being a great and awful tragedy, is yet a triumph of the spirit, because it is controlled at every point, not by the human actors in the drama (those roles we played in reading the Passion Gospel, two Sundays ago), not by the executioners, by Pilate, by Herod, by Annas and Caiaphas; nor even by the very action of his own body with its cells and molecules, but by his own spirit. By freely choosing death and going through it obediently to the end, he reversed the tragedy of all dying.”<br />
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I readily imagine an objection to this business of choosing death: Doesn’t it condone suicide? Not if you’ve been catching the frequency of the word “freedom” and “free”, words that do not describe the state of mind and heart and will in a person who kills himself not in an open embrace of dying, but in a tragic attempt at escaping life—rejecting, rather than returning, the gift of life.<br />
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But my oh my, doesn’t that open up doors down corridors of another sermon, where we should probably go some day, but not today. Today, we consider the movement Jesus opens through his death and his rising. And we consider the environmental movement towards caring for the earth. In neither case will it serve the world well to see Jesus as a passive victim, or ourselves as victims. <br />
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What will help is to grasp the freedom we are given, and, inspired and guided and sustained by the Spirit we are given, step up to the passion our world needs of us.<br />
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The passion of Christ—his life, his death, his resurrection—is all about choices freely taken, decisions freely made, the body guided by the Spirit. This is the stuff of the great fifty days of Easter culminating in the Day of Pentecost, a season also known as Spring, such a right time to consider Climate Change and Creation Care.<br />
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Richard Holloway's words are taken (and paraphrased just a bit) from his book "The Killing: Meditations on the Death of Christ," Morehouse Barlow, 1984.<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-26639274623890457642015-04-13T09:36:00.003-07:002015-04-13T09:36:44.744-07:00O Come, All Ye FaithfulScripture for Easter Day includes Isaiah 25:6-9; Acts 10:34-43; John 20:1-18<br />
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Once a month, I go to each of the two nursing homes here in Williamstown, to celebrate communion with a hardy little circle of residents who have come to what the activities calendar calls Episcopal Mass. Seldom is there an Episcopalian to be found in either circle. Some come because they’re drawn by the promise of a mass, and they know how to respond when I lead off with “The Lord be with you.” Others seem drawn by the promise of a church service, whatever its flavor. The prevailing wisdom is that there are no denominations in the foxholes: We are one in the Spirit, and no one asks to see our union cards.<br />
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On my March visit to Sweet Brook, I expected to see the usual set-up of a table and a row or two of chairs at the near end of the dining room. Instead, I saw a staff meeting going on there, while at the far end there was a semi-circle of residents. I thought to myself, “Humph. Looks like they aren’t expecting me.” Then I spotted one familiar face and then another, convincing me that that was the Episcopal Mass, movable feast version.<br />
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Always, even when attendance is at absolute low tide, we sing a hymn to start and to end. I asked if someone wanted to pick the hymn. Foster, who never misses a service, Foster (who would turn 103 that next Sunday), Foster called out a hymn number. I could tell it wasn’t #93 (“What a Friend We Have in Jesus”), and it wasn’t #4 (“Amazing Grace”). No, it was #61, “O Come, All Ye Faithful.”<br />
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This being the 25th of March, I said back (with a touch of surprise), “A Christmas carol!” To which Foster replied, “No, it isn’t.” At that moment, my better angel put his finger to my lips and I said nothing. Why argue with a 103-year-old who wants to sing a Christmas carol in March?<br />
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But my self-conscious angel blushed, stealing a glance over my shoulder to see if that staff meeting was still underway. It was. “Sheesh, Elvin: you’re going to lead nine really elderly people in singing this a cappella?” As if reinforcing this worry about appearances, I noticed the activities director had quietly left the room.<br />
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“Why not?” I heard myself think. “Besides, if I don’t start this carol, Foster will—and if I lead, I can choose a range I can sing in.” So off we went, and in just seven seconds we were in Bethlehem, beholding the birth of the King of angels.<br />
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And I couldn’t help but smile. I noticed others in the circle were smiling, too. I’d lost track of that staff meeting, except to wonder if they too were smiling.<br />
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Suddenly, it came to me what day it was. March 25, nine months to the day from December 25. March 25, the Feast of the Annunciation, when the archangel Gabriel (the fellow in blue in that window in our east aisle) appeared to Mary, telling her she would conceive and bear a son, and would name him Jesus. He would be great, and would be called Son of the Most High, bringing to earth a kingdom that would have no end.<br />
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And when Mary protested that this just wasn’t the right choice, she wasn’t yet married, hadn’t even known a man’s touch, Gabriel answered, “Nothing shall be impossible with God.”<br />
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The Prayer Book appoints a prayer to be offered on the Feast of the Annunciation: “Pour your grace into our hearts, O Lord, that we who have known the incarnation of your Son Jesus Christ, announced by an angel to the Virgin Mary, may by his cross and passion be brought to the glory of his resurrection…”<br />
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And here we are. Some are present today because they have been brought here by his cross and passion. On Maundy Thursday, they allowed their feet to be washed as a lesson in servant ministry. Good Friday, they spent time considering the enormity of God’s all-embracing love. In the Easter Eve Vigil, they renewed the vows of their baptism.<br />
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Some may be present today for other reasons, like family unity, curiosity, or outright bribery.<br />
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But here we are, making our responses to the call, “O come, all ye…” Come, you who wonder what to make of the claim of his resurrection. Come, you who are confident in the assurance of his resurrection. Come, you who resist the possibility of his resurrection. And here we are, one way or another, because of the glory of his resurrection.<br />
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If “glory” feels like it’s more a first-century than 21st-century word, perhaps “joy” is what fits the pull of this day. The joy that was breaking out in that circle of smiling elders, the joy that lights up Christmas, is the power at work today, the power that is the pulse of the heart of God. For nothing shall be impossible with God.<br />
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Joy that, no matter how hard some may try, God’s love, God’s reconciling love, God’s all-comprehending love, God’s fully forgiving love, cannot be killed. For nothing shall be impossible with God. <br />
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Joy that was the prize and the goal that Jesus saw always before him, and for the sake of that joy endured the cross, its shame and its cruelty. Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, teaching us to lay claim to the central gift and power of God: Joy that is born of love, raised by love.<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-30927662732955057852015-03-23T14:33:00.001-07:002015-03-23T14:33:14.191-07:00His Passion Is for UsScripture for the 5th Sunday in Lent includes Jeremiah 31:31-34; Hebrews 5:5-10; John 12:20-33<br />
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I want to dispel two rumors. One is that I have given up preaching for Lent. But I will tell you how much I have enjoyed doing what you do on Sundays, listening attentively to someone other than myself, someone who has already listened attentively to what the Spirit is saying to the Church. I have enjoyed lying fallow these past two Sundays. I have gratefully received the gift of first Ben’s, then Steve’s preaching. I could get used to this. But, on the other hand, as St. Paul put it, “Woe is me if I preach not the Gospel.” And I know what he means. <br />
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The second rumor I’m here to dispel is that I have asked the Vestry for a 65-million- dollar jet to fulfill my responsibilities as a pastor. It’s tempting, but I’m not sure Harriman Airport is ready for that; and to overshoot that runway in takeoff would indeed put me right at the doors of several parishioners, but not constructively.<br />
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Pastor Creflo Dollar—and isn’t truth stranger than fiction, for the man is well named—complains that his current jet has been in and out of the shop for repairs over the past thirty years. I can relate to that. If I had accumulated the dollars I’ve spent fixing the cars I’ve driven over the past three decades, it would be a tidy sum. Though there have been unexpected secondary gains: I would never have met the fascinating array of mechanics who have displayed their own brand of pastoral care (including the mother of two of them, whose coffee and biscotti can’t be beat), nor would I have ever finished reading “High Tide in Tucson” or any of the other waiting room books I’ve kept handy for such vigils.<br />
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Speaking of reading, I’ve had an experience in the week just past, assigning parts to sixteen parishioners who have volunteered to help read the Palm Sunday Gospel in Many Voices. That’s eight readers per service. The approach we’ve used has been to provide a sign-up sheet with the number of spaces that correspond to the number of parts to be filled. That has seemed wiser than listing the parts; who’s in a rush, after all, to fill the role of Judas Iscariot, and, for that matter, how many takers do we expect for the key part, Jesus? Wiser, it seems, to find out who’s up for the adventure in general, then get specific. Whether this approach is fairer isn’t so obvious. One might sign up, hoping for a plum part, only to be cast as a heavy. Such, I suppose, is show business. It is, for sure, how church business gets done via servant ministry, the first being last and the last first.<br />
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Having this task on my to-do list has given me the opportunity to reconsider who these people in the Passion Gospel are, and what they’re expressing. It is the Church’s task to hear what the Spirit is saying through this passionate story that fills the crucible of Palm Sunday and Holy Week, year after year, unaltered except for how it is read and who it is who reads it. The words, the actions, remain the same over nearly two thousand years of hearing.<br />
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And I hasten to add actions, not only words, because no sooner had I matched parts with readers, relishing the completion of that task, than it dawned on me that there was one more part to fill: at the 10:00 service, our custom calls for a nearly life-sized cross to be brought up the aisle to the altar. I had almost succumbed to a basic temptation: imagining the Passion of Christ without his cross, expressing the Gospel, the Good News of Jesus, at a discount, discounting the hard news of Good Friday, when the incomprehensible love of God comprehends all loss.<br />
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So we will have this story full, action as well as words. And the fullest part, at least in terms of air time, is the Evangelist, the Gospel writer St. Mark, who narrates the action, setting the stage for each of the readers in turn.<br />
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The first whose voice we will hear is Jesus. Instantly, we are drawn in, literally inward, to our Lord’s interior experience of all that is happening to him, through him, in the vortex of outward actions penning him in like a sheep in the shearing pen. First, we hear him pray. Moments later, he shakes Peter out of sleep. Temptation is at work all around. Peter, James, and John have escaped into sleep, avoidance, denial.<br />
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Our Lenten journey began with the signing of the cross on our foreheads, calling us to pay attention to reality and to give obedience to God. Jesus’s Lenten journey began in the desert, where he mastered those arts of attention and obedience.<br />
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But no sooner is the inner core of disciples discovered sleeping, than Judas actively betrays his master. Insidiously, his kiss signals which man it is to be seized in this dark garden. Could there be a greater perversion of justice, that a sign of love should abuse the One who embodies perfectly the love of God? Notice that history does not judge only that ragtag police force in the garden of Gethsemane for the violence they inflict wrongfully: History judges also the Church for falling asleep at the switch, neglecting the requirements of justice, allowing the perfidy of Judas. Judas, disappointed by the kind of Messiah Jesus is, tired of the servanthood message, itching to advance his own political zeal; Judas, the undoer of Jesus, comes undone by the same temptations his master resists.<br />
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A high priest is heard next, filling the role of Jesus’s Grand Inquisitor. Here is where every member of the clergy ought to tremble, from Fr. Elvin to Pastor Dollar to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Each a kept person, tempted not to rock the boat or bite the hand that feeds. The laity who profess and practice faith are no less accountable for how they represent God in the world. Nor are they less susceptible to the temptation not to disturb the status quo of whatever it is that keeps them, their career, their social set, their family, their country— whatever we defend, right or wrong, unthinking, uncritically.<br />
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A servant-girl will be heard. She identifies Peter as a disciple of Jesus. A more mature post-resurrection Peter would know how to welcome such a moment as this. But in the build-up to Good Friday, temptation is all about yielding to fear, and he does. <br />
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But the voice of the servant girl is thought to be the voice of social prejudice. Peter’s accent gives him away as a Galilean, and her dark role is to profile him based on appearances. How ancient is this temptation, to judge someone’s otherness, assume him blameworthy, diminish his humanity, expose him to ethnic cleansing.<br />
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And all of this is about to happen full-bore to Jesus, who now appears before Pontius Pilate, Governor of Judea. But the title neither impresses nor intimidates Jesus, who refuses to answer Pilate’s questions.<br />
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After witnessing this encounter, we will stand for the final third of this story, which keeps escalating in intensity. Over and again, we hear voices punctuate the narrative, catapulting heavy boulders of harsh judgment against Jesus— and they’re our voices! It’s as if we’re rehearsing yielding to the temptation to project onto the innocent one all the spleen and blame that fuels scape-goating, all our swallowed rage at a lousy economy, failed leadership, the scourge of brutality, corruption in high places. Wholesale helplessness.<br />
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One more voice will be heard, the last word, a word of truth and sanity from a least likely fellow, a Roman centurion, the officer in charge of this public execution. In one sense, he assesses the loss the world has just experienced in this unjustifiable punishment. But to the ears of those hearing what the Spirit is saying, the centurion ‘s verdict is the seed from which the green blade rises: “Truly this man was God’s Son.” <br />
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And is, his people respond. Though that response will not appear in the script,the very action, the annual rendition of the Passion Gospel in Many Voices, recognizes that his story addresses our temptations, trains us to pay attention to our own reality, calls us to give our hearts’ obedience to the One whose passion is for us, for the world and its salvation. <br />
Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-46779049659390086502015-03-02T09:01:00.002-08:002015-03-02T09:01:26.359-08:00Lift High the CrossScripture for the 2nd Sunday in Lent includes Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38<br />
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March 1st. We’re on the right side of winter. One week from today, Daylight Saving Time begins. Can summer be far behind? But let’s have spring first! The Spring Equinox is Friday, March 20th. And we’re due for snow, today, tomorrow, and the next day.<br />
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Against the constantly changing backdrop of seasons and forecasts, Christians affirm the constancy of God’s love for us in the Anointed One, Jesus Christ, a love experienced in our spirits’ engagement with the Holy Spirit. We read in the Letter to the Hebrews, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” Regardless of the weather, the month, or the day.<br />
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The sign of that utterly dependable continuity is the cross. Life in Christ begins with the imposing of that sign of new life, on the forehead, in the water and oil of Holy Baptism. On Ash Wednesday, ashes, the final form of last year’s palms from the Sunday of our Lord’s Passion, reduced by fire, trace the same baptismal sign in the same baptismal spot. When healing is sought, the sacrament of unction brings the same sign to bear upon that site, outward anointing conveying inward anointing by the Spirit of God.<br />
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And, one day, that sacramental sign may be made upon the forehead for the last time as the Christian, dying, affirms radical continuity, commending human spirit into the carrying and keeping of Jesus Christ. When death reduces a believer’s body to its basic carbon components, earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, the sign of the cross is traced again as a handful of earth is released on casket or urn, using even the humus of decay to declare the utter constancy of God’s love for humankind, one by one.<br />
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The Church’s consistent use of the cross—and I’ve mentioned only a few garden-variety examples—reminds and teaches and expresses what St. Paul names in his Letter to the Romans today: God’s promises rest on grace and are guaranteed to be far more generous and all-embracing than we can imagine. “It depends on faith,” says Paul without quite making clear what “it” is, so we’re free to consider that “it” might be our comprehending, our imagining: Unless our imagining is shaped by our faith, we won’t grasp that each of us is grasped by God in Christ through the Spirit. It’s all so amazing, Paul says, as he alludes to the Abraham and Sarah saga to demonstrate how God “gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.”<br />
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“It’s enough to let you hope against hope!” Paul exclaims; Like Abraham, he reminds us.<br />
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And in that spirit of extravagant grace, the Church keeps making the sign of the cross over us, even when we present flimsy evidence that we truly get what it means, that cruciform sign of hope and faith and love. A bishop makes it on the forehead of each person she confirms, however promising, however ignited, however committed. The sign of the cross appears at the top of each priest’s certificate of ordination, reminding him that this calling is not to proclaim himself, but Christ crucified and risen. And when a couple kneels to receive God’s blessing in holy matrimony, there is a hoping against hope that this union will continue generating and sustaining life, so help them God. <br />
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The Gospel moment we witness today has Jesus expressing to his disciples openly the role that the cross will play in his life, and in theirs. Peter scolds him for discouraging their devotion, rebukes him for daring to imagine such an outcome as the one Jesus confidently foretells. “It’s enough to make us go back to our fishing nets!” Peter says, more or less.<br />
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Last week, we heard about temptations Jesus faced. Here, his disciples are tempted to imagine not the radical continuity of Christ and what that will mean to them, but rather their brand of continuity, keeping alive their delight in him, their thrill at having important work to do, their Robin Hood and his Merry Men spirit that they’re not going to yield freely.<br />
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To this, Jesus is said by Mark to have scolded Peter. But does he call Peter Satan, or is Jesus clearly seeing this moment as one more of Satan’s wily returns to erode his mission? For certain, Jesus summons Peter (and the rest of us) to set the mind on divine things. And, within moments of that, he urges them to take up their cross and follow him.<br />
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If you’d like to know where the custom of making the sign of the cross comes from, here is the Gospel answer: It is a way to set your mind on divine things. It is also a way to receive what God offers. There are at least eight moments in the Holy Eucharist when tradition says, “Here is an important moment to set your mind on divine things. Here is a ripe moment to intentionally receive what God is offering.<br />
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The first is at the very start. As Maria sings in “The Sound of Music”, “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start…” It’s in the ABCs of liturgy that the opening salutation always gives us a moment to set the mind. Find your worship leaflet, page one, at the salutation, and notice how a Lutheran salutation we’re using this Lent reminds people of the custom of signing themselves with the cross. Yes, that’s Lutheran. No, the Roman Catholics do not have the property rights on this custom.<br />
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What’s the interior meaning of the custom? It’s a prayer without words, but if we were to add the words, they would be, “God be in my mind, God be in my heart, God be in my weakness, God be in my strength.”<br />
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And what’s the house rule for such matters as this? All may… none must… some should. That’s the Anglican rule regarding religious practice in general.<br />
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A second moment in liturgy comes earlier in our Lenten order than in the rest of the year: The absolution that follows our prayer of confession is an example of God offering you something that deserves conscious receiving. At any point while the celebrant is announcing persuasive good news that your bacon has been hauled out of the fire by our Savior Jesus Christ, making the sign of the cross is in order.<br />
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A third moment is just before the reading of the Gospel. The fact that the Gospel reader troops down the aisle is a give-away that something good is on offer. It’s customary to welcome the Gospel by making a threefold sign of the cross on forehead, lips, and heart. I’ll bet that barely needs explaining, but the lips part is a key: for the Word we welcome to influence our talk, it must first land in the heart.<br />
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A fourth moment comes at the close of the Creed. This is another example of setting the mind on divine things. Having recited such a mouthful as the Nicene Creed, describing the Church’s faith and hope more fully than many of us might agree with or claim we understand, it’s good to deal with that sense of “Whew!” by the nonverbal prayer of the cross that lets us cast our care, our faith, and our questions upon God.<br />
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Fifth, near the end of the Sanctus (“Holy, holy, holy Lord, God of power and might…”) comes a verse that is meant to recall us to the city gates of Jerusalem on Palm Sunday: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest!” Custom invites making the sign of the cross on that word “Blessed.”<br />
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Sixth is a moment well into the prayer at the altar when bread and wine are consecrated to their sacramental purpose. That purpose is named, right after the Holy Spirit is invoked to come upon these gifts of bread and wine: “Unite us to your Son in his sacrifice, that we may be acceptable through him, being sanctified by the Holy Spirit.” In that moment, so reminiscent of baptismal mystery, we recognize that we have unity with God and one another as gift, and the gift is being replenished. This is another time to intentionally receive what is being offered.<br />
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Two more remain. One is obvious: After receiving the bread and the wine.<br />
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And the last is hard to miss: When the blessing is declared, it deserves to be caught, received, welcomed.<br />
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Why adopt an ancient custom, one that may feel unfamiliar? In the first half of this sermon, I mentioned seven instances of the sign of the cross made upon or over us, as it happens, by clergy: Important times of transition, rites of passage, times we couldn’t imagine the sign of the cross not being made. <br />
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In the second half of this sermon, we’ve considered eight moments when everyone may exercise this practice (remembering that all may, none must, some should). These eight are expressions of the priesthood of all believers, a truly Protestant principle if ever there was one. <br />
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With that in mind, why not experiment with this ancient custom? Rather than adopting it, try it for a season and see what it gives you. Don’t grade yourself as to how many of those seven moments you can remember—use the moments you do remember, to set your mind on divine things, to welcome and receive what God is giving you. <br />
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Christian worship, Christian practice, is sacramental. A sacrament is an outward and visible sign of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace.<br />
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Though unearned and undeserved, that love of God does not make us passive bystanders. Making the sign of the cross is one humble way of receiving, responding, to God. One more way to pray with the body, without words.<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-11816162169632461582015-02-27T10:04:00.000-08:002015-02-27T10:04:05.095-08:00Tempting AssumptionsScripture for the First Sunday in Lent includes Genesis 9:8-17; I Peter 3:18-22: Mark 1:9-15<br />
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A funny thing happened on the way to a cup of coffee I was to have had with someone last week. Actually, it wasn’t all that funny to either of us, except by hindsight.<br />
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Tunnel City at 10:00, we agreed. Since I was about to ask a lot of this person, I made it a point to be early so as to meet her at the door when she arrived. I wanted to pay for this cup of coffee before I made my pitch. Little did I know that she had arrived even earlier, and was busily blogging in the back room. <br />
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10:10 and I figured, well, winter delays us all. 10:15, okay, maybe I wrote down the wrong time, or maybe she did. A fellow I’m friendly with came over for a chat, so by 10:25 I’m concluding that this rendezvous isn’t happening. <br />
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If you know me, you won’t be surprised to hear that I lacked access to the Internet (that’s one of my new year resolutions to tackle), and I didn’t have my coffee mate’s cell phone number with me—so, once back at my office, I headed for the keyboard, only to find the plaintive message, “It’s 10:37, and you haven’t come. We’ll have to try again.”<br />
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Had I looked into that back room? Well, I thought I had. I’d certainly scanned the rest of the place. But I picture her now just inside that rear doorway and tucked off to the left, where the muses were dancing all around her laptop.<br />
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Our assumptions can become obstacles. I had assumed I was the first kid on the block, and I was not. My would-be coffee partner may have made an assumption or two (like that I am more observant than I actually am). <br />
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HOW COULD THIS HAVE HAPPENED TO US? I asked, in my email to her. The answer, I suppose, is that we are both human, subject to faulty assumptions, likely to get absorbed in our own thoughts, and apt to draw false conclusions.<br />
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Which takes us to the desert beyond the Jordan, where the Spirit of God has driven Jesus to face temptations. When Luke tells this story, it’s all fleshed out with specific temptations to turn stones to bread, to turn his spiritual power into domination, and even to defy the law of gravity in a daredevil sort of way. Mark, by contrast, offers no such detail and leaves it for us to imagine what shapes temptation takes. As for me, I’ll take that as an opportunity to imagine the temptation to make wrong assumptions, to be self-absorbed, and to draw wrong conclusions. That should be challenge enough for Lenten spring training in preparation for new life at Easter.<br />
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In fact, those temptations might be right up the alley of what Jesus dealt with in his temptations. It’s in the language of assumptions, self-absorption, and wrong conclusions that the apostle Paul described our Lord’s liberation from such temptations. In his Letter to the Philippians he calls the Church to embrace the task of faith formation:<br />
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“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross.”<br />
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There in a nutshell is the point and purpose of Lent, to allow Jesus’s liberation from false assumptions, self-absorption, and wrong conclusions to shape our faith and practice.<br />
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Whenever I pray for people, I pray that they will see and make their very best choices and avoid their worst choices. That is my prayer for myself daily, as well. That day at Tunnel City, I could have used more of that kind of praying. Still, what actually happened is a gift in that it trains me to test the assumptions I’m making, to step beyond my own thoughts and pay attention 360 degrees around (or as close as I can get), and to weigh that moment when I’m about to act on a conclusion that could miss the mark, misread reality, and fail to connect with the precious present.<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-63188635362056040932015-02-16T09:13:00.001-08:002015-02-16T09:13:20.523-08:00What Is Expected of Disciples?Scripture for the Last Sunday after the Epiphany includes II Kings 2:1-12; II Corinthians 4:3-6; Mark 9:2-9<br />
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The prophet Elijah figures prominently in today’s readings. He’s represented in one of our stained glass windows, but I can’t justify asking you “Which one?” because you’d need binoculars to find him, up in one of the petals of the great rose window.<br />
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But his protégé Elisha makes a showing in the medallion of the lancet window nearest the font. Those five windows feature women and children of the Bible, a memorial tribute honoring Alice Schermerhorn Carter, remembered for her devotion to the wellbeing of women and children here in the North County between 1900 and her death in the late 1920’s.<br />
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In that last window of the set, the younger prophet stands with a woman and her son. Their story prefigures the resurrection of Jesus, for Elisha has raised this young man from his death bed. Here is one way Elisha is remembered to have used the power he gains today from his mentor Elijah.<br />
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Elijah had a reputation for appearing and disappearing in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. This is not lost on Elisha, who anticipates the requirement that if he is to inherit his mentor’s spirit, he must see the very moment of his death. And Elisha desires more than his master’s spirit: He wants a double share of it. All the more urgent, that he keep his eye on the prize.<br />
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It’s not hard to imagine his annoyance as members of the national prophets’ union, local Bethel chapter, swarm around him, buzzing like bees with the news that charismatic Elijah is about to be recalled to heaven. “Yes, I know; keep silent,” replies Elisha, swatting away at these distractions. <br />
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It’s surprising to me that Elijah is right there as all those local prophets chirp and chatter about his death. Elisha dares not look away for a moment, with old Elijah capable of disappearing as skillfully as Harry Potter under his invisibility cloak. When Elijah says to his disciple, “Elisha, stay here; for the Lord has sent me to Jericho,” it’s as if Elisha hears his master’s motor revving up for take-off, and he answers back, “Fat chance, Father Elijah: I’m stuck on you like glue.”<br />
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You must have noticed that today’s reading resembles an echo chamber. With barely time for a breath, we hear a second time the swarming of the local prophets, and the wily master’s second attempt to shake free from young Elisha. One of the first things we learn about ancient Hebrew thinking is that if something is worth saying once, it’s worth saying twice.<br />
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And then they’re at the Jordan River. It will be here, centuries later, that Jesus of Nazareth will have poured out on him both muddy water bonding him in solidarity with us, and the divine Spirit that will empower his every move. <br />
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And now, the language is meant to remind us of Moses leading the displaced Hebrew slaves out of their bondage in Egypt into the land of promise. As fast as the eye can see, Elijah takes his cloak, rolls it tight, and wales it against the water of the Jordan, clearing the way for them to cross.<br />
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When they reach the other shore, the master asks what parting gift or favor he may present to his protégé. That’s when Elisha reaches for the moon. “A double share, please, of all that makes you you.”<br />
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And that is the moment when what Elisha instinctively knew is confirmed. “You have asked a hard thing; yet, if you see me as I am being taken from you, it will be granted you; if not, it will not.” As if to say, To comprehend what God is doing in me, you must see my final moments. You must pay attention to me.<br />
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And what a stunning scene, in those moments of Elijah’s transition. A chariot of fire, horses of fire, and a whirlwind bearing Elijah to heaven! Put on your 3-D glasses and picture that on the big screen.<br />
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It is more than Elisha can bear. Overwhelmed by grief, and is it also guilt?, he tears his tunic in two. I ask about guilt because that rending of garments was a classic sign of remorse and repentance in the ancient world, and it may suggest that now that Elisha has met his goal and gotten what he wanted, he recognizes his loss, he counts the cost of losing his mentor, he realizes that he will be just as tested, just as exposed to risk and danger as was his teacher. <br />
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He tears in two his old cloak as he sheds the skin of a student and assumes the mantle of a teacher. He is bumped up a generation.<br />
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And he tears it to make way for wearing his master’s mantle. But before he puts it on, he does what he has been taught: He rolls it tight and wallops the Jordan, just to see. And indeed, the waters part for him.<br />
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Goodness, what a long preamble to making us ready to ask two questions. First, why this story on this day? Second, how does this story of prophetic succession help us appreciate Mark’s story of the Transfiguration? And yes, let’s work on a third question: So what?<br />
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This story comes to us today courtesy of a season called Lent, the Church’s season of transitioning from winter to spring (all in favor say aye), the Church’s season for making the case that to comprehend what God is doing in Jesus Christ, we must see his final days. For us to comprehend what God is doing in us, we must keep our eyes on Jesus. We must pay attention.<br />
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And like Elisha, we enter this season wanting something. And if a share of that something is good, let’s make it a double share; and so we tend to expect more of ourselves, and more of God, in what we call the holiest season. The time is ripe: Enough of this icy mantle of winter! Rend it in two and bring on the season of growth and new life to take the place of earth’s long frigid sleep in barren death.<br />
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And with Elisha’s recognition of his own grief, his own guilt, the tone is set for Ash Wednesday, the Church’s way to make a right beginning of Lent. It is the one remaining time in the Christian year when Episcopalians still kneel to pray.<br />
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To our second question, how one reading speaks to another, clearly there is overlap in the cast of characters, for Jesus is seen talking with Elijah and Moses. As each of them parts the deep waters that could have been an obstacle to God’s people but instead became a pathway, so Jesus strikes death with the rolled-up mantle of his own flesh and becomes the way, the truth, the life.<br />
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And taken together, these two readings show what is expected of disciples. The very presence of Elijah, the fleet fellow here one moment, gone the next, reminds us how focused Elisha had to be to get what he wanted, not for a moment taking his eyes off the prize. By sharp contrast, and in a Monty Python kind of way, Jesus’s proteges (Peter, James, and John), are remembered to have had a tendency to fall asleep on those mountaintop retreats Jesus took them on. <br />
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I know, Mark doesn’t say they slept, this time; but if they did, picture them wakening with a jolt, sensing this aurora borealis experience they’ve almost missed, blinking away sleep, blurting out, “Rabbi, isn’t this wonderful that we’re here? Let’s make three shrines, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah…” Whereupon they are overshadowed by the Shekinah, the divine presence in the cloud, and from the cloud a voice: “Hush. Be still. This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” <br />
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Lent invites us to practice mindfulness, to focus on what matters most and let go of what matters least. Lent urges us to be alert to recognizing our best choices and avoiding our worst.<br />
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What Elisha wanted of Elijah was that same spirit that made his master who he was. Elisha’s persevering attentiveness to the teacher is the quality of discipleship that Mark teaches in his story, in that voice from heaven that requires the church to give first place to listening, listening to the Beloved.<br />
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How will you do that, this Lent?<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-4480701634984285362015-02-10T08:32:00.002-08:002015-02-10T08:32:35.937-08:00Lift Up Your Eyes and SeeScripture for the 5th Sunday after the Epiphany includes Isaiah 40: 21-31; I Corinthians 9:16-23; Mark 1:29-39<br />
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Isn’t it both humbling and thrilling to come across words from 25 centuries or more ago that remind us so eloquently why we put our boots on and trudged into this place today?<br />
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“Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?” Hear the prophet Isaiah urging us to treasure the Spirit of God that dwells in every heart, however veiled, however hidden or buried.<br />
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“It is God who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; God who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.”<br />
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In some of our moments, we believe we are rulers of the earth. Much of our lives gets spent acting as if we were governors of our own little provinces where we are in charge and do things our own way. But we know better. Isaiah insists that we do: “Have you not known? Has it not been told you from the beginning?...<br />
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Yes, we are grasshoppers: easily crushed in the survival of the fittest. We busy ourselves with daily tasks so familiar that we imagine we are rulers of our little patch of earth. Well, we are; and we are not. Whatever strength we have runs out, and even princes are brought to nothing.<br />
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“Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created the stars of heaven, so fully knowing the mystery of their making as to be able to call each one by name, each essential to the whole?” Stand in awe, and let the everlasting One give you power not to dominate and control but to serve and love. Bring to be hallowed and renewed both your strength and your weakness. Lift up your eyes on high and see.”<br />
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Yes, we grasshoppers can go transcendent by lifting up our eyes to the majestic hills that surround us, recognizing nature as the grandest cathedral; and we seek transcendence in sanctuaries like this one, where we experience what religion writer Phyllis Tickle calls a location in physical space, but also a location in emotional and psychic space anchoring the individual, recalling memories, respecting stories, moving body and soul into a constructed womb made holy by the devotion and faith and prayers of hundreds and thousands of other believers, both those around us now and those who have gone before us. Holy space sometimes affirms when nothing else will.<br />
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This lifting-up-on-high-to-see reveals the nature of God. Isaiah’s rhapsody resembles a creed: “The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth, who does not faint or grow weary, whose understanding is unsearchable, who gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.”<br />
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And, as that essential little creed is meant to do, there is revealed what God wants of us: that we too should empower the faint, and strengthen the powerless.<br />
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And that takes us to the Gospel. God sits above the circle of the earth, but in Jesus Christ God’s sleeves get rolled up for some serious renewal of the exhausted and empowerment of the marginalized. <br />
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The stage was set for this last Sunday, when Jesus’s sermon in the synagogue at Capernaum was transformed into the act of his healing a man in acute distress. This is how Mark the Gospel writer opens his book: Jesus is baptized, Jesus is driven by God’s Spirit to forty days of solitude and fasting in the desert, then Jesus comes to Galilee announcing, “The time is fulfilled, and the Kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”<br />
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And from there on, Jesus and his team are on-call, delivering comprehensive health care. Because recovery begins at home, they go to the bedside of Simon Peter’s mother-in-law and relieve her of her fever. Outside, word travels and before long they’re handing out numbers at the door, bringing to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. “And the whole city was gathered around that door.”<br />
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There is never a time in the public ministry of Jesus of Nazareth that he isn’t out on the front line meeting the most basic of human needs. He is in the street, in the market, at the village well, wherever the people are who need him most. We speak of his Passion and refer to the events of Holy Week when he is betrayed, condemned to death, humiliated, and executed. But his Passion begins so much earlier, certainly with that first healing in the synagogue at Capernaum. <br />
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Our ancient creeds speak of his passion in the final days. What I like about the Iona creed we’re using today is how it speaks of his entire Passion, how it calls us to commit ourselves, in the service of others, to seek justice and live in peace, to care for the earth and to share the wealth, the commonwealth of God’s goodness… and so be the church.<br />
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To draw on St. Paul’s letter that we heard earlier, we are entrusted with a commission. Christian commitment to God in Jesus Christ calls us to entrust ourselves to the One we have come to believe has power for the faint, strength for the powerless, renewal for the exhausted. And the other dimension of this great transformation of faith is that we are entrusted by God with the mission of Jesus’s Passion, his entire Passion, and entrusted to us is the power to do it.<br />
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So it’s no wonder, is it, that St. John’s is being asked to do more and more in the wider community? And it’s not just us: all congregations are finding themselves needed in fresh—and in very old—ways. <br />
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From here on, if this sermon sounds like a recruiting session, that’s because it is.<br />
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Advocating to meet the needs of Berkshire County residents for food and transportation, Berkshire Interfaith Organizing had its formal birthing two Sundays ago, when two hundred congregants from more than a dozen sponsoring churches and synagogues (we are among them), and representatives of several religious communities such as our Diocese, and Catholic Charities, and Sisters of St. Joseph, and regional bodies of Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Presbyterians, assembled for a public launching. Most of our state legislators were present, and said that they look forward to a creative (and sometimes challenging) relationship with Berkshire Interfaith Organizing. <br />
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We are seeking a parishioner to represent St. John’s on the governing board.<br />
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Let’s stay with the subject of food. Two quite different needs have recently come our way. One is to occasionally provide food for Cathedral in the Night. That’s a weekly open-air (even in winter) weekly worship event Sundays at 2:00 p.m. on the front lawn of St. Joseph’s Parish on North Street. Homeless people, people on the margins, skateboarders, and members of downtown Pittsfield’s congregations that are taking the lead (St. Stephen’s, prominently) in taking church outside their walls, on average 25-30 people participate in what is still in its first season. Churches prepare sandwiches to be eaten on the spot, and food to take home. We’re being asked to take our part preparing and serving food.<br />
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Here in this place, inside these walls, a new weekly service of Compline, the church’s ancient custom of bedtime prayers, will be offered at 9:15 p.m., starting this Thursday, February 12th. Our hope is to offer students an attractive form of alternative worship, an alternative to Sunday morning, an alternative to a long service (this one will be twenty minutes), and an alternative to sacramental worship. Let me quickly add: this service is for everyone still awake and functioning at that hour, not just students. You know we don’t gather students without feeding them, so we need to know who feels drawn to help us offer simple snacks on Thursday evenings, snacks that will be enjoyed by some who linger and, for those who can’t, snacks-to-go. This may not be feeding the hungry in the same urgent way as Cathedral in the Night or the Berkshire Food Project or our monthly meals to seniors, but it will be feeding the hungry. And, we hope, a fresh kind of outreach.<br />
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It’s food security and transportation that we’re addressing, and again two very different needs for transportation are at our door. One is more exactly at the door of the Friendship Center Food Pantry in North Adams, where each Wednesday some fifteen food recipients need rides home and help with their bags. Most of these rides will be within a mile or two of North Adams center. Food pantry hours are 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., and 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. That translates into three two hour shifts when volunteer drivers and companions will be needed. St. John’s is rising to the challenge of taking one Wednesday a month to provide six volunteers, three drivers and with each a companion to help with bags and conversation. <br />
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It’s not transporting people that brings about our second need. It’s transporting to the landfill every other week or so the recyclables that St. John’s generates, the paper, the containers, and the various bits and bobs that we gather at our several recycling stations throughout our buildings. Such a simple way to care for the earth.<br />
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Let’s get practical in closing. For more information about Berkshire Interfaith Organizing, or about Cathedral in the Night, speak to Margot Sanger. To learn more about food at Compline, see Bob Hansler. See me or Claudia Ellet about Friendship Center Food Pantry rides. And go to Madeline Burdick about helping with recycling.<br />
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There’s a sweet moment in the Gospel today when Jesus approaches Peter’s mother-in-law. “He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up,” says Mark. Two thousand years later, he is yet proclaiming the good news of God’s Kingdom coming near, by approaching us, lifting our sights to consider what we can do, trusting us to take in hand fresh opportunities to bring his church outside its walls into his world.<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-40901050679877354862015-02-03T13:37:00.003-08:002015-02-03T13:37:59.731-08:00What Have You to Do with Us?Scripture for the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany includes Deuteronomy 18:15-20; I Corinthians 8:1-13; Mark 1:21-28<br />
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“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”<br />
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There’s a preachable question. To be honest, I don’t find much in today’s readings that is preachable… at least by me. I failed to hear the muses singing over these passages.<br />
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Just this record of a stark encounter: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”<br />
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No irrelevant detail, that tag “of Nazareth”. Two Sundays ago, we heard Nathanael have a harrumph moment when he asked, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Like several other disciples in the circle Jesus would recruit, Nathanael came from the waterfront city of Bethsaida, and apparently he’d been raised to look down on those dirt farmers from Galilee, where Nazareth was just an insignificant village with not much going for it.<br />
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The fellow who poses our question today, however, is nameless. We guess he’s not to be remembered as an apostolic recruit. He might not have passed a CORI check. He may have been a street person living on the margin of town life in Capernaum. I picture him slipping in after the processional hymn, largely unnoticed until he blurts out his fear.<br />
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“Have you come to destroy us?”<br />
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“Oh, no! It’s crazy Ezekiel! Who let him in?” That’s one way to hear this story. No one’s surprised that old Zeke has been set off by a change in the force field of that little country church. Bring in a visiting preacher, and anything can happen. The vibes are different from their usual sabbath-day fare—and wouldn’t it be Zeke who’d be sensitive to that? Poor devil…<br />
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Or can we imagine a different way to hear this story? Could that fellow who cries out be the pastor of the congregation? Is it the rector who’s blown a fuse? Has he simply had it with all this emergent change rocking his boat, and is he the one who picks up in this Jesus fellow an implicit threat to the status quo and blurts out, “Have you come to destroy us?”<br />
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Perhaps that strikes you as an odd reading of the story—but let’s leave room for surprise. And however we hear this story, we watch as Jesus of Nazareth embraces the confrontation. I imagine him cut off mid-sentence in his sermon, but instead of being flustered by this interruption (as we mortal preachers might), instead of helplessly looking around the room hoping that someone will silence this man, Jesus now makes this man’s healing become the lesson he teaches. And it is a lesson in freedom from bondage.<br />
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However you understand the man with the outburst, Jesus silences his anxiety. That appears to be the first step in his recovery. Perhaps it’s not until we’re willing to practice silence in his presence that we receive the freedom Jesus gives. Until we let go of the tyranny of words, that domination we’re under from the morning news right through our working hours, that inundation of our senses brokered by an increasing array of electronic devices that have us more and more on the alert. Until we embrace silence and learn to pray without words, we are not receptive candidates for the freedom he gives.<br />
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“Be silent, and come out of him!” What we need to come out of us is our fear. Today’s<br />
other lessons reinforce this message. The people of Israel are shown desiring as a successor to Moses a prophet who will protect them from ever having to encounter God. They have had such harrowing experiences as refugees from bondage in Egypt that what they have come to want most is safety, a smooth ride, no surprises—and from such desire comes a religion of fear, a religion that enshrines a frightening God.<br />
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Jesus has come to free people from bondage—all people, all bondage. In his First Letter to the Corinthians St. Paul coaches Christians how to help in the movement to liberate people raised in a culture that practiced the worship of idols. Maybe this is where we return to the question, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?”<br />
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Have you come to destroy our favorite idols? What human society has no idols? It’s the universally besetting original sin, worshiping as if it were God something less than God. <br />
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In the Hebrew Bible, prophets express their outrage at Israelites yielding to the temptation to dance around the fertility poles of Canaanite religion; yet other passages suggest that it was common for a family to have its own household god, perhaps a shrine to ward off evil and misfortune. By the time we turn to the Christian scriptures, we’re in an imperial culture held together by an imperial cult, the emperor expecting to be worshiped as if a god. <br />
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We may practice more subtle idolatry. The American Dream. The Golden Years. Rugged Individualism. Personal liberty. Good things taken to excess become idols. Excessive and unquestioning loyalty, even and especially in the practice of religion, also in the exercise of politics. Believers may enshrine traditions, certain translations and interpretations of holy scripture—and of a nation’s constitution.<br />
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But it’s around food that Paul offers his coaching. There must have been a cozy bond between the butcher shops and the shrines where the best cuts were offered to gain the favor of the gods. And then the meat was put in the market for re-sale, and sometimes claimed by civic authorities to grill and serve at festivals where all ate for free.<br />
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Who could turn that down? Yet Paul urges that very self-discipline, if the tender consciences of recent converts to Christ were troubled by believers’ failing to draw the line separating the Kingdom of God from the ways of the world. “Rather than fail at caring for the weaker members of Christ’s Body, I’ll become a vegetarian!”, Paul announces.<br />
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His purpose is to teach and model strength that is God’s strength. Though it may appear to be weakness, true strength, God’s strength, serves and builds up others, rather than dominating and controlling.<br />
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Now, there’s a theme for Superbowl Sunday. Professor Matthew Skinner, who teaches New Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, writes on the Huffington Post Blog, and gets us thinking about football.<br />
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“Americans enjoy (the sport),” he says, “because, to a degree, football reflects the values of strength, courage, strategy, self-discipline, teamwork, and celebrity that American culture holds dear. It’s also refreshing to watch someone else get crushed by a 260-pound linebacker after you’ve had a lousy week at work.<br />
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“The problem develops when we let football (or other sports, or the military, or corporations, or other forces) define strength in terms of dominance…<br />
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”The Superbowl might prompt us to consider the hazards of an ethos in which rewards go to those who say, ‘We take what we want,’ and follow through on it.”<br />
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Skinner sees the Superbowl and the Bible sharing the ability to make us ask, What’s the proper use of strength? For many Americans, football defines power and manliness. For Christians and Jews, the Bible’s authors present a God who “uses power, subverts power, becomes subject to the power of others, and shares power.”<br />
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Our culture, he notes, celebrates both selfless heroism and arrogant domination that abuses the dignity of others.<br />
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“It’s something to think about,” says Skinner, “before the fighter jets fly over the stadium, the commercials for Bud Light and “American Sniper” roll, the guy at the bar makes another tasteless joke about underinflated footballs, and Katy Perry and Lenny Kravitz take the halftime stage.”<br />
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“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” <br />
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For starters, he gets us thinking.<br />
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(Matthew Skinner’s post “The Super Bowl and the Church in a Culture of Dominance (1 Corinthians 8:1-13)” was posted on January 26, 2015 on The Huffington Post Religion page.) <br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-73127242351918545582015-01-30T06:54:00.001-08:002015-01-30T06:54:12.480-08:00The Form of This World Is Passing AwayScripture for the 3rd Sunday after the Epiphany includes Jonah 3:1-5, 10; I Corinthians 7:29-31; Mark 1:14-20<br />
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“For the present form of this world is passing away.”<br />
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President Obama, in his State of the Union address, encouraged us to identify a number of ways in which our nation’s strengths can be recognized. I have an enduring trust in him and what he says, and if his purpose was to nudge us into a finer gratitude for the life we enjoy in this country, I’m all for it. Grateful hearts could serve us well at this time in our history, and I would by far prefer the future to be shaped by a union of grateful hearts than by a pack of ungrateful hearts.<br />
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But even our Encourager-in-Chief addresses the fact that the present form of this world is passing away when he turns to the subject of global warming and climate change. That’s because there’s really no other way as yet to address the profoundly disturbing state of the earth without dwelling on the diagnosis. The treatment, the remedy, remains elusive. We’d like a lot more success stories to tell, but as a nation the movement to invest sacrificially in order to achieve success is still in its infancy. And the gang in Washington isn’t leading us there.<br />
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Listening to news emanating from the Middle East, where a collapsed government in Yemen lies between our old pals in Saudi Arabia and a caliphate-in-the-making of the remains of Syria and Iraq, is enough to persuade us yet again that the present form of this world is passing away.<br />
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I’ll bet we could create a longer list yet of examples of this chilling observation. But how much chill can we stand all at once on a winter Sunday? And where is there good news to be found to encourage us?<br />
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Isn’t there a degree of good news in that this grim headline of transience comes to us from an apostle writing to one of his church plantings two thousand years ago? St. Paul’s examples of a disintegrating society would surely be different from those I’ve led off with, but clearly the Gospel of Jesus Christ as Paul knows it addresses the state of the union between God and humanity as a bond of redeeming love equal to the task of dealing with world orders that sooner or later, all of them, pass away.<br />
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Each of our three readings models an insight that will help us faithfully deal with potentially overwhelming times.<br />
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The first might be called revolutionary, even treasonous. It is to accept the startling fact that God loves the very people who stand on the opposite sides of our social, cultural, religious, political, and international divides. This lesson from the story of Jonah takes us to ancient Nineveh, one of the oldest and greatest cities of Mesopotamia. If the past twenty-four years of war in Iraq haven’t obliterated the site entirely, the city’s remains are on the east side of the Tigris River, directly across from present-day Mosul. <br />
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Jonah has been sent there to give the residents of Nineveh a chance to repent and so escape calamity. It is God who has called the Hebrew prophet Jonah to undertake this mission, requiring Jonah to enter Assyria, Israel’s sworn enemy, and in Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, to do open-air preaching of a message that made Jonah’s skin crawl. It felt like aiding and abetting the enemy, but he was told to warn those Ninevites that their great city would go under unless they relented from their long-standing oppression of Israel. <br />
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This might be like sending Benjamin Netanyahu to Tehran to persuade the Iranians to beat their swords into plowshares. Not that re-purposing swords wouldn’t be desirable; but neither Jonah nor Netanyahu would believe it possible, hardened as they are against their foes. It’s no wonder that Jonah tried his darnedest to avoid this mission, jumping onto a ship heading the opposite direction from Nineveh, only to have to jump from that ship into his famous encounter with a whale that knew more about obedience to God than Jonah did, spitting him back into active duty.<br />
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And the point of the little Book of Jonah, the reason for its inclusion in the Hebrew Bible (against sizeable odds), and the reason for it being cited in the New Testament, is to announce that God’s love is wide enough and deep enough to include one’s most hated enemies. For Israelites to boast of being God’s People and then to treat Gentiles as if they were despised by God, is unacceptable to God, says the Book of Jonah. <br />
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So there is one insight to help us deal with the overwhelming times we are in: Be wary of vilifying and dehumanizing people on the other sides of our social divisions. <br />
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A second appears in that letter from Paul. It boils down to this puzzle: Deal with the world as though you have no dealings with it. Right. <br />
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What I believe he means is suggested by his examples of havings. Each of them—having a spouse, mourning a loss, celebrating a gain, buying and owning—each of these most basic states could shut out the rest of the world, the rest of life. Each instance of me/my/mine may generate tunnel vision, exclusivity, preoccupation that prevents us from seeing choices worth considering, blocks the freedom that is our truer state, prevents a more generous sharing.<br />
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At Vespers on Thursday, we observed the feast day of Phillips Brooks, late 19th-century preacher, poet, and bishop. I came upon a sermon he preached on the subject of humility. I expect it was given from one of the Philadelphia pulpits he occupied, or from his early years at Trinity Church, Boston. In any case, an upscale audience warming up to enjoying the Gilded Age.<br />
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He took aim. “It is the narrowness of our life that makes us proud. I should think one of you merchants would be proud of his successful business if he saw nothing beyond it. I should think you men and women would be proud of your splendid houses if you look no farther. But if you could only see God forever present in your life, and Jesus dying for your soul, and your soul worth Jesus’ dying for, and the souls of your brethren precious in His sight, and the whole universe teeming with work for Him, then must come the humility of the Christian. To that humility let us devote ourselves, for in a humility like that alone is peace.”<br />
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A second insight into dealing with the present form of this world passing away, say the saints Paul and Phillips, is to look farther, to look beyond what could narrow our hearts and to require of ourselves what God requires and causes: broad and open hearts.<br />
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And that brings us to the doorway of a third insight—more accurately, to the seashore, the Sea of Galilee. In this liminal thin place where earth and sea and sky touch, Jesus announces a parallel reality to the disintegrating world Paul names. “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”<br />
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Both men are right. The present order is passing away; at the same time, God is doing a new thing. Entering human flesh, God is working great purpose out from within the human heart, broadening it, opening it. <br />
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On which side of the liminal divide will we choose to live?<br />
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To vilify our opponents and adversaries is to lock ourselves into the present form of this world.<br />
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To look no farther than our own business and not beyond our homes and belongings, our plans and feelings, is to be married to the present form of the world. <br />
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To obey when we hear Jesus say, “Follow me,” is to let him set our course in a parallel reality to a disintegrating world. To follow him there is to learn to practice a stewardship shaped by God’s fulfilment. To welcome the nearing Kingdom of God is to learn skills of repentance, humility, and belief that will cross the thin divide and bring to this world the grace it needs.<br />
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(Brooks’s sermon is found in his collection “The Purpose and Use of Comfort, and Other Sermons”, E. P. Dutton and Company, 1906, pp. 352-352.)<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-48534903888242281952015-01-12T13:52:00.003-08:002015-01-12T13:52:40.562-08:00Humbled and EmpoweredScripture for the First Sunday after the Epiphany includes Genesis 1:1-5; Psalm 29; Acts 19:1-7; Mark 1:4-11<br />
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The Arctic cold front that blew through midweek was a piece of work, wasn’t it? We’ve seen worse, and we’ve felt colder, and we yet may this winter—but it was humbling, sitting where I was right here, alone in this room, when the front edge of that air mass skimmed across this roof and shook the place. <br />
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It made me think of the Day of Pentecost, when the apostolic band, gathered in the loft where they’d kept the Passover meal with Jesus—this would be seven weeks after that wild night of intimacy, betrayal, arrest, terror—and on the fiftieth day post-Easter, felt the place rock when the Spirit, the Wind, in Hebrew the “ruach” of God, blew through. <br />
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The psalmist had experiences of God like that: “The voice of the LORD splits the flames of fire; the voice of the LORD shakes the wilderness… The voice of the LORD makes the oak trees writhe, and strips the forests bare.”<br />
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Back in the apostolic loft, those men and women were simultaneously humbled and empowered by their encounter with the Holy One of Israel whom they now clearly knew was also the Holy One of their futures.<br />
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Simultaneously humbled and empowered. If you would like to remember those words, feel free. I love it when people say to me thus-and-so, this-and-that, then add the tag “as you said in your sermon recently,” often proving my darkest suspicion that what people seem to recall from my sermons has perilously little to do with what I have tried to express. But that is okay—simultaneously humbling and empowering— okay to be reminded that what we try to name here in this room is elusive and in constant motion like the wind, and highly personal (therefore subject to subjective recall).<br />
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But if you were to remember the few words “simultaneously humbled and empowered”, and to quote them back to me in the next week or two, I will gladly recognize the subject I attempted to name today.<br />
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Thursday evening, when it was cold enough to make us think twice about going outside again, Diana and I went to see the film “Wild,” based on Cheryl Strayed’s memoir of consciously becoming the woman her mother raised her to be.<br />
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The film captures the 94 days and nights in which Strayed hiked the 1700-kilometer Pacific Crest Trail, walking into becoming the person she knew she could be. She chose a noble, harrowing, archetypal remedy to the awful state of being stuck in the aftermath of her own poor choices and the poor choices of many around her. She chose to hike the trail, to make a pilgrimage, though she wouldn’t have called it that at the outset, when she had no use for God who, she thought, had screwed things up badly in her wild life thusfar—her abusive father disappeared, her mother recently succumbed to cancer, Strayed’s addictions to heroin and to sex, an unwanted pregnancy, a failed marriage, no career path to speak of… A wild life in one sense of the word, to be tested now by wilderness, healed by the wild, her survival the result of her own wits, her encounters with people of good will and with people of bad will, and, ultimately, her encounters with the holy as her arduous trek lets her ultimately sing with the psalmist, “I was lifted out of the desolate pit, out of the mire and clay, my feet set upon a high cliff and my footing made sure.”<br />
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Those aren’t her words, to be sure; Strayed doesn’t emerge from this journey a believer in a traditional sense. But she does experience inner reconciliation in several senses. And she shows where she’s headed by using quotations from poets and authors who have spoken to her, leaving at each sign-in station on the trail a line or two from Emily Dickinson, James Michener, Robert Frost, Adrienne Rich. Rich’s poem “Power” is enough a compass to Strayed’s journey that I’ll read it in full: <br />
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Living in the earth-deposits of our history<br />
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Today a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earth<br />
one bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-old<br />
cure for fever or melancholy a tonic<br />
for living on this earth in the winters of this climate<br />
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Today I was reading about Marie Curie:<br />
she must have known she suffered from radiation sickness<br />
her body bombarded for years by the element<br />
she had purified<br />
It seems she denied to the end<br />
the source of the cataracts on her eyes<br />
the cracked and suppurating skin of her finger-ends<br />
till she could no longer hold a test-tube or a pencil<br />
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She died a famous woman denying<br />
her wounds<br />
denying<br />
her wounds came from the same source as her power<br />
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“Power”, by Adrienne Rich<br />
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“Denying her wounds came from the same source as her power.” Simultaneously humbled and empowered, you might say. In the film, before it’s known that her mother is terminally ill, Strayed faults the woman for not coming to terms with her own wounds (especially at the hands of that abusive husband, Strayed’s own father). The daughter finds her mother’s cheerfulness inconsistent with the reality the younger woman sees, and she accuses her of denial. In reply, the mother asks (approximately), “Would I re-write my story if I could? No. Because then I wouldn’t have you.”<br />
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The first Christian apostles discovered the intertwined nature of their woundedness and their readiness for being the people Jesus called them to be. Their terror on that wild night of intimate communion with him abruptly unwinding in betrayal and arrest, their losing him on that God-forsaken rubbish tip of Golgotha the next day—these wounds, his wounds, seemed to them the pathetic remains (and all that remained) of a promising movement. And so, for fifty days, they hung low, they pieced together the traumatic puzzle of what had befallen him and them, they grieved, they hiked the trail of their sorrows.<br />
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Until that fiftieth day, when their good sense in gathering, sabbath by sabbath, to continue searching his teaching and honoring their fellowship in the breaking of bread and prayer became the site of their empowerment. The shelf-life of this transforming dynamic reaches to our own day, as our own experience teaches us that to be the people Jesus raises us to be requires of us a humility born of our wounds and a power born of God. It is when we engage both that the Spirit engages us—or is it that the Spirit engages us first? We keep an open mind and heart. We just know that it takes this simultaneous humbling and empowering to live the life of repentance and pardon, bold witness, recognition of God present in all, justice-seeking, peace-making, dignity-respecting— the whole trek, the holy trail of the covenant love we and God have embarked on.<br />
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The apostles’ baptism in the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost appears to have shaped the early Church’s expectation of what it means to be initiated into the mysteries of Christ’s life and death and resurrection. So we get today a snapshot, a first-century selfie, of a dozen believers in the city of Ephesus, baptized with more than water for repentance: baptized also with Spirit for practicing and proclaiming covenant love. If we had to describe this baptism as being either for humbling or for empowering, we’d say empowering.<br />
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And if we had to choose between those two purposes in describing the baptism Jesus undergoes at the hand of John the Baptizer? That would be a tough call. The heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending on Jesus like a dove: that’s the wild stuff of power, and if we need words to accompany action, John proclaims, “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me, right here before you today; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the laces of his hiking boots.”<br />
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The humbling of John, you could say; and that would be a noteworthy thing, for if there’s one trait John didn’t have, he was not shy or reserved. No introverted Episcopalian, he.<br />
No stranger to the Spirit.<br />
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But because this means he’s not the center of this story, we see the humbling all circling around Jesus. He begins his public ministry at a revival meeting where the price of admission is repentance of sins. He stands waist deep in the river Jordan not with his twelve selected buddies (if they’re there, they don’t yet know what he has in mind for them); no, he rubs shoulders with a great crowd of people, all sorts and conditions, city dwellers and villagers, poor rustic farmers and people of means. And the water of the river Jordan, say the commentators, was no sparkling crystal stream. We are talking mud, serious mud.<br />
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The Son of God, the Son of Man, the King of kings and Lord of lords, is humbled not for a day but for the mission entrusted to him. What happens today in the Jordan River is of a piece with all that will unfold in Jerusalem in his final days, when he enters the city “humble, and mounted on a donkey,” drawing the attention and stirring the hope of all. And every step of those three years of his public ministry between his baptism and his passion brings him to fulfill his mission by approaching all sorts and conditions of people with, simultaneously, humility and power intertwined in their wounds, and his, and ours.<br />
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This past week, we have seen powerful evidence that we live in a deeply wounded, and wounding, world. Desperate power has lost its way without humility, bringing grim terror in France, in Nigeria, in Ukraine, in Gaza. Today, we have chosen to stand in the light of the Lord’s day. May the Spirit of God make us, and all who gather at tables of new life around the world, instruments of peace, compassion, and courage.<br />
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In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-6051304303205964112015-01-07T14:20:00.001-08:002015-01-07T14:20:13.604-08:00Unexpected Guests at the Manger Scripture for the First Sunday after Christmas Day includes Isaiah 61:10-62:3; Galatians 3:23-25 and 4:4-7; John 1:1-18<br />
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On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: Four calling-birds, three French hens, two turtledoves, and a partridge in a pear tree. On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me: Five gold rings… four calling-birds, three French hens, two turtledoves, and a partridge in a pear tree.<br />
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Happy fourth day of Christmas! To borrow the image of the fifth day, it’s a golden day today in the Neely and Montemayor families, as four-month-old Lena Luisa is baptized. <br />
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Powerful language lifts from our readings today in commentary on what holy baptism means. To paraphrase St. Paul writing to the Galatians, God is about to send into Lena’s heart the Spirit of his Son, teaching her how to approach God: “Abba! Father!” The commentators tell us that the Aramaic “Abba” is the intimate “Dad… Daddy”, and we trust that Lena will learn to address God through language of feminine endearment, too. As Paul makes clear, this is not the approach of a slave to a master, nor of a servant to an overseer, but of a child to a parent, a child who is also to inherit what the parent gives.<br />
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Our patron St. John the Evangelist proclaims the same in the famous Prologue to his Gospel: To all who receive him, who believe in his name, he gives power to become children of God, born not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. And from God Lena receives grace upon grace.<br />
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Which reminds us that our primary task as her parents, grandparents, godparents, and sisters and brothers in the household of faith, is to cultivate, shape, encourage, liberate, enlighten her ability to receive all the gifting God has for her, to perceive God in that giving, and to conceive how to share that giftedness for the good of the world so loved by God.<br />
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Now, I could end this sermon right there. But with time still running on the meter, I have to wonder with you about something.<br />
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There’s something going on at our altar crèche. You’ve seen already the progress of the three wise ones and their wise camel, who appears to be making the three dignitaries walk. We trust that by next Sunday they’ll take their places there in the barnyard at Bethlehem. <br />
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But what I’m asking you to notice is what’s already there. The non-human figures at the crèche include what we expect: a cow, a donkey, sheep (lots of sheep). And there are two additional species represented there.<br />
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One is a zebra. The other, a rat. <br />
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I am not making that up. This isn’t the first Christmas they’ve come, but when I saw them fresh this year, I did a double-take. How did they get there? I wondered.<br />
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The rat, we know, goes wherever human beings go. The rat lives along the margins of human settlement, in the dumpsters, along the loading docks; following, finding, food. The rat has become a global denizen because man has paved the way for the rodent, then littered the way with all a rat needs.<br />
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We have not called an exterminator. Even though this particular specimen is nearly twice the size of the Christ child, there appears to be no need to intervene. The crèche commands a reverence for life, at least a general amnesty for twelve days. Enough time to join Mary in taking into our hearts the whole puzzle of the Incarnation, pondering the full wonder of the nativity of Jesus Christ.<br />
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And if Z is for zebra, Z must also be for zany. If protective coloration is one way that evolution progresses, whatever is going on with the zebra? If the rat is surreptitious, the zebra is out there, one horn short of a unicorn, an extraverted yan to the secretive yin of the rat. <br />
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In one of his poems, Shel Silverstein tells us what the zebra asks about us.<br />
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I asked the Zebra, <br />
are you black with white stripes? <br />
Or white with black stripes? <br />
And the zebra asked me, <br />
Are you good with bad habits?<br />
Or are you bad with good habits?<br />
Are you noisy with quiet times? <br />
Or are you quiet with noisy times? <br />
Are you happy with some sad days? <br />
Or are you sad with some happy days? <br />
Are you neat with some sloppy ways? <br />
Or are you sloppy with some neat ways? <br />
And on and on and on and on and on and on he went.<br />
I’ll never ask a zebra about stripes...again.” <br />
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We keep our rat and our zebra in our crèche to remind us that there is a place for each which no other can fill, room for all which can be denied by none. They remind us what a mess we make of this world when we judge unworthy and reject any from the created order. And they remind us how short-sighted we are when we see the lovingkindness of God extended only to us, to our kind, our culture, our species. <br />
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Unexpected guests in the adoration of God in Jesus Christ help us do justice to the full wonder of the Incarnation.<br />
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Shel Silverstein’s poem appeared in his collection “A Light in the Attic”, 1985.<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-91088959907054001942015-01-07T14:04:00.001-08:002015-01-07T14:04:17.237-08:00Full Wonder of the IncarnationScripture for Christmas includes Isaiah 9:2-7; Titus 3:4-7; Luke 2:1-20<br />
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Every year, it boils down to this puzzling state of affairs. <br />
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We knock ourselves out consuming, organizing, preparing, eating, drinking, decorating, partying on the premise that we’re observing the birthday of an itinerant preacher who never had two nickels in his pocket, or a traditional settled home life, or what you might call a natural instinct to avoid altercations with religious authorities claiming to know the mind of God. <br />
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Go figure. What we spend (and that is the correct verb), what we spend December doing (and November, for that matter) is more in keeping with the ancient sun worship that reached a fevered pitch at the winter solstice. Afraid of the dark, staving off the possibility that without the proper ceremonies and sacrifices, this time the sun might not return to lengthen the days and ensure the growing season, our hunter-gatherer forbears caught, cooked, consumed, offered gifts to the heavens—the prehistoric version of shopping ‘til they dropped. All to keep anxiety at bay.<br />
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How far have we evolved from that? Isn’t there some of that in our cultural Christmas?<br />
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What’s tricky about this puzzle of finding the right fit to celebrate Christmas is the fact that Christian faith honors and employs all that is tactile and sensory, physical and tangible. “Sacramental” is the name we give to that trait, using outward and visible signs to express and convey inward and spiritual grace, believing that love passes like a current through such media as bread and wine, water, music, language, art, food—when offered to God’s purpose and praise, and offered with open hand and heart to whoever welcomes such a gift. <br />
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That approach teaches us to recognize value not so much in the object, as in what is done with the object: the giving, the receiving, the sharing, the appreciating, the rejoicing, the gratitude, the building of relationship and the serving of worthy purpose, including sheer enjoyment.<br />
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So it isn’t just primitive hunting-gathering that’s at work in our cultural Christmas. Our Lord Jesus, born today, is first adored in a barnyard; and ever after, he keeps revealing how God’s sanctuary is to be found everywhere, on a grassy hillside where several thousand hungry people are fed, around countless tables where he eats with all sorts and conditions of people, and in village squares where he heals and teaches and honors and confronts all who come to him. He sets loose the power of sacrament to reach us spiritually through physical means.<br />
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And so we fill our liturgical Christmas celebration with crèche figures and candles, music and costumes, wreaths and banks of flowers, and of course bread and wine. But our Christmas ceremonies: Are they more about rocking us to sleep, or are they more about awakening and equipping us to face the changes that we know are happening (and those we don’t yet know and will happen nonetheless)? Are our Christmas services using the same-old-same-old to keep anxiety at bay?<br />
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Indulging religious nostalgia can make as puzzling a fit with Christmas as consumerism. This Jesus whose coming we celebrate is remembered for his disapproval of showy sanctuaries, and for his critique of automatic ceremonial and passionless theology that fails to reveal the sheer relentless pervasive love of God for the whole shimmering web of life. Jesus is as much about rocking the boat as he is rocking the cradle, remembered for his tendency to pound the table and demand raising the bar of personal integrity and community ethics. <br />
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So if our Christmas liturgies fail to win the hearts and spark the imagination and meet the yearnings of good people who will give this sort of thing a chance only once or twice a year, perhaps we’re not doing justice to the full wonder of the Incarnation. <br />
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But you know what? Just as Christianity’s high regard for sacrament and physicality reminds us that God has made us to enjoy creation (our capacity for joy being one mark of our being made in the divine image), meaning that we’re not on the wrong path in our giving and receiving gifts, our feasting, our decking the halls-- so keeping anxiety at bay may be valued as one of the timeless vocations of religion. If joy is one clear sign of the divine likeness within us, so is peace and serenity.<br />
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Consider the mantra in Luke’s story of Jesus’s birth. How many times do we hear the message, “Do not be afraid,”? Nine months ago, these words were said by the mysterious messenger Gabriel to a young girl in the working class cottage where she and her fiancé lived. Tonight in Bethlehem, the same words are said to calm the shepherds who don’t know what to make of the spectacle before them. The words will be said later to Joseph, anxious as he is about being a new father, anxious about this devilish journey they’ve had to make to enroll for the tax that will further drain Galilee of its resources; he is overwhelmed by the attention his son is getting from foreign dignitaries and from paranoid King Herod, and further anxious about the dangers of escaping to Egypt to keep this child out of Herod’s reach.<br />
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We’d be missing the most obvious puzzle piece of Christmas if we failed to see the holy nativity set as it is among discouraging, frightening, desperate, painful world problems. We look around our world this Christmas and wherever we look, the winds of madness are blowing, from the Islamic State’s execution of westerners to the Taliban’s massacre of Pakistani school children and teachers, to gun violence and racial discrimination in our own country, to government inaction to offset climate change. It is no small part of the mission of Jesus and his Church to keep anxiety at bay so that we may see and make our very best choices, and avoid our worst ones.<br />
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Mary treasures all the pieces of the Christmas puzzle, pondering them in her heart. So must we, if we are to take our part in that peace on earth for which the angels pray. We’d best renew our treasuring by valuing peace within ourselves, peace that the world cannot give, peace that is—like joy-- God’s gift to be welcomed.<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-70125598945018083502015-01-07T13:57:00.002-08:002015-01-07T13:57:35.487-08:00Faith Makes RoomScripture for the 4th Sunday of Advent includes II Samuel 7:1-11, 16; Romans 16:25-27; Luke 1:26-38<br />
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Metaphor alert: a house for God… a womb for Jesus… a mansion within us… and a poem with the line, “faith, responsive, making room…”<br />
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Oh, it just doesn’t get better than this! I am so tempted to pack it in, climb back down these steps, and leave the rest up to you. <br />
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But the fact is, it does get better than that. I noticed it first in our story from the Hebrew Bible, and then saw more in the Gospel.<br />
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King David got all settled in real cozy in his new custom-built house, cedar beams thank you, cedars of Lebanon no less; and David’s feeling, well, just a bit self-indulged. Grateful, mind you, but, well, getting kind of at-ease in Zion. <br />
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He also had fresh in his memory the astonishing demanding rewarding deeds of God, the valor of his men on many battlefields, the sacrificial dedication of Israel’s women and children and men too old to put on armor but all of them, united, pitching in to the one effort to establish the kingdom. And now the LORD had given them rest from all their enemies round about them. At least for a while.<br />
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And it was time to thank God. But a surprising thing happens. David has rolled out a plan for the prophet Nathan to vet (you may recall that Nathan and David did not have an easy relationship—Nathan famously confronted David for his self-indulgence in that grisly matter of sending one of his best soldiers, Uriah, to die on the front lines so that Uriah’s wife Bathsheba might be free to become a royal wife). David is wise to consult Nathan. Nathan blesses the plan, or at least the desire David has to build God a temple.<br />
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God, however, appears to be unimpressed by David’s plan. I wonder if God isn’t still peeved at David’s shameful despatching of Uriah to an unjust death. Would you want a dishonorable fellow designing your house? David might be the best candidate available to sit on Israel’s throne—but should he be designing God’s seat, God’s sanctuary?<br />
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But if that is the back-story, what’s up front is God’s pointed reminder to David that YHWH, Lord God of Hosts, is not a sitting God, but a moving force keeping true to his covenant promises to lead his people. Never before in the history of God’s relations with the tribes of Israel did God ever fault their leaders for not building him a house of cedar. “I have been moving about in a tent and a tabernacle,” declares God, and that has been fine by me. You want to make me a house? Here’s what’s more important: I want to make of you a house, a faithful dynasty I can count on to hear and obey my call to pursue peace and justice among the nations of the earth.”<br />
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To that end, says God, I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep. Now we’re homing-in on how deep the Good News goes. This story is telling us something it could be easy to miss: that pasture, the one where young David had his first leadership lessons as a shepherd, his first music lessons as a strummer, his first conflict management training dealing with wolves and lions, his learning what to make of solitude on those silent hills, that pasture was all along God’s sanctuary, holy ground for encountering the Holy One.<br />
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This is not a minor detail in the broad sweep of God’s self-revelation to humankind. The God we meet in the Hebrew Bible is One who encounters people right where they are, as they are, because where they are is stragegically important to God in the divine campaign to form community that is faithful to God. And as they are—their strength, their weakness, their need, their yearning, their valor, their vulnerability—likewise fits the providence and purposes of God, the God who does not hesitate to enter and engage the human condition.<br />
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The Hebrew Bible and its stories like this one of David the house-builder, puts us on the road to Galilee. There, in the town of Nazareth, a working class home belonging to an engaged couple is revealed to be God’s sanctuary of holy encounter. “The Lord is with you,” announces the mysterious figure Gabriel, calling young Mary to welcome God within the house of her womb. “Here am I,” she replies to the angel. “Here I am,” come words from deeper in the universe than angels occupy, and yet it is there in her cottage that the divine name “I Am” is uttered. And there, her consent—as the poet puts it, her faith, responsive—makes room for God, a sanctuary made full during nine months of God’s fully entering and fully engaging the human condition.<br />
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And there, in Bethlehem, as Mary’s pregnancy comes full term, a barnyard is God’s sanctuary. And there, a road opens and shows itself a sanctuary as God prompts the holy family to escape King Herod’s clutches. Which means that there, in Egypt, there will be sanctuary as well. As King David is said to have sung in one of his psalms, “The earth is the LORD’S and all that is in it, the world and all who dwell therein.” (Psalm 24:1)<br />
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A house for God… a womb for Jesus… That pathway of metaphors takes us next to a mansion within us. How many preachers in how many Anglican churches are playing with this image in sermons today? <br />
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A mansion prepared for Jesus sounds like a grandiose project for the one who found no room at Bethlehem’s inn. It’s a good bet that the word “mansion” is an antique, perhaps deserving the same handling that has come to that verse in John’s Gospel, “In my Father’s house are many mansions,” now “many dwelling places”. That’s not modernism creeping in to dumb us down: the old and original meanings of “mansion” include abiding place, quarters, a large building divided into flats, a stopping place in a journey, the distance between two stopping places on a journey, and of course the house of the lord and lady of the manor, not to mention those honking big residences that make the New York Times real estate section feel like a cross-cultural experience.<br />
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The mansion that Advent calls us to prepare requires conscience, says the collect; moreover our preparation requires God’s purifying our conscience. Mercy, forgiveness, forebearance are the building blocks of this mansion. The purifying that is required to prepare a mansion for Jesus is the result of God’s daily visitation. It is not only Mary who has God’s sanctuary within: so do you and I. An Advent hymn has us sing the same message: <br />
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Then cleansed be every breast from sin;<br />
make straight the way for God within,<br />
and let each heart prepare a home<br />
where such a mighty guest may come. (The Hymnal 1982, No. 76)<br />
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“Faith, responsive, making room…” writes the poet. Acceptance. Radical acceptance. The polar opposite of our “Whatever” culture. Mary’s “Let it be,” simple not because it was easy acceptance; simple because it was radical. Undistracted from what was happening at the very roots in the heart of God.<br />
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“The Big Book” of Alcoholics Anonymous offers teaching about acceptance. Acceptance is the power, the skill, the discipline that undergirds all twelve steps in spiritual awakening that gets called recovery.<br />
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I heard these words from The Big Book Wednesday night, at our Vestry meeting. Each month, a member will open the meeting with ten to fifteen minutes of what we call “feeding the spirit.” Here is what we heard:<br />
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“Acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation—some fact of my life—unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment… Unless I accept life completely on life’s terms, I cannot be happy. I need to concentrate not so much on what needs to be changed in the world as on what needs to be changed in me and in my attitude.”<br />
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We were then reminded of Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer. Its famous lines are, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”<br />
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The Vestry member leading this time for reflection reminded us of the popular saying, “It is what it is…” To my ear, that attitude sounds more philosophical than the dismissive “Whatever” attitude that expresses helplessness, cynicism, resentment. <br />
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Thankfully we don’t hear Mary respond to Gabriel, “Whatever…” There isn’t enough acceptance in that attitude to yield nine minutes, let alone nine months, of collaboration. There’d be no incarnation, no Christmas, with “Whatever…”<br />
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And as our Vestry leader observed, the approach “It is what it is,” is only the first half of acceptance. The other half? “But it will become what we make it.”<br />
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Or, as the poet has it, “Faith, responsive, makes room…”<br />
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Wednesday night, we recited the whole of Niebuhr’s famous prayer. In full, it goes: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Living one day at a time—enjoying one moment at a time—accepting hardship as a pathway to peace—taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it, trusting that You will make all things right if I surrender to Your will—so that I may be reasonably happy in this life and supremely happy with You forever in the next. Amen.”<br />
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The phrase “faith, responsive, making room…” comes from Michael Hudson’s poem “Meditation for Luke 1:26-38” published in his collection “Songs for the Cycle” (Church Publishing, 2004).<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-25119933027649229042014-12-17T14:20:00.001-08:002014-12-17T14:20:56.344-08:00Inspired by Malala and KailashScripture for the 3rd Sunday in Advent includes Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; I Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8, 19-28<br />
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I hear that last Sunday it was revealed that standing beneath the Advent wreath can be risky. So far, so good today: we’ve lit the pink candle for what tradition calls Laudate Sunday, from the Latin for the scripture’s call to rejoice. “I will greatly rejoice in the LORD, my whole being shall exult in my God, who has clothed me with the garments of salvation, has covered me with the robe of righteousness, as a bridegroom decks himself with a garland, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.” <br />
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“Rejoice always,” echoes Paul writing to the church at Thessalonika. Texts like these have long been heard on the 3rd Sunday in Advent, when in this little season of penitence the curtain is raised just for a few moments to allow a flash of skirts, a burst of joy-in-the-making, a streak of warm and fleshy pink against the earnest dark of purple. And we hear the call to look up and catch the purpose of the season, training us so to count our days that we may apply our hearts to wisdom, to count our thanks and our blessings even more insistently than we count our losses and disappointments, to recognize what truly does count in life and what does not.<br />
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The pink is meant to warm us up. It’s the appetizer Jesus our host serves up to draw us to our place at his table. The pink is a hint of the joy to come, a reminder of where joy comes from. This burst of color is to open us up to the true light that St. John the Gospel writer tells us comes into the world to enlighten everyone. <br />
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Nothing does a better job revealing and celebrating those themes of enlightenment and universality than the annual awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize. We at St. John’s have learned to stop in our tracks, each Advent, to notice who the year’s recipients are.<br />
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Seventeen-year-old Pakistani Malala Yousafzai, a Muslim, and sixty-year-old Kailash Satyarthi, an Indian, share this year’s award in recognition of their struggle against the suppression of children and young people, and their passionate advocacy for universal education. Announcing the award recipients, the Nobel Committee stressed the importance that a Hindu and a Muslim, an Indian and a Pakistani, have joined in a common struggle for education and against extremism. In addition to focusing on children’s rights, this joint award is made in the hope that it may bring India and Pakistan closer together.<br />
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Quoting from the Committee’s announcement, “Both recipients had much at stake as they battled for what they believed in. In Satyarthi’s case, it was to end the exploitation of children for financial gain. In the case of Yousafzai—the youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner, at seventeen—it was for girls’ right to an education, a quest that nearly cost her her life when Taliban fighters called her out and shot her in the head two years ago.<br />
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“While it is in the nature of extremism to create enemies and frightening images, and to divide the world into us and them, the laureates show us something else… Both (represent what) the world needs—namely… unity.”<br />
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Of the two laureates, it is Malala whose name has become a global symbol of what one human being can do to break the bondage that would oppress countless others. This is the passion shown by both recipients. For Satyarthi, it has been forced labor and child slavery that he has attacked—literally, mounting raids on factories where children were forced to work. He is credited for having rescued and helped rehabilitate 80,000 children from slavery.<br />
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In his Nobel acceptance speech, Satyarthi condemned the blind eye that gets turned to child bondage in some countries. “I refuse to accept,” he said, “that the world is so poor when just one week of military expenditures can bring all children to classrooms. I refuse to accept that all the laws and constitutions and police and judges are unable to protect our children. I refuse to accept that shackles of slavery can ever be stronger than the quest for freedom.”<br />
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In the year 2000, it was estimated that there were 246 million child laborers around the world. Today, the estimate is 78 million fewer. The world is responding.<br />
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There has been uniquely universal response to Malala’s courageous fight, both for education and for her own life after that dreadful day when Taliban fighters tried to silence this young heretic. She realizes that she may face the barrel of a gun again, any day. Her response? <br />
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"I think of it often and imagine the scene clearly. Even if they come to kill me, I will tell them what they are doing is wrong, that education is our basic right," Yousafzai said on her Website.<br />
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"They can only shoot a body, they cannot shoot my dreams," she said. "They shot me because they wanted to tell me that, 'we want to kill you and to stop you campaigning', but they did the biggest mistake: they injured me, and they told me through that attack, that even death is supporting me, even death does not want to kill me."<br />
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Speaking on Wednesday, she said the Nobel Peace Prize “is not just for me. It is for those forgotten children who want education. It is for those frightened children who want peace. It is for those voiceless children who want change.<br />
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“I’m here to stand up for their rights, to raise their voice,” she said. “It is not time to pity them… It is time to take action, so it becomes the last time… that we see a child deprived of education.”<br />
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“So the LORD God will cause righteousness and praise to spring up before all the nations,” declared the prophet Isaiah.<br />
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What is righteousness? We explored that question at last Tuesday morning’s eucharist, where we often have conversation about the scriptures. The closest we got to a workable answer is that we know what righteousness is NOT when the prefix “self-“ is added to it. So righteousness is pretty much the opposite of that, we figured. Right relationship is one way to think of it, and perhaps a set of Matryoshka dolls comes in handy to imagine a threefold love. The threefold love Jesus calls forth from us is to love God with the whole heart, to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Play with that image of the dolls that are held within one another, consider how they might tell us something of the threefold love Jesus summons us to practice: these loves co-operate, they co-inhere with one another, the whole-hearted love of God starts and frees and shapes and inspires, fills and guides and repairs, a healthy love of self that reaches out to give and opens to receive the love of the other person, and that love evokes, frees, encourages, in turn.<br />
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Don’t you find it easy to see and sense the threefold love in Malala Yousafzai and in Kailash Satyarthi? The love that Jesus says counts in life shines brightly in this Muslim and this Hindu. Hearing their stories, feeling their passions, imagining what their choices and commitments have cost them and yet may, for me these two world citizens raise my sights this Advent to realize what we await, what we long for, what our world needs. <br />
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A hymn sums it up. I’ll bet you’ll find these words familiar.<br />
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"One Lord, in one great Name unite us all who own thee;<br />
cast out our pride and shame that hinder to enthrone thee;<br />
the world has waited long, has travailed long in pain;<br />
to heal its ancient wrong, come, Prince of Peace, and reign." The Hymnal 1982, No. 542<br />
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How does this vision of universal peace and justice, exemplified in remarkable lives, and awaiting fulfilment, sit with our preparations for Christmas 2014?<br />
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A passionate care for the rights and needs of children shines from our Giving Tree. Our Christmas Offering will go to the parish’s Outreach to Kids Fund that helps equip us to respond year-‘round to urgent needs of children and families in the North County, and Heifer Project International will receive the other half of the Offering.<br />
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A parish family brings a trunkload of food to the Friendship Center Food Pantry, having asked that their Christmas party guests bring food for those who need it. Last weekend’s Lessons and Carols at the College collected food in the same way. The CIAO concert will collect donations to support a village school in Uganda.<br />
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Our Advent season of waiting and longing is full of generous sharing. Many more examples are known to you and not to me, done, as the carol puts it, “how silently, how silently…”<br />
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By comparison to what Malala and Kailash do in their lives, we are so carrying the light end of the load. They would say to us: Turn a seeing eye to the oppressed children, the most vulnerable children, those with fewest resources, those who some will say have no right to be here, but are here; those who some will say have no further claim on our nation’s resources, while in fact they are among our nation’s resources. Turn a seeing eye and learn what part of the load we are called to carry.<br />
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Articles posted on three sites proved helpful in preparing this sermon:<br />
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“Nobel Peace Prize 2014: Pakistani Malala Yousafzai, Indian Kailash Satyarthi Honored For Fighting For Children's Rights”, The Huffington Post, 10/10/14, by Jade Walker<br />
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“Malala, Satyarthi accept Nobel Peace Prize, press children's rights fight”, by Greg Botelho, CNN, December 10, 2014<br />
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"The Nobel Peace Prize 2014 - Press Release". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 17 Dec 2014. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2014/press.html> <br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-45707100220949033902014-12-02T07:38:00.002-08:002014-12-02T07:38:55.400-08:00The Wilder ChurchScripture for the 1st Sunday in Advent includes Isaiah 64:1-9; I Corinthians 1:3-9; Mark 13:24-37<br />
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Here we are, on the other side of the season’s first big snow storm. We’ve survived the first rush of winter adrenalin, as snow projections inched upwards and colors changed on those high-tech maps behind the weather people. <br />
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Given our penchant for traveling at Thanksgiving—which meets the need and desire we have to gather with family and friends on that day—this storm put probably most households through a round of fretting over travelers’ safety and navigating changes in travelers’ plans.<br />
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But there we were, Thanksgiving Day, having made the best of it and found our way to the tables where we belonged. And here we are today, observing the first Sunday of Advent. And the “we” of this family gathering are the members of three sister congregations, as St. John’s is delighted to welcome the people of All Saints and St. Andrew’s.<br />
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I have looked forward to this Sunday as an opportunity to taste and to feel what is sometimes called “the wider Church”, the Church beyond what Bishop Fisher calls the silo of our own home congregation. <br />
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We experience the wider Church when we gather in Diocesan Convention. Not only are 60-some congregations represented by several delegates each, filling the ballroom, but the agenda is also filled with snapshots and video clips and story-telling about our many mission partners in the wider Church within the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in other parts of the country, and in other parts of the world.<br />
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Someone here at St. John’s, who shall remain nameless, calls it not the wider Church, but the wilder Church. So I’ve been looking forward to today as an experience of the wilder Church. <br />
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Let’s get back to Bishop Fisher’s image of the silo church. That, by the way, is church with a small c. Talk about the wider Church, and that deserves a capital C, because where we’re headed with that wideness is the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church of the creeds. And where we’re headed is the universal Body of Christ expressed in the sacrament of baptism. This capital-C Church is wider than, and certainly wilder than, the Episcopal Church. It’s more than the sum of all its denominational parts: it includes all whose faith is known to God alone, all whose spirituality may not carry the labels of organized religion, but whose compassion is nonetheless the love of God flowing into the world.<br />
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By contrast, the silo church keeps itself closeted from the world, preferring—or feeling obligated—to take care of that silo, patching the holes to keep what’s inside dry and ready to feed those cows that come with the silo. <br />
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We get the point. The church that lives unto itself will die by itself. That rule is universal; it applies to all congregations, not one is exempt.<br />
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Hence the remedy, the prescription that our Bishop offers to all sixty-some congregations in Western MA: take the Church out into the streets. I think he would capitalize that C, because for sure he doesn’t mean take out into the world the churchy preoccupations with itself. He means take into the world the all-embracing compassion of God, the fearless reverence for life of Jesus Christ, and intimate imaginative trust in the Holy Spirit—the very powers given to us in baptism, renewed in us by worship and community, sharpened in us by servant ministry. The very powers the world and its people need. <br />
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These are the powers and attitudes Bishop Fisher takes with him in his walking each of the three geographic corridors of our Diocese. Each 60-70 mile trek is meant to get him and us out of our churches, into the world for which God entered our human flesh.<br />
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What does it mean, to take the Church out into the streets? It’s a darned good thing that all sixty-some congregations (not to mention the hundreds and thousands of others across the land) are scratching their heads on this question together. Because it will require togetherness to find our answers. Not that those answers will fit equally all congregations, not even in as small a territory as the North Berkshires, but that each congregation has its own genius, its own lessons to teach, and its own gifts to bring to the table. <br />
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As I look around this room this morning, I wonder how God may be calling our three congregations to think and act and worship outside our siloes in this new year that opens to us, this Advent Sunday.<br />
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How might we find ways to listen together for God’s answers to that question? Does our coming together today suggest that we have already begun to do this kind of listening? <br />
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One Sunday afternoon this fall, a golden day when the foliage was at its peak, Diana and I drove to Cricket Creek Farm in South Williamstown and then walked north on Oblong Road. <br />
It was a right time to remember poet Mary Oliver’s words:<br />
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Look, the trees<br />
are turning <br />
their own bodies<br />
into pillars<br />
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of light,<br />
are giving off the rich<br />
fragrance of cinnamon<br />
and fulfillment…<br />
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Suddenly, a fellow passed us, running along the shoulder of the road, then darting into the open pasture of Field Farm. We could see he was a young farmhand. What was his hurry?<br />
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Well, it was 4:00 p.m. and the cows were due to be milked at 5:00. How long does it take to move a herd of cows? How many Episcopalians would it take to move a herd of cows? <br />
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It took one farm hand. The closer we got to him, the clearer his singing became. Was it singing, or more like a chant? I won’t try to reproduce it—I expect it’s an acquired skill. It was a mix of his calling some cows by name—the outliers, the ones that mooed back at him in what sounded for all the world like sheer defiance. But mostly he just sang to the herd a song of his own making, telling them it was time to move, time to head back to the barn.<br />
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And what amazed us was how those cows knew just what to do. The farmhand went to the northernmost back edge of the herd, and the cows at the front edge did their slow pirouette and headed along the pasture, the avant-garde leading their sisters as they paralleled the road, then crossed the road without the benefit of a crossing guard, into the barnyard. <br />
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Those cows out front were motivated. A full udder is a perfect homing device. To them, that farmhand’s song was pure good news, for a cow has to do what a cow has to do.<br />
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Is our little herd of North Berkshire Episcopalians finding fresh motivation to work together? Rather than assuming that it will be necessity that motivates us, what if we welcomed a new togetherness based on our fullnesses? What if Christ the farm-hand is singing us into working together to share our various kinds of abundance? I’m not so much thinking of sharing with one another (though today should show us that’s enjoyable). I’m thinking that Jesus is calling us to share him with this corner of his world.<br />
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Words to a song he’s singing on this Advent Sunday are heard in the Gospel. He wants to gather his people from the four winds. He is near, and like the simple prodding presence of the farm-hand, his closeness to us calls us to move, to act, to share that closeness with people who long for it without yet recognizing it.<br />
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He calls us to be doorkeepers on the watch, keeping awake, alert to our opportunities to throw open our churches’ doors and windows, and our opportunities to take our churches out for a walk in this wider and wilder world.<br />
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(Mary Oliver’s full poem “In Blackwater Woods” is found in her “New and Selected Poems”, Beacon Press.)<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-28764163551922787882014-11-25T10:34:00.002-08:002014-11-25T10:34:41.244-08:00Sheep and GoatsScripture for the Last Sunday after Pentecost includes Ezekiel 34:11-16, 20-24; Ephesians 1:15-23; Matthew 25:31-46<br />
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Where to begin? <br />
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Today is Christ the King Sunday, a nickname we’ve borrowed from Roman Catholic tradition to distinguish the 24th Sunday after Pentecost, last of those Sundays numbered like streets in a city. Call this Christ the King Sunday and you give notice that we worship and serve the one who promises to make all things new.<br />
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And that makes today just the right time to remind ourselves that next Sunday a new year begins in the Christian calendar. Advent we call it, that short season of personal preparation not just for the coming of Christmas but the coming of Christ, a taller order and a deeper calling than erecting the tree and schlepping through the mall. Set out for you today is an array of free Advent devotional booklets and for-sale Advent calendars, tools for your use at home or at work, for your own personal preparation.<br />
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My favorite step into Advent is to bundle up and walk out into the deep darkness of night when there’s no cloud cover and as little ambient light as possible, to look up and regain a sense of what a speck in the universe earth is, albeit a hallowed speck precious to the One who set in motion, one starry night, the Incarnation of the divine in the human, Jesus. <br />
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So today is just the right time to give you a heads-up that next Sunday we’ll celebrate Advent with more than a touch of incarnation as we welcome parishioners of All Saints and members of St. Andrew’s, our sister congregations in the North County. This fall, they’ve been worshiping together at St. Andrew’s, while All Saints installs new front steps and a ramp, and a new fire safety system. What prompted our inviting them here was hearing that they couldn’t find a priest available to them on the 30th, and our wardens didn’t miss a beat spotting an opportunity to let the word become flesh.<br />
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And today is when we will say farewell to Judy Buhner, who for the past dozen years has brought us her uniquely gracious mix of Quaker clarity and what she eventually discovered was her secret Anglican appetite for sermons and singing. Judy has served on Vestry, Stewardship Ministry Team, has been a lector, has preached, extended pastoral care in many ways, and has been a loyal member of our knitting group. She and Bob will soon close on selling their house (to a young family in our parish) then heading to Georgia for the winter before taking up residence in their new home in the Lathrop Community in Northampton. <br />
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So, as I said at the start, where to focus next on a Sunday with so much swirling around? <br />
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Let’s focus for a few moments on prayer. I have in mind the Prayers of the People. If you worship here frequently, you know we use a variety of prayer formats. The one we call the Iona Prayers expects no vocal participation. The silences built into that form are kept silent for the interior work of calling to mind the variety of needs summed-up in that bidding prayer.<br />
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But the one we’re using these days, adapted from the New Zealand Prayer Book, encourages voices to be heard. Four times, the leader pauses to invite you to name out loud the people and the concerns you bring with you today. If you’ll take your orange announcements sheet, you’ll see in a grid the four categories of intercession that can make this particular form sound like the Prayers of the People.<br />
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These categories include our concerns for the world; our hopes for the community we live in; the needs of individuals we’ve brought with us on our hearts and minds today; and those who have died or are grieving.<br />
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I hope that seeing what’s coming may help us choose what to do with those four opportunities when we get there. Perhaps (during this sermon) you may want to jot down in that little grid names and concerns that come to mind, and be readier to let your voice be heard. <br />
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Speaking of voices, how do you hear the voice of Jesus in that apocalyptic Gospel portion we heard? “Apocalypse” is a Greek word for “uncovering”, and here Jesus reveals a vision of the Last Judgment. Is he advocating a judgmental world view? <br />
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I doubt that his dramatic view of the end of time and the setting-right of the world’s ancient wrongs is much on the minds of 21st-century believers, and surely isn’t at the top of the charts for non-believers. But in the Middle Ages, this theme loomed large: over the main doorway of many a European cathedral is a panoramic sculpture that conveys the triumph of the good and the vanquishing of evil. This kind of scene is found painted on chancel walls in parish churches. In one half of the fresco is a glimpse of beatific glory; in the other half, it’s gruesome going. But the prominence given to these scenes presents a fascination with one line in the Creed, “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.”<br />
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Not so, the kingdoms of this world. They will all have their day, then pass into oblivion; but on the last great day God’s kingdom will come on earth as it is in heaven. But it’s not as if God’s kingdom hasn’t been here all along. According to Jesus’s vision (or is it Matthew’s vision?) two kingdoms have been interwoven in the roller coaster ride of history, the demonic kingdoms of this world represent one kind of kingdom that is all about self-serving, greed, violence, and oppression; and God’s reign, revealed wherever the polar opposites of those vices are to be found in virtues that are surprisingly down-to-earth. The apocalypse is the uncovering, the unwinding, the pulling apart of these two kingdoms.<br />
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This isn’t the first time in recent weeks that we’ve heard Matthew relay Jesus’s stories in ways that surprise us for what they do and don’t care about: Here in this vision of the end in today’s Gospel, the criterion of judgment is not confession of faith in Christ, and it is not doctrinal agreement with all the creedal beliefs in grace, justification, and the forgiveness of sins. The one criterion is whether we act with loving care and uncalculating generosity for people in need.<br />
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But something more is happening here than a lesson in ethics. The people who take care of others, sheltering, and feeding, visiting and encouraging, they aren’t aware of a deeper dimension to the various acts of compassion they’ve taken part in. They were content with the part they could see, that basic needs were met. But they were also part of something far greater than they knew, a global movement of compassion (at least as global as around the Mediterannean Sea and along the fault lines of the Roman Empire), namely the kingdom of God that entered our biosphere from the womb of an at-risk young mother and would forever be subversive likewise in its dealings with the powers and principalities of this world. <br />
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Wherever an act of lovingkindness moves across the synapse between the caregiver and the cared-for, one of the two kinds of kingdoms in Matthew’s apocalypse grows. Being below the radar, this growth is creatively subversive as time moves along towards what can only be called The Great Reversal at the end of time. And talk about subversive: those doom scenes from the Middle Ages show very well-fed, fashionable, powerful people, some even wearing church vestments, even mitres on their heads, being consigned to the nether reaches of eternal punishment. And the other half? They are “the least” in society, the poor, prisoners, the homeless; and, surprising even to the helpers and givers, these “least” are, says Jesus, “members of my family.” <br />
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So, while this vision of the end time reveals the primacy of ethics as essential to the kingdom of God, the vision itself reveals the nature and mission of Jesus Christ. He fulfills the great commandments of the ancient law, “Hear, you people: the Lord God is One, and you shall love the Lord with all your heart and mind and soul; and you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Fulfilling this law in himself, his Spirit is available to be poured out upon all who seek the equipping of all to love all.<br />
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Back, then, to my question a ways back: What do you hear in the voice of Jesus in this vision of the last judgment? On the surface of it all, he appears to see the world in terms of all or nothing, white or black, good or bad. That’s not the world we occupy—or if we believe it is, it’s at our own peril.<br />
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What Jesus does in his role as judge is to reveal the great lie that such dualism is built upon, the error that says that God and Satan are equally matched and locked in everlasting struggle. While the nightly news goes far to reinforce this error, Jesus’s apocalyptic vision reveals the truth that there is one God and only one God. Once that is known, should there be any longer a need to separate sheep from goats, a need to judge people for their differences?<br />
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What I hear in the voice of Jesus is his judging not of people but of their differences, a careful weighing of what does and what does not matter, and I hear him training us to practice that skill. Already, we’ve heard the message that differences of belief and differences of opinion are not what matter in the kingdom of God. Behavior does matter, is essential, is transformative, is what counts. Differences in behavior deserve to be judged.<br />
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By his behavior, Pope Francis shows himself an agent of change, subversive to a tipping point that will elevate compassion over compulsion, comprehension above conformity.<br />
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By their behavior, ISIS jihadis perpetuate the ancient wrongs and demean the very name of religion.<br />
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In this world, there are sheep and goats. A more blatant example of behavioral difference would be hard to find, than the one I just cited. But the insidious judgmentalism practiced by neighbors and cousins is just as likely to ignite barbarism. I mean the xenophobia that results in neighboring groups fearing and hating one another simply because they have been trained to, and because they belong to opposing parties or claim different customs and religious traditions.<br />
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Reflecting on his first eighteen months as Archbishop of Canterbury and head of the worldwide Anglican Communion, Justin Welby recently addressed the Church of England’s General Synod (where, at very long last, the ordination of women as bishops was finally approved and made law). <br />
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The Anglican Communion, he says, is flourishing in 165 countries. He reported how incredibly diverse he finds Anglicanism to be. “Within the Communion are perhaps more than 2000 languages and perhaps more than 500 distinct cultures and ways of looking at the world… The vast majority are poor. Many are in countries where change is at a rate that we cannot even begin to imagine. <br />
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“At the same time, there is a profound unity… underpinning the Communion, a unity imposed by the Spirit of God on those who name Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour… The potential of the Communion under God is beyond anything we can imagine… The prize is visible unity in Christ despite functional diversity. It is a prize that is not only of infinite value, but also requires enormous sacrifice and struggle to achieve.<br />
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“Yet if we can get near it we can speak with authority to a world where over the last year we have seen more than ever an incapacity to deal with difference, and a desire to oversimplify the complex and diverse nature of human existence for no better reason than we cannot manage difference and dealing with The Other. Yet in Christ we are held together. In Christ the barriers are broken, peace is held out to us as a gift established, which needs living. In Christ there is hope of a life that provides hope of peace.<br />
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“The future of the Communion requires sacrifice. The biggest sacrifice is that we cannot only work with those we like, and hang out with those whose views are also ours. Groups of like-minded individuals meeting to support and encourage each other may be necessary… but they are never sufficient. Sufficiency is in loving those with whom we disagree… <br />
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“We must grasp the challenge… The prize is a world seeing Christ loved and obeyed in His church, a world hearing the news of his salvation.”<br />
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(Archbishop Welby’s comments appear in a press release from Episcopal News Service dated November 17, 2014, “Archbishop on the Communion’s challenges and the way forward.”<br />
M. Eugene Boring’s commentary on Matthew in Vol. VIII of “The Interpreter’s Bible”, Abingdon Press, 1995, was helpful in preparing this sermon.)<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7135301965990402888.post-7007445263815487982014-11-17T14:54:00.001-08:002014-11-17T14:54:45.322-08:00Exploring Space, Outer and InnerScripture for the 23rd Sunday after Pentecost includes Judges 4:1-7; I Thessalonians 5:1-11; Matthew 25:14-30<br />
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What do you think of those Europeans, landing a scientific probe on a tiny comet, an exciting first in—here’s a new word for me—cometary exploration.<br />
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Who knew what those Europeans were up to? Well, we did—though it may not have been the kind of news that grabbed much attention, the United States and the European Union have been partnered in the international Rosetta Mission since 1993.<br />
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Rosetta, we’ve learned, is the name of the orbiter satellite launched from French Guiana in 2004, into a circuitous ten-year trek across the solar system, crossing the asteroid belt and traveling into deep space, 6.4 billion kilometers, more than five times earth’s distance from the sun, to its rendezvous with Comet 67P. Piggy-backed on Rosetta since 2004 was the landing device named Philae, about the size of a kitchen dishwasher. I wish my kitchen appliances remained intact that long. <br />
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The Rosetta Stone is a slab of volcanic basalt inscribed with hieroglyphics that eventually provided the key to understanding an ancient civilization. The Rosetta Mission opens a door to the origin of planet earth, explores the role that comets may have played in the evolution of life on earth, and fosters a better understanding of our future.<br />
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67P is a mysterious cosmic iceberg. It has lobes that make it look like an oversized ginger root. It surely qualifies for that outer darkness where the master exiles the fearful slave who fails to invest the talent he has been given.<br />
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That is truly an Uh-Oh moment in the parable. All has been affirmative so far, as those other two investment managers report on their successes. But with the third slave, the master lowers the boom and sweeps him away into outer orbit. <br />
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There were Uh-Oh moments in outer space, last week. Before the lander probe Philae was launched from Rosetta, operations control detected a failure in the thruster engine on top of the probe, meant to occasionally offset the lack of gravity that would otherwise cause the dishwasher-sized probe to float away from the comet’s surface. Then, upon landing, harpoon-like devices meant to anchor Philae also failed to fire. Uh-oh.<br />
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The result: The Little Probe That Could suddenly couldn’t prevent itself from touching down not once, but three times. News reports have told us that Philae may be perched on the edge of a steep cliff, one of its three tripod legs dangling over the edge. The lander is thought to be lying on its side, its battery power diminishing without much exposure to the sun’s renewing light. Uh-Oh.<br />
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That name Philae comes from an island, a temple, and a stone. The island of Philae is (or was) located in Lake Nasser in one of the cataracts of the Nile in Egypt, south of the vast Aswan Dam. On that island was the great temple to the Egyptian god Osiris. You may recall that before the Aswan flooding reached Philae, a famous internationally-supported rescue of the temple was achieved by UNESCO, relocating it above the flood waters. <br />
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But I suspect the name Philae was given to the probe because it is also the name of another puzzle-breaking inscribed stone, whose hieroglyphics, in tandem with the Rosetta Stone, helped open the history of ancient Egypt. <br />
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Why ever am I going on and on like this? For one thing, I’m wondering if there’s a parable hidden within this historic event in space exploration. What allegories might there be? <br />
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Philae cannot transmit or communicate with humans on earth except through the orbiter Rosetta. The knowledge and comprehension we long for requires more than scientific probing (Philae); the divine knowledge we yearn for requires also the ancient texts (Rosetta).<br />
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And consider Philae’s tripod legs. Those three supports are meant to balance and secure the probe for its probing. The Anglican theologian Richard Hooker, whom I brought into the pulpit with me last Sunday, is remembered for his Three-Legged-Stool model of Christian authority: Informing our decisions, shaping our religious faith and practice, are the three legs of holy scripture, received tradition, and Spirit-guided reason. All three are needed to comprehend what God gives us, what God asks of us, what truly matters. I can’t picture Philae’s Uh-Oh placement right now without thinking, “Oh, so that’s what may happen to me if I lose sight of even one of those three witnesses to truth that God provides: scripture, tradition, reason. I’ll be tipped over on one side or another, blocked from the light I need to recharge by. I’ll have fallen and can’t get up.<br />
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Enough allegorizing. Let me ask one question before we step across to that perplexing parable. Even with its misfirings, even with its fallen nature now, the Philae probe and the Rosetta Mission are considered a wild success. How come our parable ends up in such a nasty sense of failure around this third fellow? Why is that third manager so scorned as a failure and then brutally banished? (I understand his failure: he didn’t earn a penny of interest—but he does better than his counterpart in Luke’s version, who wraps his talent in a napkin and is darned lucky it’s still there when the master returns. At least Matthew’s third fellow hides his talent in the ground… What I don’t get is the excessive punishment.<br />
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I mean, who needs sacred texts like this one? Is it divine knowledge we experience passing to us through this scripture?<br />
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Give me instead my favorite verses. My very favorite is also from Matthew, and I can’t hear it often enough: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and by burden is light.” That’s my idea of a key sacred text conveying knowledge of God, and I could happily hear that as the Gospel every Sunday.<br />
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But the Christian faith does not let us rest content on the laurels of a few verses. Instead, we get stretched by parables that lead us first in one direction, then in another, creating (as today’s parable does) a dilemma. Rather than resolving the dilemma for us, we must choose which direction summons us in our own journey towards being good and faithful servants.<br />
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So let’s probe this parable. Jesus tells it to bring down to earth a clearer sense of what the kingdom of heaven will be. What Jesus needs first is a creative absence: a wealthy man goes on a journey, and to free him for that journey he entrusts his property to his slaves. A recipe for disaster? No, we’re told that in those days trusted slaves rose in the ranks as managers. It was a Do It Yourself society, no wealth managers, no stock exchanges; how a wealthy person grew wealthier required inventive opportunism. Come to think of it, that hasn’t changed much, has it? <br />
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But one thing has: banks are (or were, before 2008) mostly trusted institutions that most people utilize, including an expectation of earning some degree of interest, however little these days. By contrast, Hebrew law prohibited the exacting of interest in personal loans. Let’s wonder more about that.<br />
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Is this wealthy man not a Jew, but a Gentile whom the story sets up as a straw man who can be ruthless because that’s just the way Gentiles are? And if exacting interest is not allowed, how does this story square with the ancient law?<br />
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A talent was a big deal: equal to the wages of a day laborer for fifteen years. Given the short life expectancy then, we’re talking about a lifetime’s earnings, all the money a worker might see across the better part of an adult career. <br />
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But here’s the thing. If we want to unlock the mystery of this parable, we have to pay attention to the stage directions of the drama being played out. What these three slaves do with what is entrusted to them they do during their master’s absence. His being gone is the key to this Rosetta Stone.<br />
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For first-century Christians, the very nature of their lives was waiting, waiting for the second coming of Christ. They were taught to expect it in their lifetime, and they did. But how do you invest yourself when the central person in your life has gone? The master’s absence in this parable is no minor thing: it’s the setting and the key. The criteria for being counted good and faithful in this time of waiting are set out clearly. It is not theological correctness that matters. It is not passive retreat from the world. It is not strict obedience to a set of defined instructions, even if those come straight from the ancient law.<br />
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It is active responsibility that takes initiative and accepts risks. That’s the criterion that matters in the first-century Church. Methodist commentator M. Eugene Boring helps us here. “In the story, the master gives no instructions as to what is to be done with the money, so faithfulness is not merely obedience to directions. Each servant must decide how to use his or her time during the master’s absence.” It is all about discerning and deciding. It is up to each one of us what we make of the present.<br />
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Then notice the surprising twist: When the master returns, he reveals two things. First, he reveals to his servants that their mission has been primarily about trust, not money. Second, he reveals to us hearers what is as unexpected to us as it was to those servants: that the master invites them to enter into his joy is his way of saying that he has given them the vast wealth that was his. Only the third servant keeps regarding the wealth as not his own. His failure to generate interest is tied to his failing to recognize what the master was meaning to do: to call and empower slaves to become so much more than slaves.<br />
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Instead, this third servant has chosen to believe not the best, but the worst about the master. To use St. Paul’s language from his letter heard today, this fellow believed himself destined for wrath; and that, says Paul, just isn’t true. But such distrust will shape a person’s attitude, letting fear dominate discernment and decision, immobilizing the human capacity for taking responsibility and taking strategic risks. It is so up to us how we conceive of God.<br />
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Can we take the sting out of the master’s final action? It didn’t take long for some of the early Christians to try. In the apocryphal “Gospel of the Nazarenes”, a book later than Matthew and one that didn’t make it into the New Testament canon, this story is retold so that one servant multiplies the money, one hides it, and one squanders it with harlots and flute girls. The first is rewarded, the second rebuked, and the third cast into prison.<br />
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“This version is more satisfying to our aesthetic and moral sense,” writes the commentator, “therefore, it is furthest removed from the original story of Jesus, which was upsetting to our ideas of justice.”<br />
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The fact is, the very purpose of much of the New Testament is to frustrate the human desire to summarize the way God works into nice neat coherent packages. What else should we expect of the Christ who comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable? <br />
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And where do we come into this parable? <br />
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Our coffee conversations members are reading about Emergence Christianity, a re-articulating of Christian faith and practice so as to speak effectively to 21st-century people who have emerged from outmoded ideas and require a nimble, fresh, truthful expression of Christianity—one that takes the Church outside the church and into the world.<br />
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We come into today’s parable as Emergence Christians responsible for stewarding the faith and the resources entrusted to us. Required of us is the willingness to risk the loss of familiar forms and ways and means of being the Church, to explore and experiment with a courage and trust and boundary-crossing collaboration comparable to those teams of scientists and engineers who keep extending our frontiers, deepening our comprehension, and expanding our reach.<br />
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The One who is in it all with us—Source, Guide, and Goal of all that is—will meet us on the way, guide our orbit, reward our probing, and embrace the world in grace.<br />
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(M. Eugene Boring’s commentary on Matthew is found in Volume 8 of “The New Interpreter’s Bible”, Abingdon Press, 1995. His insights form the basis for this sermon’s approach to this parable.)<br />
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Fr. Peter Elvinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13978840519376806032noreply@blogger.com