Category Archives: sermons

No Rights

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Today we celebrate the feast of Florence Li Tim-Oi, the first woman ordained priest in the Anglican Communion; she served during World War II during a time of duress in Asia.  Because of the controversy of her ordination, she resigned her license after the end of the war.  I want to consider why our church ordains women and what that means for who we believe God to be, and what we believe to be the vocation–or job–of every Christian.

Having been raised–theologically-speaking–in the house of Stanley Hauerwas at Duke, “rights” language makes me very uncomfortable.  It’s not that women have a “right” to serve just like men do, as priests–none of us, as followers of Jesus, has a right to do anything, so the argument goes.  What I mean to say is that when we were drowned in the waters of baptism and raised up out of them by the grace of God, all our rights were washed away–the only claim that any baptized person has is our belonging to God in Christ–we follow the lifestyle that leads to the cross.  It’s not about us as individuals anymore, it’s about what’s best for God’s kingdom and God’s people.  Our only right is to pick up our cross and walk in Jesus’ footsteps.

Looked at this way, women ought to be ordained and to serve as priests, bishops, and whatever else in the church because God gifts both women and men with the sorts of talents that are useful for church leadership, development, evangelism, and the like.  Part of my frustration growing up was that my parents told me that I should use the gifts God had given me–which were pretty clearly gifts for leadership, teaching, and speaking in public–and my church was telling me that I couldn’t do those sorts of things because I was a girl.  An early Christian and theologian said, “that which God has not assumed, God cannot redeem”–what was important about Jesus–God in the flesh–was not that he was male, but that he was human.  God assumed humanity, became a person, not God-became-male.

So if God doesn’t care if you are a man or a woman, as the passage in Galatians says today (3:23-28), I wonder if God cares if you are ordained or not.  In the Gospel (Luke 10:1-9) lesson, Jesus sends out 70 of the people–probably all men–who had been following him around, instructing them to try out this ministry-and-evangelism thing.  Perhaps they were like itinerant preachers, or circuit-riders, the way that Methodism spread in the United States, but I suspect they may have been more like immigrant workers, or bi-vocational evangelists–people who did “normal” work, but who shared their faith in the God who became a person because of his love for each human.

My uncle was visiting this week, and one morning he told me about his work at a major home-improvement store.  He talked about how he builds relationships with customers, whether they are regulars or someone he just interacts with for 30 seconds or a few minutes.  When someone is looking for a realtor key holder (those cases that have a code to punch in that holds the key–i don’t know what those are called otherwise!), he shows them where they are, but if they seem open to it, he asks them what it’s for, and as they start to have a conversation, he helps them think through the implications of the change they’re making to their home (whether it’s for security, or convenience, or whatever).  Even though he’s just a “normal” worker, he reaches out to the people he comes in contact with and walks with them in their lives, if only for a few minutes, to help them know they’re not alone, to offer his expertise and wisdom, and to help them to make the best decision for their project.

Every Christian in every job is called to this kind of work.  God came to earth in Jesus to prove how much he wants to know each of us; Jesus didn’t run away even from being murdered on a cross to show us that he loves us more than he loves anything else, even life; God raised Jesus from the dead to reveal that he is the most powerful force in the universe.

As baptized Christians, we come forward to receive the Eucharist in order to be healed and be filled with that same power; when we allow God to be active in our lives–giving up our “rights,” he does more through us than we could know or imagine on our own.  God has called each and every one of us to be missionaries for the sake of his kingdom and his people, to go out as sheep in the midst of wolves, trusting in his will.  We are primarily identified by our status as Christians, not as men or women or as priests.  We’ve all been given a vocation in baptism, and that is to grow in relationship with God through Jesus Christ, and to introduce others to Him.  Amen.

Weak Coffee & Steeping

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20140123-103826.jpgO everlasting God, you revealed your truth to your servant Phillips Brooks, and so formed and molded his mind and heart that he was able to mediate that truth with grace and power: Grant, we pray, that all whom you call to preach the Gospel may steep themselves in your Word, and conform their lives to your will; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

(Collect for the feast of Phillips Brooks, Bishop of Massachusetts, 1893)

My husband Jordan and I are fortunate to agree on the most important things–religion, politics, and how many coffee beans constitutes a decent cup of coffee.  I’m not sure where he developed this sensibility, though, because my in-laws have a disturbingly divergent understanding of hot coffee.  Whereas 1-2 tablespoons-per-cup is the norm at our house, and we admit it might be a little excessive, up in the North Dakotan Hylden house, 2 tablespoons is enough for an entire pot.  We all joke when we’re up there for holidays, we call it “coffee water” and we speak about experiencing “the idea of coffee” when we partake of the morning brew.  To be honest, it’s got less color than my afternoon cuppa Earl Grey.

I think Phillips Brooks is something like the coffee us younger Hyldens drink.

The collect written and prayed to remember this fellow disciple speaks of us being “steeped” in God’s Word, and it is clear from his many sermons which still instruct and inspire today that Phillips Brooks was a stellar example of a life steeped in Scripture, worship, and prayer.

It’s as if God, in the forms of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, are the coffee grounds, through which our lives–water–is poured.  The most potent brews are those which use lots of finely-ground beans.  The water is transformed, it’s hardly recognizable as water anymore, but becomes a different sort of liquid.  For one thing, instead of being hydrating water, strong coffee, on the whole, is a dehydrating beverage; steeping in coffee grounds completely reverses the effect that the water has on our bodies.  Studying Scripture, praying, and attending worship can have the same powerful result in our lives.

As Episcopalians, we believe that worshiping together is the most powerful sort of brewing to which we can subject ourselves.  Do you know Drip Coffee, downtown, or in Five Points?  They don’t make pots of coffee from a coffeemaker like we have on our kitchen counters; they grind each serving of beans individually, tap them into a single-serving filter, and use an expert method to slowly pour the hot water over the grounds, so that the water takes on the beans’ aroma, taste, and caffeine in a special and intense way.  Episcopalians,and Anglicans throughout the centuries, have believed that worship is that kind of steeping.  It’s when we’re together, seeking God as a community, that God is most clearly with us–we need each other to know God best.

To carry the analogy a little further–maybe too far, but here I go!–often, when I go into Drip, I ask them which coffee I should get.  Is the Peruvian best?  Or does Kenya have a great taste this week?  The baristas are quick to explain the differences between the kinds of beans that week–which ones are more chocolatey, or have more fruit in them.  In order to know those sorts of things off the top of their heads, the baristas do a lot of tasting and reading and studying of their beans.  Phillips Brooks, for one, and many other fellow saints in the history of our church, and today, have spent a lot of time steeping in Scripture, studying, tasting, reading, and meditating on God’s Word–getting to know the God revealed in Scripture through the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  By becoming very familiar with the way that God often talks and acts, Bishop Brooks could more easily point out God’s work to his churches, and bring them along in knowing and recognizing and growing with God all the more.

When we show up to worship, if we’ve been reading, studying, and praying Scripture, we’re much more attuned to God’s voice, and we can hear in our hearts what God wants to say much more clearly.  May we hide God’s Word in our hearts through study and prayer, that we may become ever more deeply steeped in the particular coffee grounds which are the only living and almighty God.  Amen.

 

Waiting to Breathe – The Feast of the Baptism of Jesus

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Father in heaven, who at the baptism of Jesus in the River Jordan proclaimed him your beloved Son and anointed him with the Holy Spirit: Grant that all who are baptized into his Name may keep the covenant they have made, and boldly confess him as Lord and Savior; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.

Collect (Prayer) for the First Sunday after the Epiphany (BCP)

If you would, close your eyes with me.  Let’s take one big, deep breath in through our noses together–as much air as your lungs can hold; then let’s all exhale at the same time, with our mouths wide open, a big “ha” sound…  Let’s do it once more, a big, long, deep breath through our noses, and a loud, long breath out through our mouths.

Thank you.  I just thought we could all use a little more oxygen.  Now, on with the sermon!

In a break with many other Protestant churches, our Anglican tradition is to baptize babies.  As you’re probably aware, many churches choose to wait till a person can speak for themselves and decide on their own whether or not they really want to be Christians before they submit to the Christian ritual of baptism.  We side with the Roman Catholics and the Orthodox churches on this count, and in doing so, we’re making a significant statement about who we believe God to be.

During the first centuries of Christianity, before there were so many denominations as such, they were ironing out some of the import sacraments–what it meant for humans to take up common physical items, water, bread, wine, and to ask God to enter those things, so that we could better understand how it is that God enters each of us.  One of the questions that came up was: what if the priest who prayed that God would bless the water for Baptism, or enter the bread and wine for Eucharist later on turned out to be a fraud?  They used a word worse than fraud, but the question they were getting at was how much human effort and righteousness affected God’s potency.  Who was responsible for how things turned out, humans, or God?

As you can probably guess, the answer our ancestors in the faith came to is that what matters is God.  Even if the priest who baptized you, or officiated your wedding, or buried your grandma turns out to be an embezzler, or worse, the Christian church throughout the ages has agreed that we all trust that God takes care of and protects and is the one thing that matters in whether or not a sacrament does the job.

Let me tell you what a relief that is!  So perhaps we should all just go home now.  God’s got it all under control, he can zap us with grace any time he likes–why bother with saying a creed and praying prayers and having this strange meal together?

Did you know that our respiratory system is the only system in our bodies that is both voluntary and involuntary?  We can’t stop our stomachs from digesting just by thinking about it, and if everything’s working right, our limbs don’t fly about on their own.  But at the beginning of the sermon, we all concentrated and made ourselves breathe.  Since then, I’ll bet that no one has kept thinking “breathe in, breathe out” every moment while I’ve been up here preaching.  But none of us has passed out, we’ve all kept breathing just as we always do, without thinking about it.

Whether we’re paying attention or not, God is at work.  When we concentrate on it, when we look for what God’s up to around us and in us, we start to see more clearly how God is active all the time.  Our lungs are passive, in a way; they can’t control how much oxygen is in the air, or how they function in different levels of pressure.  God is like the oxygen in the air–he’s present everywhere, and we breathe him in without noticing sometimes, though the greatest benefit comes when we pay attention to what we’re taking in and what we’re letting back out.

We come to church because this is where we learn to breathe.  We learn how to take God in, and how to let him fill us up.  In our modern society, spending lots of time sitting behind desks and hunched over computers, we are not breathing as well as some of our forebears did who spent their days outside in the fresh air, working the soil and making their own food.  Our lung capacity shrinks when we don’t use the full range of our breath, just like our ability to notice and listen and respond to God shrinks when we don’t make a habit of spending time seeking and noticing him with others as we worship.

We baptize babies because we believe that in the end, it’s about more than any decision or declaration one person makes; it’s about the God made known in Jesus Christ coming to be with us in the Holy Spirit, that we would never be alone, and that the love manifest in the Trinity is stronger than death.  That kind of love takes a community, and it is the Christian community, throughout time and space, that commits for us at our baptism, and with us throughout our lives, to continue to help us learn how to breathe.

“It was God, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made him known.”

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Gospel Lesson: John 1:1-18

Epistle: Galatians 3:23-25; 4:4-7

In the 1950’s, there was a missionary named Jim Elliot who felt called by God to go to Ecuador to minister to native peoples there.  Along with his team, he started to build relationships with a particularly remote tribe—first dropping gifts from their missionary plane, then working toward introducing themselves, continuing to clear the way with more presents to show their goodwill.  Finally delegations from each group met.  On this big day, Jim took a photo from his pocket to show the tribespeople that the missionaries were friends with a member of their tribe.

Having never seen a photograph, they assumed that Jim had eaten brother, since he had taken the likeness of this person out of his body to show them.  They murdered Jim and his companions immediately.

I wonder if we sometimes make the opposite mistake about Jesus.  I wonder if we take Jesus to be just a picture of God—only an image or likeness, but not really God himself.  They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, but if I had my choice I’d take the thousand words every time—there’s so much more to learn from studying a description of someone than reducing a whole person to a single photograph.

Our Gospel passage today is bursting with poetic description of God; it harkens to another description of God elsewhere.

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  That description goes on to reveal that God created humanity “in God’s image”—which means that we ourselves are a sort of photo in some way—and when God created humanity, he furnished a place for his people to live and provided for their every need.  You know this story—here’s where the montage of Adam and Eve frolicking and eating and naming animals fits in—and then something goes wrong.  (you can imagine the sound of  a pin dragging against vinyl) Adam and Eve decide that God may have been lying to them after all, and they test the truth God had told them—whether it really did matter so much how they lived.

Now we really learn something about God: that evening, arriving for their daily walk, God calls out for his companions, his cherished creatures.  They’re hiding—they know they shouldn’t have tested God and shouldn’t have doubted that God was telling the truth, but they really would rather not face up to it.

We’re not that different, are we?  Instead of recognizing our crookedness, we bury it and move on.  I read a story this week of a professor who, when his desk got too full of letters to be answered and tasks to complete, he’d spread out an edition of the New York Times and then start over as if his desk was clean.  We paper over our sins, too, instead of owning up to them before God.

On that evening, God knew exactly what had happened and where his creatures were; he could have come rushing in, screaming, demanding that they leave immediately, as if he was a righteous landlord.  But that’s not the description of God that we’re shown here at the very beginning of Scripture.

Scripture begins with a God that is so full of love that he dreams each of us up out of nothing.  Then, when each of us, as we all do, decides to test out whether God is really telling the truth, he gently asks what it is that we’re doing—giving us a chance to tell him the truth and to own up to our schemes.  We grab a New York Times, or a fig leaf, to try to cover up the mess we’ve made, even though God can already see the mess.  The God who’s described here in the pages of Genesis is the same one described in the first verses of the Gospel of John—the God full of grace and full of truth.

Being full of grace and truth sounds lovely, but I argue this morning that it makes God very off-putting.  That same professor didn’t cover his desk with a newspaper just once, but did it habitually—when he finally died, they dug down many layers of newsprint, finding all sorts of unpaid invoices, unanswered inquiries, and unfinished assignments.  Can you imagine the horror he might have felt if this practice had been discovered and challenged while he was alive?  God knows all the layers of newsprint we’ve used to paper up our lives.  Even when I’ve lost count of the path and number of lies I’ve used to cover up various deeds—done and left undone—God knows each and every one.  God is full of truth, and that sounds kind of terrible.

Thomas Keating, a 20th century monk, says that when it starts to dawn on us just how many layers of deception we’ve built our lives on, we think we’re getting worse, but truly, we’re just realizing how bad off we always were, and that, he says, is an enormous grace.

We look up at God from the bottom of our crumpled-paper and sticky-sin lives, and he reaches down and scoops us up in his hand, brushing away the debris.  This is grace.  While truth is hard, I think grace might be harder.  The law, our epistle says, was our disciplinarian before Christ came.  The law, or rule-following, lets me continually hit myself against a wall when I do something wrong.  I punish myself and pay for the wrong I’ve committed.  All the time, I’m trying to be dependent only on myself.

This isn’t how we were made to be, though.  We were made to be in the midst of God’s grace and truth.  God’s grace is the hand that comes down to the cave of our sin and scoops us up and out of it—we don’t have to run ourselves against a wall, we don’t have to sit in the dog house for months on end; we’re forgiven.  The hard part is to accept God’s grace, to live as if we are truly forgiven, not punishing ourselves any more, but acknowledging honestly the shortcomings we suffer.

I’ll close with a bit of a poem by W.H. Auden:

Well, so that is that.  Now we must dismantle the tree,

Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes —

Some have got broken — and carrying them up to the attic.

The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,

And the children got ready for school.  There are enough

Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week —

Not that we have much appetite, having drunk such a lot,

Stayed up so late, attempted — quite unsuccessfully —

To love all of our relatives, and in general

Grossly overestimated our powers.  Once again

As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed

To do more than entertain it as an agreeable

Possibility, once again we have sent Him away,

Begging though to remain His disobedient servant,

The promising child who cannot keep His word for long.

The Christmas Feast is already a fading memory,

And already the mind begins to be vaguely aware

Of an unpleasant whiff of apprehension at the thought

Of Lent and Good Friday which cannot, after all, now

Be very far off.

 

God is full of truth—he knows what’s under your newspaper.  God is full of grace—he brushes away all the debris by his death on the cross and resurrection.

Will you accept his hand?

A Sermon for Christmas Day

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Catskills“The hills are alive with the sound of music!”

Perhaps that’s not the song you came to church to hear today, but that’s what we just sang in the psalm together.  “Let the hills ring out with joy before the Lord.”

What is joy?  When do we experience joy in our daily lives?  Novelist Zadie Smith argues in a recent essay in the New York Review of Books that though we humans often experience pleasure—perhaps over a great tumbler of whiskey or a dog’s sweet companionship, joy is a much more rare and complicated emotion that is necessarily overwhelming and entangled with fear.  It is the sort of thing that we could not bear to experience often, but when we do, we laugh and cry and can’t catch our breath and whether or not the event or its results are sustained, our lives are forever different for having experienced it.

What a miracle happened on Christmas!  As we glimpse the enormity of this moment—just as when the shepherds saw the whole sky filled with bright angels—we burst forth with shouts of joy.  In this moment, a joyful song we’ve sung before doesn’t fit—we need a whole new way of communicating to try to express this new age of God’s rule.  This marvelous thing so unlike anything that’s happened before, we need a new song, a fresh account of God’s deliverance.  Even the past looks different now that we know that God is here, in this place.  Now.

There’s little else we can do with our joy but to sing, even the hills and seas are alive with the Promise that God fulfilled in becoming human on Christmas Day.  After centuries of oppression, exile, and dispersion, The Promise has come to fruition.  God has come to earth, he’s come into the middle of the mass of humanity and become human himself.  God has made himself as close to us as he possibly can.  It’s like how doctors treat pre-mature babies in the hospital—they’re administered skin-to-skin contact from their parents as if it was medicine.  Resting on their father’s chest, or feeling their mother’s hands on their back, is as powerful as any manufactured pharmaceutical we have devised.  God’s touch, his own hand and arm, as the psalm tells us, brought forth this miracle for our sake.  God came in Jesus to heal us.

God has made good on his Promise now—today—Christmas.  We are so precious to God that, given the choice to exist in peace and quiet and perfection for eternity, which, after Christmas morning with little kids, might sound pretty good, or to exist with and among humanity, he chose us.  God has chosen never to be except to be in relationship with us.

Joy isn’t the only thing we feel today, nor is it the only thing that Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and others at Jesus’ birth felt.  Just as they had questions about what life would mean and look like in light of this new reality, we do too.  God’s companionship is the only answer to all the questions.  Why can’t a brother and sister acknowledge the brokenness between them and reconcile on Christmas?  Why can’t parents and grandparents set aside their pride and stubbornness and entrust their son and grandson to God’s capable hands?  Why are children shot and spouses beaten and people starving?  Our only answer to evil is that despite its presence in the world, God’s presence is with us too, and God’s love is more powerful than brokenness and death and destruction.  The Promise God made to Abraham and to his descendants, the Israelites, is the same promise we can now claim as humans, because Jesus came as a human to save all people.  God gave us Jesus out of his love, and Jesus is the touch that allows us to survive.  He is the image of the invisible God.  Jesus is God-with-us.

This truth, this joy that is revealed to us in Christ’s birth, this is the steadfast love that God is showing us.  God has remembered his mercy and truth toward the house of Israel, he’s fulfilled his promise this morning.  We sing a new song because a new thing has happened—something incomparable to all other experiences we’ve ever had.  God reaches out and touches us.

To offer back to God our joy and thanksgiving at this marvelous gift, we gather together our harps, our trumpets, our organs, and pianos, and violins, and flutes.  But even with these and with our own voices, the effort is paltry in comparison to the new thing God has done.  Let us gather up the noise of the whole world—the roaring sea with its clapping waves and the ringing music of the mountains—all oriented to shout praise to God for this great gift he has given to humanity and to all creation.

Joy to the world!