Category Archives: sermons

Prophet Daniel & the Leather Oxfords – a sermon.

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In May, I was in NYC for my brother’s graduation from college, and while I was there, I wanted to find the right kind of walking shoe for the summer. I started looking through shoe stores in SoHo for the slip-on tennis shoe I had in mind, but by the time I walked into the second store on Broadway, I had given up my crush on ked-look-alikes and moved on to a leather oxford with a bit of a heel. Where did that desire come from? I’d never spent a moment looking at them online before my trip, or in any stores once I’d arrived; I hadn’t even noticed that there were any pairs that style in stores, but suddenly, I was overcome with this burning desire for oxfords. I moved from store to store, in pursuit of the perfect pair.

Many of you are aware I’d been taken in by the ubiquitous advertising of the fashion world—leather oxfords with a small heel are all the rage for spring. After a few days of walking around in New York City, seeing the shoes on women on the street, on billboards on buildings and in the subway, and on manequins in store windows, the image had lodged itself in my head, and I had no idea it was weaseling itself in there until I had a sudden and unquenchable thirst for these classic leather shoes.

In today’s Scripture lesson (Daniel 1:8-15), Daniel just isn’t refusing Babylonian biscuits and gravy, or turning down a grass-fed filet. By “not defiling himself with the portion of the king’s delicacies,” Daniel is standing up to the lie that Babylon is trying to pass off on him. Daniel knows the truth—life is found in no one else, there is no other god or person or philosophy or lifestyle on earth that gives the kind of life that following the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob does.

Actually, our language has done us a great favor— “Babylon” continues to be a label used to describe those things in our world that are corrupt and evil. We are called to be Daniel here, today, in 2014 in Columbia, South Carolina. We are called to reject Babylon, to purpose in our hearts to not defile ourselves with the portion of the king’s delicacies. We are called instead to eat fruits and vegetables, those things which will truly build us up, give us the energy we need in order to live good, joyful lives, attuned to God and to each other.

Just like Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, as the Tempter offers Jesus bread, and the ruling of kingdoms, and the service of angels, there’s nothing inherently evil about bread or being a world leader or about angels’ help. There’s nothing wrong with wearing beautiful clothes, or watching television, or enjoying grass-fed filet mignon.

How many more malicious desires and ideas take root in our minds and hearts when we’re not looking? Television like the Real Housewives might be one—have you ever noticed what happens to you after you watch shows like that? I’ve found that I’m usually crankier, more tired, and most discontented with my life than I was before I sat down on the couch, even though my purpose in sitting down to some mindless TV was to relax. I’m less-relaxed, less-calm, less-rejuvenated when I finish Millionaire Matchmaker or Scandal. These shows lull me into new expectations about how exciting and shiny and sexy my life should be; my little bungalow with its husband, and garden, and German Shepherd in South Carolina suddenly looks very, very dull—and it happens without me realizing it.   I snap at my husband and I roll my eyes at vacuuming; surely the Real Housewives don’t have to deal with dog hair or with ironing.

How about Don Draper? We are desensitized to advertising all over and around our lives. Just like suddenly developing an urge for those oxfords, it’s a given matter of course that the ads on the edges of our pages while we surf the web are related to the shopping sites we visited earlier in the day, and the emails we receive in our inboxes are tailored to appeal to our particular weaknesses and consumer habits.

It is a lie to believe that what we ingest doesn’t matter. Our culture is becoming very aware of the importance of the sorts of things we eat, but by the same token, our culture tries to tell us that what we watch and read and talk about and worry about and focus on doesn’t matter, it doesn’t shape us nearly as much as the food we put in our mouths. This is the lie of Babylon that Daniel identified and purposed in his heart to resist.

We’re being lulled to sleep, thinking that what really matters is whether we are eating ethical shrimp or fair-trade zucchini. Though ethical food and fair-trade practices are vitally important to our lives as Christians and citizens of this created world, we ought to spend at least as much time considering the kinds of influences we allow in our own lives and in the lives of our families. Are we ingesting the kinds of television shows, music, radio programs, novels, movies, and conversations that help us to stay awake, or do the lull us to sleep?

It’s not a coincidence that we read Daniel wanted to eat vegetables—celery and kale do not make you want to take a nap. They keep you alert. Babylon wants to make you fall asleep; to not realize what is happening to you until it’s too late. We are the proverbial lobsters or frogs in the pot on the stovetop. Just a little bit of discontentment sneaks in to start with, we repeat the same annoying story about our spouse or best friend, and after a few times, we start to believe it. The water starts to warm up, and we start to believe the lie that others’ lives are naturally more glamorous and peaceful than ours. Soon, the water is boiling and we’re cooked—we didn’t even notice it.

This is what happened to Walter White in Breaking Bad—a timid high school chemistry teacher is diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer without having smoked a day in his life. He eased up next to evil under the guise of providing for his family by starting to cook and sell very pure, very cheap meth. A few seasons later, he’s a drug kingpin in the Southwest.

My friends, we live in Babylon. We are strangers in a strange land. We are offered all sorts of shiny delicacies by the king every day. As we notice all the moments that shove tempting, sleep-inducing food beneath your nostrils, let us remember Paul’s words: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.”

A version of this sermon was preached at Downtown Church in Columbia, SC, on July 20th, 2014.

Look up, Look out!

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In preparation for my trip to France, my dad suggested we spring for an international plan–just in case we really needed to make a call or use our phones while we were abroad–it’d be better to pay a little up front instead of footing the bill if we needed the service but hadn’t paid for it beforehand.

I didn’t listen to him.

Thankfully–as you can safely assume from my recent glowing updates about my trip–we didn’t encounter any emergency that required use of our cellphones as phones (though you’ve already seen much evidence of our use of our cellphones as cameras!).  I learned something important from not having my phone’s “smart” capability accessible most of the time, though–I learned to look up.

Sitting with my husband at lunch, waiting for the food to arrive, walking down city streets, waiting in line at a museum or (yet another!) church–I had no excuse not to look up, to look out at the people passing on the street, to look at the architecture, to look at the sky.  All this looking at other things not only helped me to keep my mind attentive to what was in front of me–which was no small change!–but it also kept me from looking down, looking at myself–navel gazing.

When we look down at our phones, we’re not only missing the world around us, but we’re teaching ourselves to do something strange with our bodies.  Our necks are cranked down–not the way we’re made–and our bodies are hunched over, literally curling in ourselves.  What kind of patterns are we teaching our minds and hearts through our bodies if we’re curved in on ourselves all the time?  We’re not just missing the world around us, but we’re becoming the only thing that we see–and it’s not a particularly attractive angle at that.

When we hold our bodies so that our eyes and faces are looking out and up, do you know what happens to our hearts?  Our hearts are opened, as our backs are held up straight–as if our very souls are ready to shine and share with others.  If we look down, it’s not only ourselves who are missing something; everyone else around you can’t see you and your beautiful heart–we’re robbing ourselves, and others, of the great beauty that all the world possesses.

I got into this work (being a priest) because there’s nothing I love more than seeing God at work in people’s lives.  Sometimes I lose sight of that love, and the work gets to be onerous.  In France, I was made to look at the beauty of people, of buildings, and of nature all the time.  It helped me remember that there is beauty everywhere, all the time.  We need only to look for it–and looking out and up is one of the best ways.

(super short approximation of sermon delivered 6 July, Trinity Episcopal Cathedral.  Original version had a lot more about Gothic architecture in it; see another entry soon…)

Trinity & Unity

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I had two best friends in elementary school; Sarah and Maggie.  Sarah and I lived just 10 houses apart, and we were born 10 days apart–as 9-year-olds, we thought this was very significant; Maggie lived in another town.  Maggie and I both had younger brothers and therefore shared the suffering of older sisters–a unique and very heavy cross we bore; Sarah was an only child.  Sarah and Maggie had been going to the same school together since pre-K; I was new in the fourth grade.  Though we three were devoted to each other and loved each other, there always seemed to be one of us on the outside; a pair of us was always a little bit closer than the other.

Three seems to be one of the most challenging numbers for a group of people to navigate; with two, you’re just a pair, with four, there are two pairs, and once you get to five or six, it’s really just a party.  Three is an awkward number when it comes to close relationships, and yet, that’s exactly the number that God chose to use to communicate to us who he is.  The most challenging of all numbers for a relationship to succeed–that’s the number God uses to reveal to himself to humanity.

Though it’s wrong both to say that God is more unified than diverse, or more diverse than unified, both angles are a bit much to cover in one morning–or at least are beyond my ability to capture succinctly, so I’ll focus on God being three-in-one.

There are many images, or analogies we’re given in our daily lives to help us try to understand how God is three and also one; marriage, though between two people, not three, is a picture of more-than-one-becoming-one.  In Genesis it says “the two became one flesh.”  Some of you know well the challenge of being unified with someone who is very different from you; many of us have seen the beautiful results of a couple who have consistently, for decades, put their unity ahead of their own individual ways. Another picture we see of many-being-one-body is the church.  Now, I don’t have to tell you that we haven’t done a great job of staying as “one” over the last many centuries.  Even before the Protestants and Roman Catholics split off, the Eastern church, the Orthodox Church, split off back in the 11th century, and another branch of churches left in the 5th century–we’ve been doing this all throughout history.  What has happened more recently in the lower part of our state is nothing new. There’s been a lot of upheaval here in the last months, and people have gotten up from the table, they’ve left the room, they’ve removed their presence from us.  We’re left incomplete without them, our church body isn’t whole because we’re missing them.  All our “persons” aren’t here.We worship a God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – three person, one unified God.  The first thing we learn about God in Genesis is that God is singular–it wasn’t, “in the beginning ‘gods’ created the heavens and the earth.”  The three persons of our Triune God aren’t grabbing for the spotlight, crazed to be heard, insisting on their own way or their own distinctiveness.  In the first words of the first book in which God tells us about himself, we meet a creative, compassionate, life-giving, self-sacrificing God.We live in a time and culture that emphasizes individualism.  Our grades in school, our paychecks at work, our email addresses, and our cell phones have one name on them, they belong to one person individually–each of us.  It’s easy to forget that we can’t rely on ourselves, that thinking of individuals as the building block of society is a rather modern notion.This week, Jordan and I are leaving for a trip to see cathedrals in Northern France.  We’ve been doing research and I’ve been calling on my Gothic Cathedrals class from undergrad to prepare.  Did you know that most of those famous cathedrals took more than 100 years to complete?  Not only was life expectancy shorter then, but people who were masons, working hard on the building wore their bodies out even sooner – even 3 and 4 generations might pass before the work was done.Most of those cathedrals are known for the town in which they’re located–Chartes, Cologne, Amiens–the identity is based not on a particular architect or stone mason, but on the community, the whole.  The whole church and community as one.  The name of every person who worked on the building isn’t written down or remembered – what they knew themselves to be working toward wasn’t their own glory or their own kingdom or for the importance of their particular voice, but to glorify, point toward, lift up God’s name, God’s identity.

The church, God’s people on earth, Jesus’ hands and feet in the world–us–existed long before we came along, and will be around long after we’re gone.  Our work is not to be heard or to be remembered or to be concerned and proud and angry about what makes each of us so terribly unique, but to do as Paul exhorts us in this morning’s epistle reading from 2 Corinthians,

“11 Finally, brethren, farewell. Become complete. Be of good comfort, be of one mind, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you.

12 Greet one another with a holy kiss.

13 All the saints greet you.

14 The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Amen.” (13:11-14, NKJV)

An Effort to Tame the Holy Spirit – sermon written after the fact…

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Preached Sunday, 1 June, 2014; Keenan Chapel @ Trinity Cathedral, 11:15am – you had to be there…

Who knows Rick Steves?  Last night, Jordan and I were watching Rick Steves’ travel show–he’s a guy from the Pacific Northwest who makes sense for me of Jordan’s family living half in North Dakota and half outside of Seattle, Mr. Steves’ accent has strong Midwestern undertones, and his boisterous nature reminds me of my brother-in-law.  Rick traipses around Europe with his camera crew, giving travel advice and showing off the great sights.  We watched an episode he filmed in a French town named Colmar, where there’s a really beautiful piece of art, the Issenheim Altarpiece.  It’s been one of my favorite artworks since I learned about it a few years ago.

Back in the Middle Ages, many altars–if the church could afford it–had a painting of Jesus behind them.  Up in Cooperstown, New York, where I did my field education work in divinity school, there’s a painting of Jesus ascending (especially appropriate as today is the Sunday we celebrate Jesus’s ascension) behind the altar on the East wall.  What’s notable about the Issenheim Altarpiece, as Rick Steves tells it, is that a religious order commissioned it to hang in their chapel, and this religious order maintained a hospital for people who suffered from skin diseases.  They were much more serious than they are today, many people died from such diseases in Medieval times.  The altarpiece it depicts Jesus being crucified, but his body is covered with pox marks and leprous wounds–he has the skin diseases that those who are looking at him suffer from too.  This Jesus enters into the suffering of those who see him; he knows what they’re going through.  Rick Steves–he’s Lutheran, you know–goes so far as to say that medicine and painkillers weren’t so effective back then, and that the altarpiece served as a sort of salve for these dear people, saying to them, “Jesus knows how much it hurts.”

Mathis_Gothart_Grünewald_019

(via wikipedia.org)

In our reading from the book of Acts today, we hear the words of the two angels, “this same Jesus, who was taken from you into heaven will return the same way you’ve seen him go into heaven.” (Acts 1:11)  This same Jesus.  The same Jesus who has been appearing to the disciples the last forty days, who has nail marks in his hands, who suffered right next to his followers and those he healed–that human person is also God–he has been as close to people as he possibly can, and now he goes back to his Father, as our Gospel lesson puts it (John 17:1-11).  Jesus, who sits with us in our sufferings, who knows what it is like to be human, is brought to God the Father, to draw us even closer too.  Through Jesus, we are made closer to God, brought ever more into God’s presence.

And what are Jesus’ last words to his followers as he is taken from them?  “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and Judea, and all Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1:8) This verse is a sort of summary or table of contents of the whole book of the Acts of the Apostles–it’s the account of the early church’s development from Jerusalem, which is the first few chapters, out to all Judea which is the few chapters after that, and into Samaria–a wider reach than Judea–in the chapters following, and headed to the ends of the earth–to the edges of the known world in the first century–by the end of Acts.

But you know what?  We’re at the end of the earth too–here in Columbia, South Carolina.  This is our story.  This is our mission, to be witnesses to God’s work in our lives through Jesus Christ.  We are called to be witnesses, to talk about how God has change our lives, right here in Columbia.

Last week, Jordan and I went to see my brother graduated from college in New York City.  We had some extra time the night before the graduation, so we went to dinner with a friend of Jordan’s who is also doing his graduate work, and lives in the City.  I’d met him once, three years ago, and though he’d been married almost two years, neither of us had yet met his wife.  It could have been a really awkward dinner–with us really not knowing each other well at all–but they were such holy, open people, we started talking about what God was doing in our lives within fives minutes.

You’re thinking, “that’s what a couple of preachers do!” aren’t you?  Well, as the husbands were getting dinner ready in the kitchen, this new friend of mine told how God had been leading her in a very clear, specific direction in the last six months; I got into this business because I love to hear what God is up to in peoples’ lives, so I asked her how this happened, how did she know that God was speaking to her, directing her?

She told me about walking home from church one Sunday with her husband, talking as they always did, and soon the conversation turned, and as he asked her questions to help discern what she was thinking and feeling, it dawned on her all at once what she was meant to do.  And she cried, right there outside in the middle of Manhattan (of course, it was Sunday morning, so there weren’t many witnesses).

I started to tell her how it was that I was called to be a priest; but I didn’t tell her the story I usually do–you see, I have two stories.  One is about how I was doing a lot of reading and thinking and reflecting and talking the year I worked after undergrad, and how a conversation with my mentor became an “ah ha!” moment–but that’s not really when I knew, that’s not really when I was called.

The story I hadn’t told anyone except Jordan until that night was from earlier on; the summer I graduated, I lived in an apartment, and I was lying in bed one night–I’d just received my first Book of Common Prayer from amazon.com (I don’t recall what possessed me to buy one, but I did), and as I shut the book and lay there, clearing out my mind to go to sleep, the thought floated right into my head–like that game you play as children, pretending an egg is cracked on your head, with the innards oozing down your hair, into your mind–and like a flash, I knew it was true, “You will be a priest.”  The realization made me gasp, and then cry, and then I fell asleep.

My new friend put it well, she said something like, “when you come face to face with Truth, what can you do but cry, and submit?”  There aren’t good words for what happened to me that night as I was falling asleep, or what happened to my friend as she was walking down the street.  They were moments beyond the realm of the explicable.

Which takes me back to Rick Steves.

At another moment in his travelogue last night, Rick was at the Louvre.  He was describing the Realist movement, the style of painting in the mid-1800s which sought to portray scenes as accurately as possible.  Many artists got quite good at this, studying light and details, using paint to make what looked like a photograph–there are plenty of them featured at the famous Parisian museum.  Then along came the Impressionists, who not only let their brushstrokes show on their “finished” canvases, but eschewed this idea that paintings should look like photographs all together.  They favored, instead, to use paint to give life to a scene–like Renoir’s depiction of a cafe in Paris, where you can almost hear the people talking, the music playing, and the dancers’ feet tapping.  The sense of movement and life captured in Impressionists’ work continues to amaze and delight.  They knew there was more to life than the bare facts, the scientific and certain lines and boundaries of a body or an instrument or a street scene.  Impressionists captured wind and breath and emotions in a way that Realists never could, a way that science and sociology and anthropology never can.

Today we celebrate the Ascension; next week is Pentecost, and then we spend the next several months in Ordinary time.  Nothing to interrupt us, nothing to catch us off-guard, nothing to jazz up the green vestments and altar-hangings, from here till December.  But isn’t a lot of life that way?  Not just that it’s our longest church season, but that we spend most of our time taking kids to school, making dinner, going to work–banal, common, ordinary stuff (of course, the church season “Ordinary” means “counted”–not “common,” though perhaps it should).  Our challenge is to witness to Jesus’ work in our lives, to notice God in the common, ordinary, everyday things.

Then again, what was my experience going to sleep at night back in that apartment in Durham, North Carolina, and what was my friend’s experience walking back from church with her husband, except ordinary and common?  Jesus meets us in the ordinary and the common, Jesus finds us and stays with us in our suffering and in our “normal;” God is eager to reveal himself to us in the everyday.  We have only to watch, and then to witness; even if it is an experience that is more of an Impression than Realism.

Jesus stays, Jesus stays.

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“Crucify him!  Crucify him!”

Last Sunday, we played our part, joining in the dramatic reading of the events leading up to Jesus’ death.  We yelled “Let him be crucified!” along with the jealous crowd (Matthew 27).  Someone told me afterward that she always waffles about whether or not to say those words out loud with the rest of the congregation; it makes her uncomfortable, and it just sounds so horrible.  I knew what she meant–I closed my eyes this year when I joined in the shout; I just couldn’t bear seeing the angry crowd in front of me, it felt so real.

The horror is that it is real.  In dozens of ways, we shout “Crucify him!” every day.  When we respond in anger, when we deceive and rationalize, choosing the easy way out instead of the truth, we turn our backs on the reality that God offers us.  It’s like throwing God’s playbook into the trash and letting the door slam as we walk away.  We insist on our own way and our own wisdom, just like Adam and Eve in the garden, just like Jesus’ disciples who were scattered in Gethsemane’s garden–just like every human throughout time; except for Jesus himself.

What a strange God we worship.  What kind of God leaves his abode to come down to this broken place called earth?  Once arrived, what kind of God takes on the limitations and stresses of human life, living inside the confines of a human being?  As a human, what kind of God endures a fraudulent trial leading to trumped-up death charges and a humiliating spectacle of an execution? What kind of life is that? What is he revealing to us about the truth of love?

As Jesus hangs on the cross (as he did at this very hour), people mock him; someone asks, “If you saved others, why can’t you save yourself?”  Another says, “If you’re really God, the way you say you are, why don’t you come down?  If you did, we’d surely believe you then!”  Can you imagine the temptation Jesus might have faced?  Indeed, in the garden with his disciples the night before, he has already laid his cards out with his Father, begging that he not actually have to go through with the whole thing, desperate to find another way out.

Abandoned and hanging on a cross, Jesus, the Son of God, stayed.  While he was spit on, ridiculed, beaten, and nailed, he refused to turn his back on the people who were torturing him.  Jesus never pulled the release valve, Jesus never left us.  He was committed to showing humanity what love means by never turning his back on us even if that meant that he would have to die.  There was finally nothing else left for Evil to try except to force God’s hand by threatening him with death if he didn’t give up on people.  Jesus stayed.

The same crowds who had shouted a few days earlier that he was their hero turned quickly into the angry, jealous crowds who pushed at him to crack and then turned their backs to let him die. How often do we experience the same swift change in our lives?  Our best friend suddenly becomes our most effective attacker; our well-ordered life is shaken into a disaster; the most reliable part of our day is ripped out from under us, leaving a gaping hole.  We all suffer abandonment that leaves us wondering which way is up.

Though we may not know which way is up, or how to keep moving through the mess of life, or how to withstand the attacks of someone we love, Jesus has shown that God will stay right next to us.  Staying meant death, but Jesus chose not to use his power as God to get him out of the mess humanity had made around him; he only ever called upon the power of God to help others, never himself.

Jesus still calls upon the power of God to help us, even though we’re just as fickle and cowardly and arrogant and skeptical as the crowds who surrounded him at his death.  Jesus never left them alone, even when the price to stay was death.  Even though we turn our backs on God, he will never leave us alone. Jesus stays, Jesus stays.