Category Archives: sermons

God Keeps His Promises (full stop).

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A homily on Genesis 16:1-16

Sarai’s getting old.  She’s getting worried.  God has just made a promise to Abram, but there’s got to be some kind of work-around.  In chapter 15 of Genesis, God makes a covenant, promising that Abram’s descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the sky.  As chapter 16 opens, Sarai seems to realize that there’s no way that she herself is going to be able to produce an heir, and she’s trying to help God save face.  She wants to save God the embarrassment if it turns out he can’t make good on his promise due to obvious biological restrictions.

I often try to hedge my bets with God.  I pray safe, small, could-just-be-coincidence prayers.  I dutifully go about my day at “medium”–not stepping out too far in faith, lest I get embarrassed because I wasn’t listening to God, or lest God get embarrassed because I’m trusting him too much.

The Bible is full of examples of people–the history of the church is full of examples!–who want to help God along, to provide needed assistance in his great plan, or to let him out of his promises altogether.

Indeed, God does call us to action, to trust, and faith, and personal relationship.  But we aren’t to make God out to be a child–he isn’t in need of our help to figure out how to make his plans real or help clean up messes.  We are the children.  We are the ones who can never quite understand the whole picture.  God does not need us to excuse him from his promises, he desires our trust that his promises are the only thing upon which we can depend.

God desires our obedience.  We don’t have to worry about how to get somewhere or how to make God’s dream come true.  God is big enough to keep the promises he makes, and we only need to learn how to listen quietly, and to believe that God keeps his promises to us.  There is no easy way to learn to listen and to be quiet–no short cut of prayers to engage or practices to enact.  As God offers his promises to us, we are invited to respond with the hard, disciplined work of faithfulness.

Let us seek after God–not interested in sinning boldly, but in living faithfully–knowing, as we’re shown in Scripture, that when we fail, the almighty God will weave our missteps and doubts back toward his purposes.

Bringer of Life and Joy – Third Sunday After Pentecost – Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, Columbia, SC

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1 Kings 17:8-24

It’s like the climax of a James Bond movie, when the hero has gotten himself into some incredible situation, and you can’t see any way out—you know that he’ll survive, he always does, but you can’t imagine how it will happen.  Watching those movies we have hope.  We are even certain of Bond’s coming success.  The widow in 1 Kings today had no hope.  Her personal stores of food were gone, the country’s stores of food were dwindling; she was at the end of her rope.  The widow had lost hope—from her perspective in life, there really was no way out.

Elijah arrives on the scene and asks the widow for water and food.  I imagine she somewhat bitterly retorts, “Food?  Yeah, wouldn’t some food be great about now?  As you well know, prophet-man, we haven’t got much food these days.  Just as sure as your God is the most powerful, me and my son are dust—we’re about to eat our Last Supper, and then all we can do is wait for death.  So, yeah, I’d love to have some food about now, too.”  Women probably didn’t presume to have such an attitude with men at the time, especially a non-Hebrew woman speaking to a holy Hebrew prophet, but her honest response—that they had no food to share—was still a departure from the expected course of conversation.

Elijah isn’t ruffled.  “Okay,” he says, “fair enough.  So, go and make the food you’re talking about—keep to your plan—but give me the first loaf you make, and if you show by that action that you really trust that my God is most powerful, he will keep food on your table.”

The widow told Elijah that she knew his God was truly in charge, and now Elijah challenges her to act on what she’s declared.  Like it says in the book of James, “You believe there is one God?  Good!  Even the demons believe it—and shudder!”  Elijah asks, “What is your response to recognizing that this God I serve is the only true God?  Will you place all your trust in his grace and love?”  The widow does.  She offers to God, through Elijah, the cake baked with the last bit of flour and oil—but of course it turns out not to be the last bit of food, for what Elijah said was true, and what the widow asserted was true—God has power over death, and provided food enough for the widow and the prophet and her household.

“The end!”  Can you see the scrawled across the screen in your mind?  What a lovely story that was about a woman growing into a trusting disciple of the living God.  Well, the widow’s bold faith is part of the story, but by scaling back our focus and looking at the context of this story, we can see that there’s a lot more God is revealing to us.

First, there’s the second part of the story between Elijah and the widow, where the widow’s son, spared from starvation, then succumbs to a horrible illness.

There’s also the context of these two stories in the larger story of Israel—what’s happening on a nation-wide scale while the widow is discovering the broad implications of the statement of faith she’s made.  Elijah had spoken with the King of Israel, Ahab, at the time, and as happened often to kings of Israel, Ahab had forgotten that he wasn’t really the one in charge.  Ahab’s stubborn, prideful heart was keeping him from reaching out to God, who longed to save the people suffering from the famine and truly had the power to do so.  The leader’s refusal to admit his limitations and to ask for help caused his people to suffer and die.

Viewed from this vantage point, it becomes clear that God is not just showing us a snapshot of an Old Testament saint, her story sandwiched by the nation’s woes.  God is revealing something about himself to us—acting in our lives to show us who he is.

So who is God, as revealed in the two stories about the widow’s household and the larger story about the famine in Israel?

God makes food out of nothing to keep the widow, her son, her household, and Elijah alive during a far-reaching famine.  He listens to Elijah when the prophet takes the widow’s dead son into his arms and cries for mercy.  He does not coerce King Ahab to trust him.

God is the giver of life.  We see this part of God very clearly in Jesus—resurrection, bringing life where there is death, is what God is about.  Resurrection is part of God’s identity.

This May, my great-grandmother died.  Her funeral was held in Minnesota, and because of our moving schedule to come here, I was free to be able to go and be with my family.  As the weekend ended, my husband Jordan’s family called him to ask if he could help with planting—he’s from a farming community in North Dakota.  I had plenty of time, so after the funeral, I decided to drive North instead of back south to St. Louis, and spent a few days with them, especially with Jordan’s mother.

More than thirty years ago, another death took place in May—it was Jordan’s older sister, who was stillborn.  On the anniversary of her death, his mother had been praying about her sadness over not being able to raise a daughter, and as she tells it, less than a week later, I made the unexpected trip to North Dakota.  God heard the prayer of my mother-in-law and gave her life and joy in the form of two daughters as wives to her sons.

One of the lessons my mother-in-law has taught me is to view life with more wonder and joy.  I am often like the widow, grumbling about picking up sticks, grumbling about the lack I see in some area of my life, muttering under my breath about others.

In the Scripture this morning, God invites us through Elijah to live in a way that requires God to be the giver of life.  King Ahab is not willing to let God take charge, and he is not forced to do so—though the consequences are serious.  In a similar way, God invites us to let him give us life through Jesus Christ, his son.  In Jesus, God reveals himself to be the one who brings life and joy to places of death and darkness.  Like my mother-in-law, who brought her experience with death to God, we can bring to him our experiences with death, whether it is the end of a loved one’s life, a broken relationship that has left us in the dark, or a nationwide problem that we recognize we need God to be able to overcome.

Of course, we see that even the return of rain to Israel is not the end of the story.  In Jesus Christ, God reveals himself to be the giver of life in the most powerful, most personal way.  We meet our life-giving Lord for the first time in baptism, we meet him again and again at the altar as we eat the life-giving bread he gives us, and we have a sure hope of eternal life as we trust God’s power to overcome death and darkness.

Each Sunday is a little Easter—we celebrate every single week the power that our God has over sin and death.  As we bring before God the places of darkness and death in our lives, let us also respond to his invitation to each one of us.  God says through his son Jesus, come to me, and I will give you life, that you may live with joy.

Third Sunday After Easter – the Rev. Jordan Hylden

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Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules
reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.

It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled
eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His Flesh: ours.

The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then
regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow
grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.

And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck’s quanta, vivid with hair,
opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.

Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.

The poem is called “Seven Stanzas at Easter,” by John Updike.  He is not often thought of as a man of faith, but I have come across few better treatments of the Resurrection than this poem and his short story “Pigeon Feathers.”  In both, Updike insists on the sheer materiality of the resurrection: the stone rolled away was not just a stone in a story, but the same tombstone that will one day rest over our own heads.  Jesus does not just live on in our memories and hearts, and he is not just a symbol of spring and new life: he lives in the same flesh that hung upon the cross, in a body like ours.  Updike would agree with that great line from Flannery O’Connor: if it’s a symbol, then to hell with it.  “If he rose at all, it was as his body,” and if he did not then “the Church will fall.”

Updike insists so strongly on this point, I think, because he knows that it is only a resurrection of the body that can make a difference to embodied creatures like us, creatures who know that they are dust and that to dust they shall return.  You’ve probably heard the old Woody Allen line: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve it through not dying.  I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”  Death, you see, puts an end to hopes, plans, dreams, futures, relationships, loves.  We are sometimes told to make our peace with death, to become adjusted to it, but the Christian faith holds out for no such worldly wisdom.  Death, St. Paul says, is “the last enemy to be destroyed,” and “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile… if for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.”  Our Gospel is a gospel of life, and life is no metaphor.

The disciples in Galilee had just undergone the cruel and humiliating death of their friend, and along with it the death of all of the hopes and plans he had given them.  Here was a man who they thought was the Messiah, the fulfillment of God’s covenant promises to longsuffering Israel; here was a man who spoke with power about God and told stories that turned everything they thought they knew upside down; here was a man who had chosen the twelve of them to renew the twelve tribes of Israel and to proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God to all nations; but there was a dead man on the cross whom one of their own number had betrayed, whom they had abandoned in his hour of need, whom Peter, their spirited leader, had denied.

They must have been a sorry bunch.  From what John tells us, it seems like many of them had gone their separate ways.  Their rabbi was dead, so why bother to hold things together anymore?  Peter and a few others went back home, to Galilee, and went back to life as usual, or at least tried.  “I’m going fishing,” Peter said, and why not?  They followed him.  A man’s still gotta eat, after all.  And maybe out here, Peter thought, we can forget, we can move on.  People might say, “Oh, that’s Peter, he’s the one who up and left his job and followed around that Jesus fellow who thought he was the Messiah.  Well, you know how that ended up.”  Well, thought Peter, let them talk.  There had been a day when he’d told anyone who would listen that he’d be the first in line to defend Jesus, even to die if it came down to it, but he’d showed his true colors when the rubber hit the road.  No, he wasn’t worth the memory of that good man.  There’d been a day when he thought he’d found something so good, so beautiful and wonderful that it turned the whole world upside down, but what did he know.  He knew fishing, at least.  May as well get back to the real world.

It was Paul, not Peter, who said “if for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied,” but I imagine Peter and the disciples were thinking along those lines out there all night in the boat.  “That night they caught nothing,” John tells us.  And there would be many more nights like it, until Jesus was no more than a long-ago memory that they tried not to think about.

I don’t know about you, but I’m with Updike and O’Connor: I can’t make very much sense of a Gospel that isn’t based entirely upon what happens next.  After Jesus died, the disciples split up and went home.  He didn’t rise again in their memories.  In their memories, he was dead, and they’d let him die without putting up a fight.  Peter’s dejection and guilt rings true to me.  What else could follow from death on a cross?  Jesus would be remembered as no more than one of the many pretended Messiahs and anti-Roman rabble-rousers, all of them failures and footnotes to history.

But that is not what happened.  Instead, what happened was lives transformed, galvanized, set aflame with by what lies behind the simple yet wild words we say every Sunday: “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”  Peter and the disciples leave their boats and become fishers of men, just as Jesus had promised when he first met them on Galilee’s shores.  Saul leaves off breathing threats and murder against the disciples to become the apostle Paul, risking his life and traveling the world to proclaim the strange good news of a crucified and risen Lord.

Something happened to these people, and John tells us it happened just after daybreak after a long night of fishing.  He writes the story like he was there, as if it had been burned into his memory.  There was a man on the shore, telling them to try casting the net on the other side of the boat.  Of course, this was absurd; a bit of a cruel joke, perhaps—Jesus himself had told them to do this back when he was around.  For some reason, they gave it a try.  Up came the nets with an absolutely ridiculous number of fish—they all stood around and counted later, there were 156—and immediately, John knew.  It was the Lord.  Peter was in his birthday suit, John would never let Peter forget that detail, and he couldn’t even wait for them to row to shore—it was just like Peter, he threw something on and jumped in the lake.

There was the man they knew, the one they had followed and loved.  He’d made a fire.  He cooked them breakfast and ate with them.  Here was no ghost, no symbol, no metaphor, but a man who was hungry and knew how to build a campfire and filet a fish.  John doesn’t tell us if they said anything to each other over breakfast, but I imagine they didn’t.  I imagine it all took some time to sink in.  They had been up all night.  They had just seen him buried not three days before.  Could this be?  Yes, there he was, sitting over by Nathan eating a sandwich—but, could it be?  Could something this good really be true?

There was that, and then there was more.  Maybe he was really back, but could they bear it?  They remembered what he’d said to them, on the night before he died: “Could you not even stay awake with me one hour?”  And, “Before the cock crows, Peter, you will deny me three times.”  He’d trusted them.  But one of their own had betrayed him.  They weren’t worth this good man.  How could they look him in the eye?  What could they possibly say?

Jesus was the one who spoke up.  Three times, once for each time he had denied him, Jesus asked Peter if he loved him.  “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you,” Peter answered.  Jesus didn’t say, “So why did you abandon me?  Why did you deny even knowing who I was?  Weren’t you the one bragging about how you’d die for me?”  No.  That’s probably the kind of thing that you or I might say if we felt abandoned or betrayed.  But that’s not what Jesus said.

Gently, Jesus reminded Peter of the past he was trying to run away from.  He spoke truth, but not to hurt.  He spoke truth to heal.  Jesus came back to Peter as he was, not as Peter should have been.  Jesus gave Peter back his past, as something he didn’t have to be ashamed of anymore.  And Jesus gave back Peter his future, gave him back all of the hopes and plans and loves that he thought had died on the cross, and sent him out on the mission he’d been called for all along.  In that moment of truth and grace, Jesus gave Peter back his life again, and Peter’s life was never the same.

It’s the best evidence we have for the resurrection, in the end—people like Peter and Paul, people whose vision and lives have been transformed, people who have seen with their eyes and touched with their hands the depth of their own sin and need, and the even greater depth of the grace and love of God in Christ.  It’s people who don’t need to run from the truth about their lives, who show mercy to others because Christ has shown mercy to them.  It’s people who don’t have to hide from themselves the truth that they will die, because they know that Christ has defeated death.  It’s people who bear witness to a love so deep you cannot end it, and a life so strong you cannot kill it.  Peter and Paul and the disciples that morning knew the depth of Easter joy: that “neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”  It is with this good news that we are sent out into the world rejoicing.  He is risen.  Alleluia.

The Rev. Jordan Hylden – Fourth Sunday in Lent – Church of St. Michael & St. George

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You have all heard today’s Gospel lesson before. Everyone knows the parable of the prodigal son: it’s all about a lost and wayward son coming home, and about his father welcoming him back with wide-open arms. Except, of course, that that’s not the whole story—Jesus has just as much to say about the older brother as the younger brother. The great preacher Tim Keller says that we shouldn’t call it the parable of the prodigal son, but the parable of the two lost sons, and I think he’s right.  It’s not just a story about one lost son who comes home, but a story about two sons who are lost in different ways, one of them so lost that he doesn’t even know it.

The two lost sons, you see, are the two groups of people standing around when Jesus told this story. Chapter fifteen starts off this way: “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him. And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, ‘This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.’” Jesus heard what they were grumbling about, and as he so often did, he answered with a story.

Let’s be clear: the Pharisees and the scribes had good reason to grumble. To them, Jesus welcoming and eating with these people was nothing less than a moral scandal. Tax collectors were not good people. They were the ones who shook people down to send money to the imperial overlords in Rome, traitors to kin and country who usually skimmed more than a little off the top for themselves. And the sinners were people who had broken the Law and kept on breaking it, and who didn’t go to worship. In Jesus’s day, to eat with someone carried much more meaning than it does for us—it was a highly symbolic act, that meant you approved of their character. It looked as if Jesus were giving the seal of approval to some highly dubious folks. The Pharisees and the scribes, by contrast, cared deeply about God’s law, kept the traditions of their people alive, and in fact were the ones responsible for carrying Judaism forward through the destruction of the Temple all the way down to today. So it’s too simple to see the Pharisees as nothing more than proud and haughty hypocrites. They were good and devout people. And it’s too simple to see the tax collectors and sinners as romantic outcasts. They were, some of them at least, dishonest traitors. So why would Jesus eat with them? Why not give them what they deserve, and lend a hand to the ones who are trying to teach people how to follow the Law, God’s good gift to his people?

That is probably what the Pharisees were grumbling about, standing off to one side as the tax collectors and sinners crowded around Jesus. So, what does Jesus do? Tell the Pharisees they were right, and tell the sinners to take a hike and come back after they’ve cleaned up their act? Or, does he tell the Pharisees off, and say their Law doesn’t matter since God loves us all just the way we are? Well, Jesus said—you see, it’s this way. There once was a man who had two sons.

The youngest son’s story, as Jesus got going, probably sounded familiar to the sinners and tax collectors. My guess is that some of them standing around recognized themselves in the shoes of the younger son in his Las Vegas days. The King James version puts it evocatively: he had, so it says, “wasted his substance in riotous living.” There are many ways to waste one’s substance, some of them more riotous than others, but they all lead to the same place, which is where the prodigal son wound up: alone. Whatever friends he thought he’d made in his good-time days, they clearly weren’t good enough to care that he was starving to death. He’d slammed the door on his family a long time ago. He’d spent his life living for himself, and when you live that way the only people who’ll stick around are the ones who are getting something from you. When your substance runs out, they’re gone, and you find out what a waste it all was. He was lucky to have his substance run out when it did. It brought him to his senses. That doesn’t happen to everyone, and it probably hadn’t happened to all of the tax collectors and sinners standing around. But maybe some of them listened to Jesus, and saw where they were headed, saw the bottom opening up under their feet. To say “I repent” is hard—it often means admitting that following your own path to happiness got you nowhere, that you can’t make it on your own steam, that you need your Father after all. But the prodigal son did. He came to his senses, and he headed off toward home.

Some of the tax collectors and sinners standing there probably heard that part loud and clear, but didn’t think there was any home left to go back to. They’d made their bed and slept in it, and they knew they weren’t welcome where they came from. After all, you can’t go home again. Maybe you can find someplace to move on, but you can’t move back. That would mean confronting the people you hurt, the person you were, the things you’d done. And who could bear it? The past is the past and it’s best left where it is. Some things are just too broken to fix.

That’s what the prodigal son was thinking on his way back home.  He had a little speech rehearsed: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” He doesn’t go back, you see, with any hope of forgiveness, of going back to the way things were before. In his time and place, asking for your inheritance before its time was a deep insult, which basically amounted to saying that he wished his father was dead. He didn’t think he could fix that. He went back because he had no place left to go.

Jesus told the next part of the story for people like him. “While he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he put his arms around him and kissed him.” The son starts giving his little speech, but his dad doesn’t even let him finish it. All Dad hears are the words ‘Father’ and ‘son,’ and that was all he had to hear. “Quickly, bring out his best suit—you know the one, we got it for his brother’s wedding—get him a towel, get him cleaned up, get him something to eat! We’re inviting everyone over right away, tonight. This son of mine is alive again. Son, let’s be clear about one thing right now. I don’t care about where you went or what you did. You came back, and that’s all that matters.”

It can be very hard to say, “I repent.” It can be even harder to believe that you’re really forgiven. Real forgiveness can be hard to come by down here. But Jesus is telling these sinners and tax collector something about the heart of his Father. His Father is the one who watches for them while they’re still far off. In fact his Father does more than watch—he runs out into the road, and sends his own son to journey into the far country, to eat with tax collectors and sinners. St. Paul says that “while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” “In Christ,” Paul says, “God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” How could we ever come home again if not for this? We are able to come, not trusting in our own righteousness, but in our Father’s manifold and great mercies.

The next part of the story is for the Pharisees and the scribes, for good church people like us. We tend to forget about this part—we don’t think of it as the parable of the two lost sons, but the one prodigal son—and I have a hunch about why. My hunch is that we church people are an awful lot more likely to be older brothers than prodigal sons, and that we don’t like Jesus telling us that we’re just as lost as our no-account kid brothers out in California who never did anything serious with their lives except work on their suntans and explore Buddhism. We didn’t go to California and get suntans and explore Eastern spirituality. We stayed in St. Louis and went to church. Shouldn’t we get credit for that?

The older brother would agree. His father is being completely unfair, and he’s absolutely furious about it. He heads home after a hard day of work and sees some kind of party. He probably has a hunch about what’s going on—he doesn’t go inside to see for himself, and he doesn’t ask his dad what’s up. He has someone else find out for him. It’s as he thought. There’s no way he’s coming in, not after what his blackguard brother did to the family. His dad, making a fool out of himself, always letting his brother walk all over him—how could he fall for this again? And it’s not fair. He’d worked hard his whole life, and did that count for anything? Apparently not. His father can hear him shouting from outside: Why can’t I get any respect for what I earned?  For what I earned with my own hands? Why can’t I get what I deserve?

Just like he came out to meet his younger son, his father comes out to meet him too. Come inside, come inside where it’s warm, he says. I know you’re angry. But don’t you see what you’re doing? Your brother wound up cold and alone God knows where, and now he’s back—he’s alive again. Try to forgive him, don’t hold on to this—why should you stay out here by yourself, like he was? And all of this about deserve, deserve. You’ve always been this way, ever since you were a little boy. You’ve worked hard, I know that, don’t think I don’t appreciate it. But don’t you know that I’ve already given you everything? All that I have? My own heart? But all you’ve ever wanted is what you deserve. You never let me give you anything. Come inside, my son—all of this is for you too. Amen.

Fake It Till You Make It – Third Sunday in Lent – Church of St. Michael and St. George

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In the St. Michael School chapel this year, I’ve been telling lots of Bible stories.  The windows in St. George’s Chapel, where we meet, provide vivid images and reminders of God’s history with his people, and I’m grateful for the cheat-sheet!

On our first day back after Christmas break, I was inspired to tell the story of Moses and the burning bush.  I’d been trying to think of a gentle way to talk about reverent behavior during chapel time.  You see, I don’t have any children of my own yet, so I’m still under the false impression that anyone under the age of 15 can sit still and listen for a full five or ten minutes together.  So, I hoped that telling them about the way that God told Moses how to behave around him might stick in their brains the idea that they should behave differently around God’s house, too.

I told them about how God called Moses by name, and how he told Moses to take off his shoes.  To really drag the point home, I tore my heels off in front of them, right in the middle of the chapel.  We talked about what it might be like for us to take off our shoes—not literally, the older children realized, but what a sort of analogous thing might be in our culture and in our way of worshiping.

I asked them what it might mean to take off our sandals.  One child, who has clearly heard the story before, quickly raised his hand and said, “it means respect!”  …As he realized the import of his answer, he sheepishly took off his baseball cap.  Further, he suggested that perhaps we shouldn’t run or yell in the chapel.  Another child said, “Well, the bush told him to!”  She hit on an important point—sometimes we don’t know why we’re asked to do what God says, but being faced with a burning bush, being faced with God’s presence, we can sense it’s something we shouldn’t question.  Like when our parents told us as young children to get down in the basement because of a tornado warning—we may have questioned them about what to wear to school in the morning, but in a moment we know is danger, we simply trust.

I closed by asking them to imagine whenever they came into chapel that there was a burning ball of fire right over the altar—a frightening image that I hoped might help them remember that God’s presence was in chapel with them, and though God’s presence is exciting and wonderful, there are also ways we should honor the place we worship God.

Judging from the running and yelling that went on this week after so many days off of school for snow, I think we still have a ways to go in teaching the children what it’s like to be in God’s presence.

Telling the kids the story of Moses and the burning bush made me think closely and seriously about the ways that we figuratively “take off our shoes” when we come near to God, and what it means for us to “take off our shoes” or to be changed when we enter into God’s presence.  We have to learn how to behave, of course, we don’t do it instinctively, just as was revealed by the children’s responses to my questions.

When I visited our newest parishioner a few weeks ago as a one-day-old baby in the hospital, I quietly knocked on the hospital room door, I slowly and calmly opened the door, I tiptoed toward the new family, and gently asked after their health.  When the moment came, I very carefully took the little baby boy in my arms and spoke to him quietly and soothingly.  This picture is very different from the first time I met my baby brother when I was two and a half years old—my parents had to tell me, “Emily!  Don’t poke his eye out…  Please be gentle!  Don’t scream, speak softly!”  I had to be taught how to behave around a little baby, just as Moses had to be told by God how to behave in his presence, “Moses, take off your sandals.”

We “take off our sandals” by standing when we hear the Gospel proclaimed to us, by kneeling to pray—in a few moments, we will stand together as the celebrant invites us to “lift up [our] hearts unto the Lord” as we begin the Great Thanksgiving and enjoy Communion together.

The game changes when we get close to God—our lives are changed. This is a strange, unnatural, uncomfortable thing, just like it was unnatural for me as a toddler to be quiet and calm and gentle to my baby brother.  It’s become a natural way to behave around little babies, but it wasn’t, at first.  Of course, we’ve learned from the Bible that God isn’t particularly concerned with comfort, he made Moses take off sandals in the middle of the wilderness, for heaven’s sake!

At my last church, in Cooperstown, New York, I met with a parishioner in the local coffeeshop one afternoon.  He was a doctor by trade, but had been very active in the local theater company for decades.  We started talking about all these various actions we take during church services and all the prayers we say every week.  Most of the language is the same week in and week out—how did it help us at all to say the same things over and over?  Drawing in his experience with preparing to play a part in a production, this parishioner wondered if our worship on Sunday mornings was sort of like rehearsing for a play.  He said, “During the last weeks right before performing, you’re practicing your part so often and so fully that the line between your identity and part you’re playing starts to blur.  You take on this person’s mannerisms, attitude, and perspective, you start to become that person.”  The process is uncomfortable at first, it’s not natural, because it’s not who you are, but soon enough, you become comfortable with that character, and it becomes very easy to join in the play.  The result is that when you know the character so well, if something goes wrong on opening night, you can still stay in character because you’ve become that person, and that’s when the fun begins.  When you have practiced so long and so hard, you have become what you’ve practiced being, and you’re able to play.