Category Archives: sermons

“No Loss of American Life” Sermon – Trinity Cathedral – Proper 17 C

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“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26)

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.

This is the same Jesus who suffers the little children to come unto him and offers an easy yoke and a light burden.  How can this be?  Let us not try to explain away the difficult words with which we are faced this morning; let us reflect upon what this passage tells us about God, and about our relationship to him.

The parables leading up to this passage in Luke, which we’ve been hearing the last few weeks, put an ever-finer point on Jesus’ message and revelation of himself.  Those dearest to him are the crippled, the orphaned—those who cannot repay any a transactional way the kindness shown to them.  Jesus gives his followers a new definition of family here—of who it is that qualifies as our mother and father and neighbor.

We are to love our fathers and mothers and siblings, of course, but we are to love these fellow disciples in the pews next to us, and even more, to love our guests who are eating breakfast in Satterlee Hall right now, to love those sitting in jail, and those who are oppressed, here and abroad.  These are our family members, if we desire to be part of the family of God.

I have a friend from divinity school who came from a good, upstanding family, a long line of doctors and brothers who earned graduate degrees.  When it became clear to his parents that he was going ahead with his foolhardly plan to become a priest, he was told that he’d been a “bad investment” and was financially and emotionally cut off from his family.  He lost father and mother and blood-relations in order to be Jesus’ disciple.  As inconceivable as that story may be, it is almost predictably common in Scripture.  A prophet’s mother or friends or community is always ready to stone him for being a follower of the living God.  The family’s plea may be loving enough—“choose another son to send into the fray, not mine!”—but in this family, born through baptism, I am no more, and just as precious as any other of God’s children

In Lillian Smith’s book, Killers of the Dream, first published in 1949, she recounts the moment that a young student realizes the cost of fighting segregation.  The young woman says, “No matter how wrong you think it is, laws are against you, custom is against you, your own family is against you.  How do you begin?  I guess,” she said slowly, “if you hated your family, it would be easier to fight for what is right, down here.  It would be easier if you didn’t care how much you hurt them.”

We naturally show favoritism.  We love and share bonds of affection with particular people; some of this is just practical—a usual person cannot manage more than about 125 friends at once.  But we also must realize that Jesus insists that the family that is more important than blood is our family of disciples, those who follow Jesus with us, and the family of the poor, the war-torn, the oppressed.  These people are our family, throughout the world—these people are our neighbors.

On the cross, Jesus Christ risked all that he hand—his own life, his relationship with God the Father—in order to be and to stay with us, with all humanity.  We abandoned him on the cross as he bore our sins, and because sin, fundamentally, is turning away from God, he was without God the Father, as well.  Totally alone, in the deepest suffering, though he could have gotten himself down from the cross, Jesus stayed.  Jesus Christ chose to be with us—this is how God reveals himself to us.  As my favorite preacher, Sam Wells puts it: God has chosen never to be except to be with us.

This brings us back to the Gospel text today; as God’s disciples, the followers of Jesus, we are invited and beckoned to join in God’s work here and now, to love not only those for whom we have natural, blood-line, or you-look-like-me kind of affection, but God-given, uncomfortable, I’ve-never-met-you-but-you-are-my-family sort of love for all of our neighbors—realizing that their lives are just as precious in God’s sight.  Jesus died to be with every single person on this planet, no matter where they happen to live.

There’s a Roman Catholic Italian family from Staten Island who now lives in Upstate New York; I met them when I was working in their small town in the Catskills one summer.  I met them by chance—their children were the same age as some children I’d been babysitting one evening, and I’d hardly introduced myself before they were enveloping me in hugs.  Before I left a month later, they gave me a key to their home, saying, “This is your home now, too.”

I was a stranger from another land, but they loved me and cared for me as if I was their daughter.  How might we be able to love and care for those who are our brothers and sisters, whether here in Columbia, or elsewhere in the world?

As writer Glennon Doyle Melton often reminds her readers, “We belong to each other.”

One Sure Thing

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20130906-105958.jpgLast weekend, I was in Cooperstown, New York. This is the place where I learned what it was to be a parish priest, where I fell in love with the vocation, and where I’ve been stretched and challenged within an inch of my life to do my best at that job. The places (geographically) where great pain is experienced and lived through are sites of enormous comfort. When I return to Cooperstown, or Grand Lake, or Durham, I feel like the rocks and trees and wooden siding of buildings understand me and are full of those powerful memories–they’re witnesses to the battles fought.

People are witnesses, too, of course, and they can be a comfort, but there’s something about buildings and mountains and lakes and particular bits of earth (on which one stands and remembers a vantage point) that is somehow deeper, perhaps because of their stability and unchangingness. The unsettling thing is that even cities, buildings, and bits of earth change. You remember your backyard growing up as a place of great meaning, but when you return to your childhood home decades later, it’s almost unrecognizable–the trees have grown so that the sun is not at all the same, the new owners have re-modeled the flower beds; it’s not the same place anymore, the place you knew is lost.

God promises, though, that he is the same yesterday, today and forever. In this week’s Epistle lesson, Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16, we hear the witness of faithful people in the past who believed and trusted that, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (v. 8). This is what the church’s Gloria Patri says (“Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit; as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever, amen.”).

The first part of Hebrews 13 recalls Abraham, Joseph, and the prophets by their faith-filled acts: Abrahahm “show(s) hospitality to strangers, for by doing that (he) entertained angels without knowing it” (v.2); Joseph was first sold into slavery, then was imprisoned unjustly (v. 3) but didn’t turn away from God because of his circumstances; and the prophets, fairly described as “those who are being tortured” (v. 3) exactly because they refused to turn from God–to renege on God’s promise of being unchanging himself.

“Let marriage be held in honor by all… for he has said, ‘I will never leave you or forsake you.'” (vs.4-5) The witness of Christian marriage is an effort at humans committing–in God’s strength–to be faithful to each other despite changes in themselves and their circumstances. This is the commitment that God makes to us–that he will never leave or forsake each of us, that he will be with us when we have no home like Abraham, or when we are isolated like Joseph, or when we are being persecuted like the prophets. God remains the same, even when we change and when our worlds change.

“Be present, O merciful God, and protect us through the hours of this night, so that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life may rest in your eternal changelessness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

(BCP service of Compline, pg. 133)

Harry Potter Life Lesson #4 – Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost – Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Columbia, SC

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In the late summer of 2007, the biggest question in the first world was: “Does Harry Potter die at the end of the series???”  We flooded to bookstores, we stayed up till all hours, we drank in the last installment of the now-legendary series by J.K. Rowling.

I won’t spoil the ending for you in case you haven’t read it yet, but I will say: it’s something like Jesus.  As the last book opens, they are frightening times in the wizarding world; things have gotten out of control since the dark lord came back to power.  Wizards, you see, live alongside non-magical people, and the world of magic, though it usually doesn’t encroach upon “normal” life, has started to spill over.  Catastrophes, tragedies, and strange occurrences are taking over England; people are getting scared.  Throughout the last book, the tension mounts—how is evil ever going to be destroyed?  The forces of darkness have grown powerful—you know, they feed on fear—and the good forces have been picked off one-by-one, leaving fewer and fewer of the faithful left to fight.  It is starting to look very much like evil is in control, like evil is the owner of the world.

The dark lord—that is, the head wizard of evil magic, whose name is Voldemort—has very carefully built his kingdom.  He has defended himself on every side; he has informants within all the structures of government and bureaucracy, in the schools, and even within the inner circle of the good wizard society.  Voldemort, this dark wizard, knows that fear is very powerful, and feeding on the fear of others provides energy for his movement.  How can a good wizard, who has vowed not to use those spells which cause death, stand against the ever-more-powerful forces of evil and darkness?

Voldemort built his kingdom on the power of fear and death.   He gained power by killing others through the use of violent spells and instilling fear in the hearts of those who witnessed and heard about his actions.

A lot of our society is built to help us to focus on fear and darkness.  We have car insurance, health insurance, homeowner’s or renter’s insurance—these are all policies we buy to hedge our bets that something bad will happen to us.  Our movies are full of violence and malice, our news programs and websites are focused on tragedy and destruction.  Best-selling books are full of soul-tarnishing language and situations.  These bombarding influences are like a late summer deluge while you’re driving on the highway—they’re completely blinding, making it near impossible to imagine that there is another way.

But our epistle helps us see that there IS another way of looking at our world.  We’re challenged by the author of Hebrews to recognize and pay attention to the invisible things that are happening around us.  We know that this world we see isn’t a faithful account of everything that exists.  We know from experience that there’s more going on around us than what we can look at with our eyes—that’s part of J.K. Rowling’s point about the magical world.  It’s not so far-fetched as it seems at first glance, because each of us, if we pay attention, have been in the midst of curious, wonderful, strange interactions and situations, events that may seem like magic.  We might call them the Holy Spirit.  The way of fear and death and temptation isn’t our only option, though they’re often more easily seen than the way of hope and life that God offers to us.

When each of us had fallen into sin and death, we when let fear into our hearts, having taken our focus off of Jesus and allowed the stormy waves of life to distract us, God sent Jesus to steal us back from the evil house in which we’d been taken captive.  In the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, which we will remember and celebrate in a few minutes at the altar, God offers us a way out of darkness, into the light and love of God.

Part of Jesus’ exhortation to us to “be ready” is to be trained out of fearful reactions and out of habits of darkness, and to replace these habits with attention to Jesus’ rescuing acts in the world, and the embodiment of God’s love.

This past week, I went to Trinity’s children’s choir camp at Kanuga.  During their time together there, they break bad singing habits and learn how to most excellently use their voices, as well as their whole selves, to worship God.  It’s a sort of retreat—it’s training to recognize and strengthen good habits, and to dismiss bad ones.  It’s not just singing, though; the whole program is shaped so that they’re constantly reminded that it is for God’s glory that they practice and they sing.  They’re learning how to pay attention and be ready for Jesus to rescue and reveal himself them, both by what they’re taught, and by how they pray together five or more times a day.

In moments of great evil, we fall back on our habits; will we fall back on faithfulness, or fear?

In 1942, a small village in rural France, led by their pastor, Andre Trocme, fell back on faith, and stood up to evil.  Despite the fear and darkness enveloping the world at the time, these Christians—and even non-Christian townspeople—banded together to hide, nourish, and protect almost 5000 Jews from the evil Nazi regime.  The small village hid people in private homes, on country farms, and even in plain sight, producing counterfeit ration cards and identification.  When raids of German troops would come through, the town had a system to warn the victims who would flee into the woods.  After the troops left, the villagers would take to the woods, singing a song, which was the signal of safety.

The truth is that God’s love is always stronger than any darkness or evil—we’ve seen in the death and resurrection of Jesus that God’s love is stronger than death itself.  God rescues us from sin; we don’t have to be overpowered by our temptations or by fear any longer.  Because of our relationship with God through Jesus, our mediator and our advocate, we are able to be free of fear, and we are able to choose good things and withstand temptations.

A significant part of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is built on the tension between Harry and Voldemort, as the two of them come from very similar situations.  They’re both abandoned orphans, they both have no idea that they are magical until the same wise old mentor explains it to each of them, and they both are very, very talented and powerful wizards.  One of the great questions readers are left to ponder is how Harry turned out good, while Voldemort turned out evil.

One possibility is that Voldemort chose to wallow in the loneliness of his upbringing, he decided to depend on himself alone to be his savior from tragedy, and the only tools he could use on his own strength were darkness and fear and evil.

Harry, on the other hand, realizes that life without commitment to and love for others is hardly worth living.  God created us for himself, to share his light and love and joy with us.  This is the life for which Jesus rescues us: that we might be free of fear and darkness, and to cultivate good habits of love and faithfulness, for each other, and most of all, for God. Amen.

Jesus, Our Lord – Tenth Sunday After Pentecost – Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Columbia, SC

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Colossians 2:6-7

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth, and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O Lord our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

When I get home at night, our dog, Ben, runs to the door and starts to jump and whine.  We have a window in our front door, so I can see his impressive vertical leap before I even mount the steps to our front porch.  He is as excited to see me at the end of the day as he ever is for anything.

In the last two years, Ben has lived in seven different places—the only thing in common in each of those homes has been me.  I’ve become the one constant in his life, through all this bewildering change.  It’s probably not too strong to say that I’m the thing that makes sense of life for Ben.  I’m his source of food, protection, and comfort.

The same word that we use to talk about the relationship between me and Ben is used in our Epistle this morning: Lord.  I am Ben’s lord, or, to put is more simply, I am his master—just like Jesus is our master.  Jesus is where our nourishment comes from, where we find our security; he is our constant in life.  If we are baptized—as a number of our congregation will be in a few minutes—we have received Christ Jesus as our Lord; Jesus has become the one thing in our lives that everything else revolves around, he makes sense of life for us.  Having responded to God’s call and received Jesus as Lord, the passage from Colossians exhorts us to continue to live in Jesus, rooted and built up in him.

These are beautiful words—“living in Jesus,” being “rooted and built up” in God—but what do they mean?  What do they look like lived out?

There was a young Christian woman, Corrie Ten Boom, who was sent to a concentration camp during World War 2 with her sister.  They’d harbored Jews and helped them to escape capture and death.  The God they received and knew through Jesus Christ convicted them to stand against their government and the corrupt powers of the world, to defend precious human lives.  For this crime, they were arrested and sent to the Ravensbruck death camp.  Their rootedness in Jesus caused them to continue to speak lovingly to others about God even while they were facing certain death.

One story of their time in this camp is that Corrie’s sister, Betsy, had an annoying and unrelenting habit of thanking God for everything.  She’d look around the barracks and start listing things off, “Thank you, God, for our clothes”—which were dirty, falling apart, and very old.  “Thank you, God,” she’d say, “for our eyes,”—which, Corrie would point out, only helped them see the hopelessness of their situation all the better.  “Thank you, God, for the fleas.” Betsy would say.  Corrie thought this was one bridge too far.  Sure, Colossians says something about being abounding in thankfulness, but surely, surely we don’t need to be thankful for fleas!  Betsy was resolute; she was sincerely thankful for it all.

Not long after, the two sisters discovered that the guards had stopped patrolling the barracks because of the flea infestation among the prisoners—the fleas had kept the abusive guards away, giving the prisoners freedom to pray and to talk about God with each other.  Thank God for fleas, indeed.  These women were rooted in Jesus.

We’ve seen in the last months here in Columbia what happens when roots are established in sandy soil.  I’ve always known the verses and songs about building one’s house on shifting sand, and it’s always made me think of the beach.  This summer I’ve understood in a new way how the sandy soil of the piedmont, when it’s waterlogged, can also fatally damage the stuff that takes root in its soil.  It’s not that the plants themselves have anything wrong with their root structures, it’s the stuff that the roots are growing in that’s the problem.  When the sandy land is so saturated, the roots can’t hold on the right way.  Soil that seems okay most of the time just can’t cut it when storms come.

Our soil is our time—what do we spend most of our time, especially our free time, doing?  Which are the thoughts and reactions that most readily bubble up to the surface for us when faced with a challenge?  For my part, having been raised on Jane Austen novels, I either set my face to the challenge, resolute and calm, or by turns I fling myself on a fainting couch and complain about my nerves.  Perhaps I should pay closer attention to which are the heroines and which are the comic relief.

What is the stuff we spend our time with—what we let into our minds through reading, and watching, and talking with one another?  Is our soil infused with rich, firm, Jesus fertilizer?

We’re encouraged to dig our roots deep down in our Lord Jesus, and also to be built up in him, too.  Our roots drink in Jesus in the soil, so that Jesus becomes part of our growth, he comes into the deepest part of us as we allow ourselves to be fed by him in his love and strength.  This nourishment then can translate into growing, being built up in Jesus.

When I was little, even before I entered elementary school, I took ballet lessons.  I loved going to the little school, turning my feet just so, holding my shaky arms above my body.  I loved to grow in my practice, to build up my repertoire of dance knowledge.  Then we moved to another state, and I didn’t take lessons anymore.  That part of my knowledge lay dormant, the building that I’d done, teaching my muscles to move and practicing how to stand—it wasn’t gone, but it wasn’t in good working order, either.  A few years later, we moved again, and there we found another place for me to take ballet lessons.  I started up again, and like the saying goes, it was like riding a bike.  My muscles and body remembered movements my brain had long forgot; my legs had grown and changed, so that I had to relearn some things, but the practice I’d built up long ago helped me to quickly adjust.

The same thing has happened to me at points in my life when I’ve been away from the piano, or away from the sewing machine—these skills I’d learned and built up as a young child spring back to life when the opportunity arises.

What about our relationship with Jesus?  Just as we received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him.  The good news is that if we’ve strayed and not quite continued to live in him, we can always go back to growing and being built up in Jesus Christ, the Son of God.  Our practice, the things that help us grow—maybe we’d call them habits, Scripture reading, attending a Bible study or weekday service, or volunteering for a new ministry—these are things we can pick up right where we left off and keep going.

As Christians, we continually reaffirm the commitment we made—or the commitment made for us—at baptism.  We’ll be saying the words of the Nicene Creed shortly as a way of demonstrating our resolve to live in Jesus Christ, God incarnate, to be both rooted and built up in him.

In the fifth century, in Ireland, there was a young man who’d been captured and enslaved, his name was Patrick and he was a Christian.  After six years, he escaped and was able to return to his family, where he became a priest; after his ordination, he returned to his captors and worked as a missionary in Ireland for the rest of his life.  This man not only forgave those who enslaved him, but loved them so much that he went back to those who had imprisoned him and offered them the greatest gift a person can offer another—the good news of eternal life in Jesus Christ.

There is a poem attributed to this Saint Patrick in our hymnal.  We’re pretty sure now that it wasn’t actually written by this faithful Christian from the fifth century, but the words ring true today, as we meditate receiving Jesus Christ as our Lord, resolving to continue to live in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith that we’ve been taught and overflowing with thankfulness.

Here it goes:

Christ be with me, Christ within me, Christ behind me, Christ before me, Christ beside me, Christ to win me, Christ to comfort and restore me.

Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ in quiet, Christ in danger, Christ in hearts of all that love me, Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

Amen.

holy week

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this week brings ordination to the priesthood for two of my dearest friends, a ZTA soul-sister, and my husband.  Last night, Kara Slade was ordained in Oxford, NC. The sermon from the service can be found here: so, so good.  (like many parts of the evening, it made me cry)

Lord willing, on Saturday, Jordan Hylden will be ordained in Fargo, ND…