Tending the Soul

Texts for the 6th Sunday of Easter.

Here we are on the 6th of the 7 Sundays in Eastertide. Thursday is Ascension Day. Soon comes Pentecost.

In the Gospel today, Jesus is preparing his disciples for his departure. We are looking back to the time after the Last Supper and before the arrest in the Garden. Jesus is saying goodbye.

And he says it this way: Soon I am going, but don’t be afraid. You won’t be alone. I’m sending someone to be with you, to be your companion when I am gone, to help you remember the things I taught you. 

That companion is the Holy Spirit, the Advocate, the Comforter, who will walk with the disciples when Jesus walks with them no longer, to bind them together in community, and give them the power to continue Jesus’ work in the world.

That’s where we are in the story of Jesus and that’s where we are in the story of the church year. And this is our story, too. We too are preparing to receive again at Pentecost the Holy Spirit, who will walk with us and bind us together and empower us to do God’s work in the world.

So, what are we doing to prepare for the Spirit to be our companion going forward?

Most of us have busy lives. We have lists of things to do. We have family to raise or elders to look after. We have our work. We need to shop and cook and exercise. We have instruments to practice and books to read and photographs to take and games to play. We have places to go and chores to do. 

And that’s just my own partial list. Like many of us, I sometimes get so caught up in “busy” that I relegate my spiritual development to something I might get around to after I’ve done all the other things. How about you? Oh, we love God and we want to be good, but since God is infinite, maybe tending to our spiritual lives doesn’t have to be on the front burner right now.... 

And yet. What could be more important than tending to our spiritual lives? Our spiritual selves aren’t an add-on to our regular selves. Our spiritual self is the very core of our whole self as a beloved child of God.

Our Bible begins in Genesis with a couple living in a beautiful garden, and it ends with this image in Revelation: a heavenly city come to earth as a community in a garden, gathered around God, from whom flows life-giving water, featuring a tree of life whose leaves are God’s medicine for healing. We are invited to live in this garden and be healed and reconciled. That is God’s beautiful vision for us. We are nourished by this living water and this healing tree of life. This is who we are created to be, citizens of this garden. This is the home of our spiritual self.

Tending to the spiritual self means partaking of that living water and allowing God’s medicine to heal our wounds and fractures as we go about our daily business.

These last days, we’ve been holding discernment meetings where many of us have come together to talk about hopes and desires for the future of Bruton Parish. Some women of the parish gathered last weekend to talk about women’s ministries here as well.  

And all through these discussions, I’ve been hearing a longing for connection. Connection with God and connection with others. For some it’s connection with one another here - women connecting to women, parents to other parents, younger folks to older folks. For others, the longing is for connection with the community around us - people in the parish connecting with people in the community who need companionship and help and healing.

Some have voiced a desire for deeper connection with God through worship, through new engagement with the Scriptures, through exploring spiritual themes in literature.

St Augustine described the work of the Spirit as connecting.  He described the Spirit as the love that moves between Father and Son, between God and us, connecting us to God and to one another.  Connecting us to our story as the people of God. Connecting us to our true selves.

There’s an intentionality to spiritual development, and that intentionality is often a casualty of our busy lives. We think we will get around to it. But that’s not tending to it.

If we tend to it, the Spirit nourishes us with living water from God’s own heart, and gives us the strength, and fosters the love needed, to connect with one another and to connect with the community so that we are in fact able to continue God’s work in the world as Jesus has asked us to do. 

Jesus is reminding us today of our need to intentionally prepare for the Spirit to be among us, to strengthen us, to work through us to connect us to God and to one another and to our true selves. This isn’t ‘when I get around to it’ work but something our very souls and the soul of this community depends upon.

So come, Holy Spirit, come!

Sheep or Shepherd?

Detail from a window at St Mark's Capitol Hill, Washington DC

There is one Shepherd, and we are all called to be one flock. The Good Shepherd knows his or her sheep by name, and the sheep know the sound of the shepherd's voice, and the shepherd loves the sheep and is willing to die for them.  These are things we are likely to hear on Good Shepherd Sunday.

And we are comforted by these words. This has been a week that has seen violence and disaster, loss of life through evil and through carelessness and through the forces of nature. Reciting the 23rd Psalm, we affirm that the Lord, who leads us to good pasture and fresh water and through the valley of the shadow of death, is our Good Shepherd.

But there is also a disconnect here, if we stay in the land of the Good Shepherd, of green pastures and valleys of shadows without seeing them present in our own lives and in our own communities.  The stories that have unfolded this week have intruded on our reveries.

And so while it is good to meditate on the Good Shepherd in the land of the 23rd Psalm, I can't help but think about the Good Shepherd on Boylston Street, the Good Shepherd at Rest Haven in West, Texas, the Good Shepherd in the Sichuan Province of China, of Syria, of India, of [insert place of brokenness here]. That Good Shepherd is surely our God, and the people of those places are the sheep loved by the Shepherd.

But we Christians know our God through the person of Jesus Christ, in whom God became incarnate - a human - and lived among us.  And that Good Shepherd Jesus admonished us to feed and love his sheep, to ourselves incarnate God's love for God's people here on earth.

And so we are called, too, to be Good Shepherd's of God's sheep everywhere we and they are.

Sometimes we are the sheep, when we are grieving and broken ourselves, but sometimes we are the shepherds, too.  And shepherds are called upon to take risks on behalf of the sheep who are in need or trouble and even in danger.

Today's newspapers have mentioned a police officer who brought milk to a family with a small child in Watertown during the lockdown. He provided sustenance in the face of fear and danger.

The death count in Texas is made up primarily of first responders who first rescued people from the nursing home nearby and were killed as they attempted to care other people in harm's way. They laid down their lives for the sheep.

Sometimes we are the shepherds, too. The Great Shepherd of the Sheep is Jesus, but we are called to feed his sheep. That makes us shepherds as well, serving in all places that are broken and hurting and in distress.

Letters to Me: Another Book Project!

I am so pleased to announce the publication of this book of essays, Letters to Me: Conversations with a Younger Self.  As you can see from the book cover above, a number of writers (including Brian McLaren and me) contributed to this project whose target audience is young men and women in the 18 - 28 age group.  Our hope is to offer insight and encouragement to them during this sometimes tumultuous and transitional time of life.

Our assignment was to look back at a critical time/event in our own life during that important decade and wrote a letter to our younger self reflecting on the event from the vantage point of ten to thirty years later.  (I'm in the thirty years later category.)  I have read all the essays, and they are terrific. Some of us looked at happy events, some of us recalled unhappy and even what seemed to be disastrous events, and then, either way, offered commentary on that time with the assistance of hindsight.  The tone throughout is gentle and generous, wise and sometimes wry and occasionally even slightly amazed at our younger selves.

The book is now selling on Amazon as a Kindle download for only $4.99.  Such a deal! Click here to purchase an e-book. The paperback version is available for $12.99.  The paperback would make a great gift to the young adults among your acquaintance.

As a side note, the editor, Dan Schmidt, who blogs at Toucanic, found me here at the Large Party and that's how I came to be part of this effort.  After reading my blog for a while, he invited me to write an essay.  And now I can say, "the rest is history!"  Thanks, Dan!  Here's a link to the interview I did for Dan on his blog as part of the book release this week.

Please do take a look.  All of us in the Letters to Me team would appreciate your help getting the word out about the book.  Buy one, link to it on your blogs, write a recommendation at Amazon, give some away as gifts.  Let me know if you have other suggestions.

Thank you! And, as we church folk say, God Bless.

The whole truth

A pub in Carndonagh (Inishowen Peninsula, County Donegal) Ireland

Click here for the readings for today.

This is one of those Sundays in which the lectionary serves up a buffet. So many readings, so many stories, so many points, so little time.

And so I shall simply focus on the end of the story of the woman cured of her hemorrhaging. She reached out and touched Jesus secretly, and he felt the power go out of him. So he turned and asked, "Who touched my clothes?"  But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, "Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease." (NRSV)

She told him the whole truth.  She made her confession, in a way. And it healed her.

Telling the truth is not always easy. We all know children, perhaps our own, perhaps our own selves as children, who cannot own up to something even when the evidence is right in front of them. Not to mention adults! Who wants to admit the truth about something about which they feel shame? Who wants to admit infirmity and frailty? Who wants to admit mistakes?

Who wants to look bad in front of Jesus?

The woman was afraid. She'd tried to be secretive. She thought she had upset Jesus and that he was going to upbraid her.

But she told the whole truth. And she was healed.

She named her action and with it her condition and her pain. And it no longer had power over her. It no longer ruled her life. It no longer possessed her. She was free. She was healed.

I still don't want to look bad in front of Jesus, but I know that this story is true. I know that saying the whole truth to God (and sometimes everybody, but not always) is the way to healing. I know that there is a difference between fixing a problem and being healed.  I didn't always know it, but I do now.

And so I pray for the courage to name the truth, especially the truth about myself, knowing that by doing so I will be made well.

Morning Prayer for Doctors and Nurses

Sanctify, O Lord, those whom you have called to the study

and practice of the arts of healing, and to the prevention of

disease and pain. Strengthen them by your life-giving Spirit,

that by their ministries the health of the community may be

promoted and your creation glorified; through Jesus Christ

our Lord.  Amen.

Prayer for the Sick

This is another day, O Lord.  I know not what it will bring

forth, but make me ready, Lord, for whatever it may be.  If I

am to stand up, help me to stand bravely.  If I am to sit still,

help me to sit quietly.  If I am to lie low, help me to do it

patiently.  And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly. 

Make these words more than words, and give me the Spirit

of Jesus.  Amen.

Thoughts about Ascension

The Feast of the Ascension, which occurs 40 days after Easter, according to the timetable of Luke, was last Thursday.  But it is an important feast of the church and an important occasion for us as Christians, and so even though we celebrated it in our church on Thursday, we attended to it again today.  


Ascension is a curious feast.  It’s puzzling, this idea of Jesus going up into heaven while his disciples stood around watching.  Perhaps you’ve seen those images of two bare feet sticking out below a cloud to illustrate it.  The literalism is kind of disturbing.

We 21st century people don’t believe in a three-tiered universe any more and so we may well fear being laughed at by the likes of Carl Sagan, who liked to remind religious folks that if Jesus rose up from the earth through the clouds into the space above them, then he would have ended up caught by the earth’s gravitational pull, and would now be in orbit, circling the planet like a satellite, round and round.

So we don’t always know what to do with the Feast of the Ascension.  We can’t get our heads around it or we can’t get past the physics.  Or we can’t get past the part where Jesus says, I am with you always, but then - poof! - disappears.

The point about the ascension is not the physics of it but the theology of it.  The ascension is the completion of the work of Jesus to reconcile us to God, work begun with his incarnation on Earth, God made man to live among us and to die for us as one of us. Work continued in God’s act of raising Jesus from the dead, making death no longer our final destination.  The ascension, the final scene of this reconciling work of Jesus, illustrates Jesus now taking the human dimension into the realm of the divine, not negating the incarnation but expanding it so that it is not simply confined to earth but reaches into heaven itself.  

Wherever and whatever heaven is.

Jesus has not only broken through the barrier of death but also through the barrier between human and divine, both ways, a pioneer both in his coming to us and bringing divinity into our realm and in his returning to God taking humanity into the divine realm.  

And so, because of the ascension and the opening of that way, we are now free to draw near to the very heart of God.

And because of the ascension, the way is also now open for us to be able to know the presence of the Holy Spirit, whose coming from that same heavenly eternity we will celebrate next week on the Feast of Pentecost.  It is through the Spirit that we now know and feel the presence of the risen Christ whose realm extends throughout all conceivable universes, three-tiered or four-dimensional.  The same risen Christ who is eternally present to God in the divine realm and whom we also meet here at the altar in the bread and the wine.

That spirit empowers us to do the work that Jesus has asked us to do in his name. To feed the hungry and clothe the naked and visit the sick and imprisoned, and stand up for the poor. Our work is commingled with God’s work.  Our work is now all part of the great divine occupation of creation and peacemaking, and healing and reconciliation.

And we will meet Jesus in that work, too, if we will have the eyes to see him in the lives and faces of those who are suffering. 

Always looking up into heaven obscures our view of the work we have been given to do here and now, which is not in the clouds but in our community and around our world.

And so as the season of Easter draws to a close, in response to the glorious joining of heaven and earth through the work of Jesus the Christ, let us commit to looking to see God at work not in the clouds but in the world, and to join into that divine work right here on earth.

A Tangible Resurrection

In these dazzling days after Easter, we’ve had time to think about what we proclaimed with joy last Sunday: Alleluia, Christ is Risen! The Lord is risen indeed! God has acted, death is vanquished! The Lord is risen, indeed!

That’s a pretty wild claim, isn’t it?

I remember, looking back on Easters past, how my mother always made me a special Easter outfit.  I remember the way my patent leather shoes squeaked and itchy crinoline petticoats; I remember egg hunts in the green grass and fuzzy cheeping baby chicks and sweet jelly beans and a soon-to-be sticky chocolate bunny.  I remember singing "Jesus Christ is Risen Today." 

The Easters of my childhood were full of sensory experiences - sounds, smells and touches.

What I don’t remember is any explanation for all of this.  No explanation of what chicks and jelly beans had to do with Jesus coming out of the tomb.  I don’t remember conversation about what resurrection might mean to us now.  As I grew older, I found that I had a lot more questions than I ever got answers for about how or why the Lord is Risen indeed.

Perhaps you’ve had this experience yourself.  And if you have, don’t you wish Jesus would show up at your house one day and invite you to touch his wounds the way he did with Thomas?  Because in these dazzling days after Easter, it is difficult to get our heads around such an idea as resurrection.  We haven’t had the kind of encounter with Jesus that Thomas, and all the rest had with him. And so, even more than Thomas, we may have trouble understanding and believing, ourselves. 

What we do understand is that when we look around the world this week, we still see devastation and death.  Earthquakes and continuing racial strife.  People are still shooting one another.  We know that children are still dying from malaria, that people are still suffering from lack of work, and basic necessities, and lack of love. 
   
We know that people are still receiving scary diagnoses and suffering from abuse or mental illness that isolates them from friends and family. 

As much as we may deplore these things, we believe in them.  We can see with our own eyes that they don’t seem to have been transformed by the resurrection.    We or those we love have been touched by them and we can understand hiding behind locked doors in the face of a frightening world.  And so, like Thomas, we want to touch something ourselves - in this world - so that we, too, may believe.

This is where the other part of today’s Gospel story comes in:  the part where Jesus commissioned his gathered faithful ones, saying, “As the father has sent me, so now I send you,” and he breathed on them, just as God breathed life into Adam, just as God breathed life into the dry bones of Ezekiel’s valley. 

The gift of the Spirit that Jesus bestows is the gift of power that inspires - breathes into - new life, not only for those gathered there but us gathered here who participate in this story thanks to both the witness of the Gospel itself and the witness of faithful people ever since.  This gift, this commission, is the consequence of the resurrection, it’s the aftermath of the resurrection, and it powers the part we need to get on with. 

And that part is this: we can’t touch Jesus but we can touch others.  Ours is an incarnational faith.  It needs to have skin on it, eyes and voices and hands and feet.  Our faith needs expression through touch and smile, through food and clothing and sanctuary. Stuff you can see and feel and smell and hear.     Jesus commissioned his disciples, and through the Gospel commissions us, to continue his ministry after him, tangibly. 

Remember what Jesus told Martha when he came to raise Lazarus, “I am the resurrection and the life.”  Remember how Jesus told his disciples, “I came so that you all might have life and have it abundantly.” 

Throughout his life, Jesus showed us what abundant life is like.  It’s like wine overflowing at a wedding; it’s like never ending baskets of life-giving bread, and nets so full of fish that they can hardly be hauled out of the sea.  It’s like breakfast on the beach after a long night of nothing; it’s like a well of living water for an abandoned woman; it’s like the restoration of sight to a blind man; it’s like giving back life to a dead man.

This is what resurrection is about - abundant life, now!

There is so much life that God wants us to have.  And now, because Jesus is on earth no more, it’s up to us, and our children, and their children after that, to proclaim that abundance, and to touch others and allow them to touch us so that they and we all might experience abundant life, even in the midst of a world full of misery. Resurrection is what comes out of devastation because of love.

And this is what believing in the resurrection looks like: that we, having been forgiven and freed, are inspired to come out of our cozy and safe rooms to become part of something much larger than ourselves - to get outside of our own selves and beyond our own concerns, to look around in our community and beyond.

And to see need and meet need and become a vessel for God’s love by touching others in the midst of this broken world, bringing to others the abundant life Jesus came to give us all.  Resurrection is what comes out of devastation because of love. 

And so in these dazzling days after Easter, let us make the resurrection something real and tangible: something as soft as baby chicks, and warm as lambswool; something as fragrant as lilies; and bright as colored eggs and shiny as patent leather shoes; something we can hear like beautiful music and running water; something that sustains and heals like bread and wine and love. 
   
Let us make the resurrection something real and tangible in the world again.

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

World Water Day: All you who are thirsty, come!

Today is World Water Day.  March 22 was designated as World Water Day back in 1992 by the United Nations, and we are more than halfway through the UN's Decade of Action for Water for Life (begun in 2005).  I didn't know that - did you?

YouTube's blog today is featuring videos about water made by groups such as Water.org, Charity: Water, One Drop Foundation, WaterCharity, WaterAid, and others.  Some are funny, some are thought provoking, most are under five minutes and a few under a minute.  Some feature celebrities (like Matt Damon). Almost all of them are made for an American audience in mind and they challenge us to notice how much water we use every day and how we take it for granted that we can just turn on a tap and get as much clean water as we want.  Many of the videos then go on to tell the stories of people in Haiti, India, and some African nations where the lack of clean water and education about hygiene is an urgent issue.  

For instance, Charity: Water reports that there are 42,000 deaths every week that result from dirty water and unsafe hygienic practices and that 90% of those who die are children under the age of five.  They also note that women and children are the ones who have to walk to find and carry water, which has an impact on both their physical health and their access to education. 

Many of these organizations are involved in helping those in underdeveloped nations drill wells and undertake other water projects as well as working with local people to train them to educate their families and neighbors about water and sanitation.  Other organizations work to raise awareness in developed nations about the world water issues.  (One Drop Foundation was founded by the guy who started Cirque du Soleil and focuses on using the arts to promote education and community involvement in water issues worldwide.) 

Further, the trend in charity water projects is similar to micro loans: they find small projects that can be underwritten by individuals and managed by the local people (or, in some cases, a member of the Peace Corps).  

So, please - I know you're really busy, but check out some of these organizations today and learn about the world wide water crisis and how easy it would be for you to be part of the solution.   Remember Jesus' words to the woman at the well: "The [living] water I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." 

Collect for Wednesday in the First Week of Lent

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   Bless us, O God, in this holy season, in which our hearts seek your help and healing; and so purify us by your discipline that we may grow in grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. 
   
   
   
   

Morning Prayer for those in Trouble or Bereavement

O merciful Father, who has taught us in your Holy Word that yo do not willingly afflict or grieve humankind: Look with pity upon the sorrows of your servants for whom our prayers are offered.  Remember them, O Lord, in mercy, nourish their souls with patience, comfort them with a sense of your goodness, lift up your countenance upon them and give them peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Morning Prayer for Social Justice

Grant, O God, that your hold and life-giving Spirit may so move every human heart, that barriers which divide us may crumble, suspicions disappear, and hatreds cease; that our divisions being healed, we may live in justice and peace; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Music for Advent: Comfort, Comfort Ye My People

Here's a improvised piano version of the hymn Comfort, Comfort Ye My People, which has such wonderful harmony. This was the reading from Isaiah on the Second Sunday of Advent.

The beginning of the Good News...

The Gospel of Mark, the first of the four Gospels to be written down, hasn’t always gotten a lot of respect.  It’s short, it has an ambiguous ending, it doesn’t feature people’s favorite parables like the Prodigal Son or Good Samaritan.  Its vocabulary is fairly limited and it uses the word “immediately” over and over - immediately Jesus went here and did this and then immediately, quickly, breathlessly, Jesus went there and said that.  Most of the sentences start with “and.”  And this, and that, and another.  The pace is relentless. 

And Mark doesn’t have a sweet birth narrative to ease us into the story of the savior.  No shepherds, no magi, no angels. For centuries, Biblical scholars pretty much ignored Mark, calling it rough, primitive, obscure, not understanding its power and purpose.

But, oh, Mark is my favorite of the Gospels.  Because it doesn’t want us to get distracted from the message. It doesn’t want us to loll around in a scene too long lest we lose the point, lest we think the story is about anything other than the shocking, urgent, mysterious revelation of God Almighty in the human person of Jesus Christ and how hard that is for any of us to grasp.  

Mark gets right to the point.  The beginning of the Good News of Jesus Christ the Son of God reaches back to the prophets.  This may be a shocking story, but it’s not without a familiar context.  The Old Testament (at least the Christian arrangement of it) ends with the prophet Malachi, who says that before the awesome day of the Lord’s return, God will send the great prophet Elijah (that wild hairy man who wore a leather belt and called down fire from heaven) to reconcile the people to one another in preparation for God’s mighty return.  Add to that the potent and poignant story of the people of God as told by the prophet Isaiah, who assures a people languishing long in exile - after the destruction of the Temple and the land and the whole nation of Israel - that God will break through all barriers, will make a safe and straight way through the wilderness, and bring God’s people home.

And so in the beginning but out of the history of God’s people now comes John the Baptizer, hairy and leather-belted, a new Elijah, to continue the prophetic witness, to prepare the way for us.  God is still speaking through the prophets, and this prophet proclaims that something is about to happen, that someone greater than all the prophets, someone powerful and mighty, comes this way.  Someone who will break through all barriers to get to us, we who are bent under heavy loads, and who will comfort us and lead us safely home.

No need to linger over any pretty scenes or literary build up.  That’s our Mark.

Do you see how urgent this is? Do you see how awe-some this is, that God Almighty comes to us in our brokenness, busting through the chaos of this world and heralded by a wild man who talks about holy fire?  No wonder we surround the story with lowing cattle and angels and fir trees and candle lights. It’s almost too raw to bear on its own.

In Advent we are given the time and space to stop and pay attention to something that for most of us is actually kind of unbelievable and yet we remember, somewhere, somehow that it is true.  That God bends towards us, that God’s move is always towards us, even when we are looking the other way or have lost sight of the strength of God’s mighty arm and the goodness of God’s gentle embrace.  

But we are most likely remember that it is true if we have had some kind of experience of it ourselves.

Ah, experience of God. Experience of this awesome one who is heralded by a wild man talking about holy fire. Some of us may not be so sure about that. We’re respectable people.  Sometimes people tell me they don’t think they’ve had any kind of experience of God, really.  But I wonder if maybe they haven’t learned how to recognize it yet.

Paradoxically, mysteriously, God is both wild and gentle, both present and absent, both intensely personal and warmly communal.  

Not all of us have experienced the relentless fierceness of God’s power - I think of stories of whole communities transformed by forgiveness in the wake of violence like work of the the truth and reconciliation commission in South Africa or the behavior of the Amish people after the school shooting in Pennsylvania or people keeping vigil on death row. I think that some of us individually worry we might not be able to withstand that fierceness - but most of us have experienced God in some way.

For myself, I think about the times I trudge along a beach, pouring out my frustrations and worries in half-formed sighs that pass for prayer, and then a single, perfectly formed shell washing up just in front of me, out of the blue, like a gift, a calling card saying, “I’m here, I hear you, I’m with you.” I remember the fingers of my newborn baby curling over mine and the rush of love that went out of me and took my breath away.  I think about that stirring impulse inside me that makes me want to give and love and connect to others, in both their pain and joy, and gives me the strength to do so.  I think about a time in the hospital when people came to visit me and a deep sense of well-being flooded over me as I knew I was loved and cared for.  I remember feeling somewhat mysteriously accompanied on the road through a snowstorm by a little red truck clearing the way ahead.  I think about the rays of light coming out of the clouds after a storm and the stirring birdsong and the fragrance of roses and I marvel at the raw power of the love and delight that flows all around the universe and flows through me if I will but stop and know it.  

These experiences of mine may seem small and sentimental, but I know that they are connected to that same power that transforms the world on a much larger scale.  And that power is ultimately about breaking through the things that keep us from loving God and loving one another so that we can be healed.  As we read through the Gospel of Mark this year, we will see for ourselves how much emphasis this Gospel puts on Jesus’ power of healing and restoration.

And so I’m here today to invite you to marvel with me about this God who bulldozes through all obstacles and tenderly gathers together all of God’s people and leads them safely home.  I’m here to suggest that we take some time today to communally and intentionally stand together in the presence of God and hear God’s promise.  And then to take time in the coming weeks to slow down, to stop even, to be still and seek - look for - the experience of God and God’s promise.  To not let the parties and events and even the beauty and good cheer of the season take up all of our time and energy and so distract us from that real experience of God.

And I would also like to invite you to share in the prophet’s work yourself.  God is still speaking through prophets of all sorts, not just the ones who call fire down from heaven, and God commands us today to comfort God’s people today.  Therefore I invite you to seek to experience God not just for your own well-being but for the well-being of the world - because you cannot offer love and hope to others until you know love and hope yourself.  

You don’t have to look far to see how many people have lost hope. Who don’t know love. Who are exhausted and bent over in pain or hunger or fear or shame.  Whose relentless grief is overwhelming them now.

We can share God’s love when we know it ourselves; we can bind up others’ wounds when we know our own wounds have been bound up; we can open our hearts to others with generosity when we have experienced God’s generosity toward us. 

And so, immediately, today, listen to the prophet’s urgent command - to us as a community and each of you individually - to break through whatever barriers you need to break through with your own holy fire to offer hope, to offer love, to offer God’s comfort to God’s people through your own hands.

For this is only the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ the Son of God.

Morning Prayer for use by those who are ill

This is another day, O Lord.  I know not what it will bring

forth, but make me ready, Lord, for whatever it may be.  If I

am to stand up, help me to stand bravely.  If I am to sit still,

help me to sit quietly.  If I am to lie low, help me to do it

patiently.  And if I am to do nothing, let me do it gallantly. 

Make these words more than words, and give me the Spirit

of Jesus.  Amen.

(BCP 461)

Bearing Up

(These bears were part of the Salvation Army's Teddy Bear Tea that took place this afternoon at our parish house.)


Community life is a place of both joy and sorrow, sometimes all at the same time.  Good things are happening even while less happy events unfold; we learn, or make an attempt to learn, how to hold them all in tension.  These bears are a joy to behold, and yet the reason for them is sad. They're either being given to children in need or sold to raise money to assist families who need help during the holiday season.

To acknowledge one is not to make light of the other. If we waited for all sorrow to cease before we expressed joy, we'd never get there.  There is always sorrow.  But there is always joy, too, if we can open our hands to receive it.  We can be intentional about being present to joy in the midst of sorrow and doing so doesn't mean that we are not deeply moved by the ills that plague our community.  It is easy to become defeated, though, if we only see the plague.

We have heard, these last days, shocking, ugly and sad stories about abuse and harassment, about continued economic woes worldwide (even as the Dow topped 12000 points yesterday).  Voters in several states today considered new, and mostly punitive, referenda on immigration and (more to the point) immigrants.  These are sad times.  And there will be more sad times.

What can we say with and about joy in these sad times?  I remember the reading from The Revelation to John (repeating what was said by Isaiah) on All Saints' Day - and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.  And I look forward to what Isaiah will say at the beginning of Advent - Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down!  This is not the world that God had in mind for us.

But is the joy only that on the other side? That may help us sometimes, but we do have this here and now part to deal with, to live through - to enjoy, even, since God has given us this world for both God's and our pleasure and delight.  We must be able to find joy in today as well as to look forward to joy in the morning.

And so, consider the bear.  Many wonderful people came out today to enjoy tea and cake and to give some bears a hug in anticipation of the hugs delighted children will give the bears they receive.  And it helps me remember that there are many, many loving and caring people in the world who want to make the world a better place.  Let us bless them as they bless us with their generosity.

Blessed are they, and you...

Text:  Matthew 5:1-12

There is a scene in the Monty Python comedy “Life of Brian” in which Jesus is standing on a rocky hill, speaking to the multitudes gathered below.  Rather far away from Jesus,  there is a small group of people bickering among themselves, insulting one another mostly, who are obviously present because this appears to be an “in” happening and they want to be among the spectators.  Some of them are nicely dressed and obviously well-off.  They can’t really hear Jesus, and it seems that for the most part, they don’t really want to hear Jesus, but they’re hanging around the scene, sort of in the back row, perhaps because it might give them some status to be seen there.

Brian, the actual subject of the movie and whose life seems to oddly parallel Jesus’ - Brian does want to hear what Jesus is saying.  But between the bickering and the distance between himself and Jesus, it’s hard to make out the words.  At one point, the well-dressed man asks someone who is a little closer, “What did he just say?”

“I think he said blessed are the cheesemakers!” the other replies. 

“Blessed are the cheesemakers?” the well-dressed woman cries, “What’s so special about cheesemakers?”  The well-dressed man explains, “Oh, you shouldn’t take that literally.  It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.”

And the scene goes on with more bickering and name-calling.

Well, the scene is good for a laugh, but there is much truth in it.  Jesus may not have actually said “Blessed are the cheesemakers,” but what he did say sounded equally ridiculous to the real crowds who heard his words in the first century, and no less ridiculous to those of us who hear them today.

Blessed are the meek.  Blessed are the poor.  Blessed are those who mourn, who are hungry and thirsty. Blessed are the merciful. Blessed are those who are persecuted.  And perhaps strangest of all, blessed are the peacemakers.  

Peacemakers.  Those who make peace.  Those whose business is peace.  Peacemaking is not a passive term - it’s not rolling over or staying out of the way or giving in or a simple refusal to fight.  There’s the “making” part of it.  Making is active.  Peacemaking is something one does through action, deliberately.  And it doesn’t tend to be popular, making peace, even though one could argue that there is a lot of demand for that kind of work.  Really, what’s so special about peacemakers? People tend to think of peacemakers as a little weird, as dreamy idealists, ineffective, out of touch with the way things really are, maybe even crazy.  Peace making, getting in between those who are fighting, working for reconciliation, making broken things whole, could be dangerous and is likely to fail - who’d want to do that?  It’s a dangerous and perhaps futile action.

Speaking of action, it’s important to note that Jesus is not just standing on a hill spouting off some instructions in this scene from Matthew.  He says these words to his followers and to the crowds who have gathered around him after he has been living out an extraordinary career for some time.  Matthew sums up Jesus’ career in just three verses - the three verses before our Gospel reading for today:  “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them.  And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.”

Jesus’ career was mostly about action, even though many more verses in Matthew are concerned with his words.  The words come after, and in light of, the action, though.  Jesus healed people. He made them whole. And this was so wonderful, so needed, so desperately desired by people all over the place that they came from everywhere and brought their friends and family and neighbors to Jesus - they hauled them out of their beds or the ditches they were dying in and brought them to Jesus so that Jesus would make them whole.

And so this set-piece discourse about blessedness comes out of the work of Jesus among the broken people whom he made whole.  

The poor, the meek, the grieving, the hungry for food and the hungry for justice, the oppressed and persecuted, and also the peacemakers.  They, Jesus says, they are blessed.

And then Jesus makes a turn: You, you also are blessed when people think you are crazy and ineffective and weird and a dreamy idealist when you do the work of peacemaking and others treat you badly for it.  When they dismiss you or taunt you or revile you because you take action, when you work to make peace.  When they think you are out of touch with reality for working to be merciful.  When they shun you for working for justice.  When they laugh at you for your idealism.

But peace making, mercy-giving, comforting, justice-doing are the actions that Jesus holds up to us as blessed.  Making people and their communities whole, healing their woundedness and their brokenness on this earth here and now is the work Jesus gives us to do through these words he speaks from the mountain.  

Well. What does peace-making, mercy-giving, justice-doing have to do with the Feast of All Saints? we might ask.  If all the saints are a sort of hall of fame of the heroes of the faith, people from long ago and far away who are bigger than life and in many ways rather removed from the experiences we might have in our own lives, we don’t have to wonder what’s so special about them.  They’re saints.

I don’t know that Jesus ever actually said anything about saints, but I can imagine that he might say, blessed are the saints: see how they acted courageously, see how they acted faithfully - they were willing to be thrown to the lions; they were willing to stand up to power mongers; they were willing to give away all their possessions; they were willing to live and work among lepers; they were willing to persist in translating the gospel using only one finger because that was the only part of their body that still worked; blessed are they when they acted in ways that other people would find futile and crazy.  

And then he would make the turn and say, and you - blessed are you when you act courageously and faithfully even if people think you are crazy to do so and that your actions are futile.  Blessed are you when other people think you are weird for mercy-granting, for justice-doing, for peace-making because everybody knows that won’t help you get ahead in life, that won’t make you rich or famous.  Blessed are you when people think you are crazy and ineffective and weird and a dreamy idealist when you do the work of peacemaking and others treat you badly for it.  When they dismiss you or taunt you or revile you because you take action to make peace.  When they think you are out of touch with reality for working to be merciful.  When they shun you for working for justice.  When they laugh at you for your idealism. 

For all the pageantry with which we celebrate All Saints’ Day, it behooves us to remember that ultimately, blessedness is not about achieving glory.  It’s not about earning one’s way into heaven through sacrifice.  It is about celebrating not only the courage and faith of those gone before us but about the faithfulness of the one who heals us.

Blessed are the poor, the suffering, the ones who practice mercy, who make peace, who are broken or outcast or thought to be crazy, because they, and we if we are willing, will be made whole by the Prince of Peace.

Freeing the Captives - A Meditation on the Feast of St Luke

We can never get too much of the message and lesson of St Luke and can never read too often the story of Jesus announcing his purpose to the world in Luke’s gospel.

Luke himself was a rather murky figure, as all the Gospel writers were. He was named as a companion of Paul, in fact Paul’s letters tell us that Luke was with him right up to the end of Paul’s story and probably his life. And how fitting,and what a blessing, to have a physician as a companion in one’s last days.

But of course, in celebrating St Luke we are reminded that the point is to celebrate his witness to Jesus. He is like a finger pointing to the moon.  Jesus himself is both evangelist and physician, a healer, God’s agent, sent to make us all whole.

Jesus says that he came to bring good news to the poor and to set the captives, the people who are oppressed, free.  He brings sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf and mobility to the lame.  In the Psalm for today, we hear about binding up the broken hearted, which Jesus adds in the parallel passage to this one in the Gospel of Mark. These are all echoes of themes in the Hebrew Bible about how salvation will be seen and understood by all when they see the lame walk and the blind see.

And we want to be made whole, ourselves. We want healing from our infirmities and and our frailties.

But see how Jesus expands the notion of healing.  It’s not just physical healing, but it’s freedom.  Freedom from all kinds of things that bind us.  

Some of us, and some of those we love, are bound by physical ailment and illness.  

But others, others whom we might not know, are bound by other things.  They are bound by mental illness, they are bound by injustice and prejudice, they are pushed down or pushed aside - maybe because they are old or ill or disabled, maybe because they lack education or don’t speak our language, maybe because they are slaves to one addiction or another, maybe because they were born in poverty and have never been able to escape it.  Maybe they are pushed aside because they are “not like us” and we despise them or we are afraid of them or we have judged and condemned them and want them out of our way.  There are many people in our world who have no one to stand up for them.

And Jesus says, I’ve come for those people.  I’ve come for the lost, I’ve come for the disheartened, I’ve come for the ones on the margins, I’ve come for the despised.  I will stand up for those no one else will stand up for.  And that's the good news.

And the healing that Jesus wants for those he has come for is made manifest in a new way; it’s a new kind of healing.  A healing of our whole world, a restoration of those who have been pushed aside back into society where they will be loved and cared for like everyone else.  


Jesus is not just about making sick people well but about making the world whole, about freeing those society pushes down and restoring them to community because in Jesus’ view, the world is not right if there are people on the margins.  We are not whole if we do not know and love all of our sisters and brothers and desire their restoration to us.

And so you see how we can never get enough of this message because for most of us it’s a hard one.  Most of us are not on the margins and we don’t mean to be unconcerned with those who are, but our days are full and we sometimes forget.  We forget not only those who are often invisible to us but we also forget that we, too, will be free when we let go of our judgment and prejudice and fear and desire to keep the marginalized on the margins where they will not disturb us.

But Jesus doesn’t forget. Thanks be to God.