“And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.” (Mark 1)

Posted on 12 December, 2023 by Emily

Can you imagine being eager to repent of your sins? Are you one who would have rushed into the wilderness, hopped in your car and high-tailed it to Cameron Parish, if you’d heard that some prophet had showed up there and was baptizing people?

That sounds nice for other people. Maybe somebody else needs to go unburden themselves, but I’m okay right here. God can change a heart from anywhere, he doesn’t need me to go to Cameron parish or West Texas or Honduras to find salvation and listen to some fire and brimstone preacher. I can repent just fine right here in the quiet of my pew, without any histrionics or wailing or embarrassing outbursts. We have order – we are Episcopalians, for goodness’ sake.

But it’s not really about being Episcopalian or avoiding uncomfortable shows of emotion. It’s about fear, isn’t it? I wonder if we might be afraid of what God requires of us in judgment.

Last week at the 8:30am service, Fr. Jake preached to open the Advent season, and he relayed a striking image from a C.S. Lewis novel that opened to us the way it might look when Jesus comes to judge and cleanse us. I think it might have looked different than we expected.

So maybe that’s a good question to ask: what do we expect the exposing and purging of our sins to look like?

Did any of you see the Anne of Green Gables with Megan Follows from the 1980s? (Who didn’t?!) There’s a scene where she’s a teacher trying to inspire her drama students to really get into playing Mary Queen of Scots, and she throws herself across the stage to cling to the skirts of whoever the other character is, maybe Queen Elizabeth the First, and yells, “Save me, sweet lady!” That’s one of the first images that bursts to my mind about begging for forgiveness. The debasing oneself, the physical and figurative lowering toward the dust. T

And we can easily imagine, too, the way that we might have experienced confession and punishment growing up – a stern voice saying, “well, tell me what you did wrong.” That hot, prickly feeling on your neck and back, maybe even bowing your head in shame and sadness in this expectant silence. Perhaps there were physical consequences too, privileges removed, or pain inflicted to help teach us a lesson.

Our world judges wrong in courtrooms, with testimonies and standing up alone in the truth or in sin. We are not so far removed, only a few hundred years, from pillories and the cutting off of ears or hands.

Gosh, who would want to invite that kind of awful pain, and to be exacted from the Lord of Lords – the almighty one of ultimate power. What excruciating destruction he could bring to our lives! Surely it’s more than we could even imagine.

Yes, I would be one of those who would demur the invitation to go and be cleansed in the wilderness. I am not eager to have my sins nailed up next to me, or to have a scarlet letter sewn to my shirt, or to serve a sentence in a dank dungeon. Nobody really does, right?

So I wonder if the exposing and purging of our sins for Jesus’ sake might look different than what we expect. I wonder if Jesus’s redemption and facing of our faults might be surprising in view of what the world teaches us that restitution looks like.

Consider: back in the garden, when Adam and Eve had disobeyed, God sought them in the cool of the day. He didn’t come immediately the moment he knew they’d sinned. He didn’t stomp over and throw lightning bolts, he didn’t nail them up to a cross literally or figuratively, he didn’t even slap their behinds or waggle his fingers at them. With compassion and regret, he laid out the consequences of their actions; I get the sense that if it had been possible to ignore the price of their actions, he would have, but you see, they’d made a choice to not-trust God, and from that point, God still wanted to protect them as much as he could, and so the consequences provided a sort of boundary line to do what he could to keep them safe while being in the wide world.

Later, we see in the Gospels how Jesus interacts with those who come to him with humility, knowing their sins. Often these are the people who society reminds of their shortcomings all the day long. But Jesus doesn’t pile on with the cultural expectations of shunning tax collectors and ignoring prostitutes. Those who recognize their imperfections, those who are humble about their sins, those who come to Jesus holding their sins out in front of them, are received how?

Jesus looks with compassion, Jesus takes time to sit with these people. Jesus gently wipes their tears and listens to their burdens and pronounces them forgiven.

This isn’t the shunning or shaming we might expect. This isn’t the hot anger and lightning bolts that we often assume power will wield. This God revealed in Jesus Christ deals gently with those who recognize their darkness and who seek to heal from evil. And that’s the difference, isn’t it? I wonder whether the people who went out from Judea and all the surrounding countryside and who poured out from Jerusalem were the ones who knew they were already in darkness and already mired in the wilderness of sin.

I wonder whether these people who sought John the Baptist and his cleansing in the river Jordan recognized that the trip to the wilderness was really not so much geographical as it was spiritual. And that they were, in truth, already there.

Already in the wilderness. Already lost and parched. Already feeling heavy and burdened by the weight of their lives. Already wandering in guilt and regret. I wonder whether any of this feels familiar to you.

What we find in Scripture, not least in the prophecy from Isaiah this morning, is that this God, unlike rulers in the world or idols of ancient times, uses his great power when he’s doing good, not when he’s meting out consequences. The God revealed in Jesus Christ is a God of mercy, the prophet Hosea tells us, and when “he comes with might, and his arm rules for him, his reward is with him… he will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms.” This God is abundant in his power for mercy, for gentleness and nourishment, for forgiveness, for light and health and thriving and hope.

The powers of this world are harsh and dark and full of punishment. The consequences are dire – the wages of sin is death – but the gift of God is eternal life. God’s kingdom, the ruling order that Jesus ushers in through the incarnation, is founded on the power of God’s love, not the power of pain or punishment or shame or evil. So as we approach God’s throne of grace, our confession of sin need not be fearful or defensive. We may rest knowing that the purging of our sins will hurt only in so far as it is hard to extricate ourselves from darkness, and that the love of God is a cleansing, healing salve to our sin-sick souls.

Sermon for All Saints Sunday

Posted on 5 November, 2023 by Emily

Revelation 7:9-17 + Matthew 5:1-12

Sitting down to write this sermon was the first time I’d spent any time at my desk since the first week of October. My monthly desk-blotter calendar was still showing “October” as I spread out my Bible and print outs. And I just couldn’t start writing. I texted Jordan, I texted Jillian, another friend who is also preaching this week called me and we talked. I even started a load of towels to strip in the bathtub.

When I came back to my desk, I looked again at the calendar. As y’all may know, I spent a week of October, fully 7 days, in the hospital at Women’s and Children’s with Jacob who was battling RSV. He was baptized last year on All Saints Sunday, and as I’ve grown, I’ve found that our lives and experiences and feelings are cyclical. Is there a time of year that always feels heavier to you? Is there a season that brings up twinges or tickling in your chest, a joy or sentimental nostalgia? Sometimes I’ll even find on specific days that my body feels more achy or I have a headache that I can’t shake, and then I’ll realize that on that day 10 years ago my grandpa died or I graduated from college, or some other big event, happy or sad, took place and I hadn’t really recalled it, but some part of my body, my being, knew it was happening, and was even remembering the impact of that event on my life while my brain forgot it.

I love that God made our selves so complex and so memorable that pieces of us will be sensitive to God’s movement even when our minds are oblivious.

And so as I sat down to write this sermon, I realized, staring at that calendar, that my body and spirit needed a little acknowledgement of what had transpired in our family in the last month. So I got a pen, and I drew an arrow through the seven days that Jacob and I spent in a tiny room, hooked up to oxygen. I wrote, “Hospital” “Jacob in the Hospital” under the arrow, and then I just looked at the paper. I took a few deep breaths, I told myself “that was a big chunk of the month.” “That really broke up October.” “You didn’t think that would happen again this year.”

And after a few more breaths – I love to think of breathing as a way to acknowledge the Holy Spirit, in both Hebrew and Greek the original languages of the Bible, the words used to name the Holy Spirit “ru’ah” and “pneuma” are words for breath, for breathing. After a few breaths, I rolled my shoulders, tore off the “October” page, and set down to read and write again. I felt better. It’s a way I was able to feel the bigness of what October had meant for our family, a way to give space for and honor the grief and fear and powerlessness and restlessness of that month. And then, a way to let it go.

Y’all will know from your own experiences and your own lives, it’s not over, the feelings and grief of our hospital stay and of our child’s illness will come up again in some other way, spurred by something else, and it’ll be my work then to listen again, slow down and welcome the stirrings that pull at me.

I tell you all this because we find echoes in today’s Scriptures, too, and we will each hear ripples that might slosh at us sideways in the liturgy today, maybe in the names prayed for and listed in our bulletins, maybe in the memories of baptisms-past, maybe in the way the light angles through the windows at this time of year. And I pray, my precious brothers and sisters, that when these stirrings pop up, whether they bring waves of joy or grief or headache or achiness or ease, that just as you welcome visitors into your home, you will welcome these movements of the Holy Spirit, that you will ask them to sit down and stay awhile, that you’ll have the courage to sit and listen and learn from these visitors that the Holy Spirit has sent to you. With that in mind, let’s turn to the readings for today.

“After this I, John, looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying,

“Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God.”

I hear an echo from Babel here. Do you remember that story? Way back in Genesis, before Abraham, before Moses and all the prophets, God saw that people were putting themselves up as idols, as the center of the universe, and he made different languages and scattered the people to protect them from themselves. Of course a consequence of that has been our division and strife against each other tribe since. But here in Revelation, at the end of time, we read that it won’t be that way anymore. That people from every nation all tribes and peoples and languages will be gathered and oriented toward the real king, the true center of the universe, of all creation, which is God, and the Lamb, Jesus. This echo of grief, of division that’s written in our bones as humans, that longs for connection instead of misunderstanding and isolation, will be put right, will be overcome, only by God and through his grace.

Later in that same passage, somebody tells John, the writer who is relaying this vision:

“For this reason they are before the throne of God,

and worship him day and night within his temple,

and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them.

They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;

the sun will not strike them,

nor any scorching heat;

for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,

and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,

and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

Do you recognize that? Did those words stir in you? We hear here prophecies from Isaiah and from the Psalms. You may remember from Isaiah 4 the lines about being sheltered by the one on the throne; you may recall from Psalms 49 and 121 the promises that no one will hunger or thirst anymore; you may hear the echo from Isaiah 25 the vow that God will wipe away every tear from every eye. I wonder if you’ve had moments, or glimmers of these truths in your own life, a sort of little promise or little fulfillment of God’s goodness and grace as we still await God’s big overhaul of evil’s eradication from existence.

Leaving the hospital surely felt like a little fulfillment, lying in my bed that night with all my boys under the same roof surely felt like a small grace and a moment to cherish and note and welcome into my house and listen to. *take a breath* Do you have those, too?

Then as we move to the Gospel lesson for today, those ladies in the Luke Bible study will have heard big echoes everywhere in these 12 verses. These passages are shared almost verbatim in Luke as here in Matthew, with a few notable adjustments. Y’all don’t have to be part of the Bible study for them to be familiar words, and maybe you remember another sermon you’ve heard on these words. Maybe you recall your momma quoting them as she instructed your behavior as a child. Maybe you feel unsettled, wondering what persecution for righteousness’ sake might require of you.

God, in inspiring the composition of Scripture, intends for these echoes to poke at us, to reveal himself to us ever more deeply, to resonate on both deep intellectual levels and on levels in us that are too deep and hidden for words at all. Do you know that verse from Romans, about prayer and the Holy Spirit? “Likewise, the Spirit, helps us in our weakness. For we do not know what to pray for as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.”

When our sighings are too deep for words, when our grief or echoes of love are too strong for us to stay standing, when our joy is too mighty to keep from splitting into a smile, may God the Holy Spirit help us in our weakness, in our fear or freeze in the face of such power so near us. May God the Holy Spirit intercede for us, drawing us along with him in prayer as we offer these echoes of holy stirrings back to God himself. May God give us courage to sit still with the memories that he offers us, may God be present with us – just as he promises he always will be through the cross – as we seek to learn what it is that God reveals to us about himself in our hearts, in our families, in our communities, and in our world. Amen.

It’s the Hope I Can’t Stand

Posted on 29 November, 2022 by Emily

I preached this sermon three years ago this week — we were hardly 3 months out from the pandemic which would shake up the world. I read it this week, hoping to steal from myself for this coming week’s sermon, but I found it was a word so closely woven to the time and place in which it was first given that I cannot hope to effectively reuse it. I share it here, now, as a marker of grief for the community I miss so dearly, and as a witness to the hope I still hold in Jesus Christ.

Delivered Advent 2, 2019, at St. Augustine’s Oak Cliff, in Dallas, Texas.

This past week, John Cleese accepted an award at the Texas Theater, just up on Jefferson Boulevard; he’s the British comedian behind Monty Python and Fawlty Towers, but my favorite thing about him, the quotation I call upon again and again in my life, is as his character Brian Stimpson in the movie Clockwise from 1986, he says: “It’s not the despair, Laura. I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.”

It’s not the despair that will get you down, not the depression and the darkness that will sock you in the gut. We’re so used to the dark, we’re so accustomed to evil, we’re so habituated into sin — it’s when hope breaks through and when joy bubbles up, and when peace descends, that we are undone, we are broken apart, we are rent asunder.

Last week I was teaching the little ones during the sermon, but I hear that Fr. Jordan preached on death and judgment — aren’t we glad he’s headed to full-time work at the diocese in two weeks?! — so this week, I’ll preach on hope. Which actually might be more brutal than death and judgment, if we take John Cleese seriously.

Both of us, Fr. Jordan and me, are taking ques from the history of our church and tradition — last week he tackled two of the “Four Last Things,” death, judgment, heaven, and hell. Standing in the ancient tradition of millenia, sermons and spiritual devotion often focuses on these end-of-life, end-of-time matters during the season of Advent, the season of waiting — waiting for God to come in flesh, waiting for God to come again and make all things right.

A more modern take on the four weeks of Advent is to focus on Hope, Peace, Joy, and Love. Sometimes, these have been interpreted as a capitulation to a squeamish and soft church that have lost their sense of urgency, of hard truth, and of austere devotion to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This pastel-tinged and sweet, fuzzy understanding of these virtues avoids the depth of these concepts — the real, fleshy, terrifying incarnation of God’s character in a man, Jesus, fully God, fully revealed of hope, peace, joy, and love, and fully man.

Advent, then, is a moment that calls us to stare back, to look full in the face, at the miracle and seeming impossibility of a life so transformed by these virtues that their identity is changed, his name is new, that she is a new creation. This happens through the slow and painful work of obedience and submission, or put another way, the work of constant, continunal openness to change, change in ones convictions, change in one’s lifestyle, change in one’s relationships, until the old is so far away as to be a different person altogether.

Isaiah picks up on this theme in our Old Testament lesson today; he’s speaking this message to a people who are in a precarious political situation, under an unjust king, divided against their brothers in the Northern Kingdom of Israel. These two parts of God’s people have taken opposite sides in a dispute with Assyria and Aram; Isaiah grieves for the people who are torn apart and who are being led into disaster. More than just lamenting, though, Isaiah trusts in hope that God will make all things right, will bring a good leader back to his people, and will somehow bring the divided family of God back together.

This poem that Isaiah delivers from the whisper of God in his ear and heart isn’t just about Jesus, which is the way we read it most often today, but was more immediately about Isaiah’s hope for the next king of his people, Hezekiah. History tells us that Isaiah’s hope was exactly realized in that man, Hezekiah, and the second part of the poem we read today hints that Isaiah himself might have started to realize that, too; as he talks about these age-old enemies, the snake and the baby, the wolf and the sheep, the calf and the lion, resting and playing not just side-by-side, but together, with one another. Isaiah describes an ultimate reunion, not just bringing together pieces of God’s people who have been divided politically into the Northern and Southern kingdoms at this point in Isaiah’s history, but bringing together created beings that have been enemies since the fall, since almost the very beginning. It’s a stunning image of hope.

And yet, what do we see when we look around us? What if we were to put a little calf into the lion enclosure in the Dallas zoo? I don’t expect that we would see them snuggling up against the cold, or grooming one another, unless it was the lion preparing his own meal. So what our eyes tell us when we look at the world, when we gaze around creation, when we experience death or when illness or infertility or poverty or anger and betrayal overcome us and our lives, is that despair is safer, darkness is more certain, at least we can count on evil, at least we know what to expect when we depend on sin.

I think that’s what John Cleese’s character is getting at. Hope is heartbreaking, because of when we see it fail in front of our eyes. And we see it fail so, so often — or at least this pessimist does. I see beloved friends with cancer, I struggle with the echoes of brokenness from my parents’ divorce when I was an infant, I watch poverty and addiction eat up children of God. It’s not the despair, it’s the hope that I can’t stand.

How can we expect, or hope for, anything different? How can we pretend that death doesn’t prowl and pounce and prey upon us? How can we imagine that we live in a world where we are not locked in darkness? It’s not the despair. It’s the hope that I can’t stand.

“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone.” Isaiah (9:2) said that, too. In saying so, even as he’s realizing that the next guy in line for the throne probably won’t be the great redeemer that the people need, Isaiah is reaching forward, realizing as he says it, that God’s story and God’s timeline is bigger and longer and more complex and more full than any one group of people or any one piece of time.

Just as the glimmers of light blind us after we’ve become accustomed to the dark, stinging our eyes, and burning our senses; as a people who are surrounded by darkness, by sin, and by death, the hope indeed, is hard to stand. It is hard to believe, and it is hard to surrender to. But Isaiah tells his people, and tells us today, “A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,” that is, out of the heritage of the great King David — who wasn’t perfect either! And this shoot, who we read as Jesus, and who Isaiah hopes might be Hezekiah, and if not him, someone else who is so full of God’s presence that he might have “the spirit of the Lord” resting “on him,” this hoped-for rescuer will do what we, too, are called by Isaiah, and by God himself to do — look at verse 3 — “He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear.”

We see the lion attacking the calf; we see addiction overcoming the will of our loved ones; we see cancer or illness or age wasting away the bodies of our friends; we see death prowl. But what our eyes see and what our ears hear is not the ultimate truth, is not the most trustworthy revelation, is not the reality of the kingdom of God.

And there’s a hint of it right here, my brothers and sisters, and it’s why we come to church each Sunday, to be reminded that what we see out there is not the final word, is not where our hope rests, is not the reality that we’re called to place our faith and hope in.

Look around you right now: the world tells us that people with different skin colors don’t belong together on Sunday mornings. That is not God’s reality. The Kingdom of God is made of all nations, and that is what happens here, at the foot of the cross, every Sunday morning.

The world tells us that your worth is based on what you produce, the money you make, or the art you create, or the investment you make in others, or the care you take of yourself. The Kingdom of God tells us that your age, your social standing, your marital status, your level of employment, your home address, your blood pressure reading, none of these things has any claim on your worth or your hope.

The worth of a person in the Kingdom of God is based on what God thinks of a person, and my brothers and sisters, hear the Good News of Hope: God gave his life for you. God thinks you are worth the price of his own life and breath. God’s love for you is so great, based on nothing but your existence, your creation, your breathing, that he would, and indeed, he did, die for you.

That is what we see here, it is the truth, it is our hope, and God is making those promises of his true in our midst, this very morning. Thanks be to God.

Pentecost

Posted on 31 May, 2020 by Emily

preached at St. Augustine’s Oak Cliff, May 31, 2020. First in-person service since March 8; outside

Acts 2:1-21

John 20:19-23

“All together in one place” — but we’re not all together. George Floyd isn’t here. Breonna Taylor isn’t here. Ahmaud Arbery isn’t here. Elnora’s Momma isn’t here — she’s died and gone to heaven, my friend Mike Boone isn’t here — he died in his sleep this past week at 35. And plenty more of our own stay at home to stay alive.

The mystery of this passage. Will we all be together in one place again?

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Running Water

Posted on 10 May, 2019 by Emily

A sermon for the fifth Sunday in Lent. Isaiah 43:16-21

When I get thirsty, I walk over to the cabinet and grab a glass from my line of clean dishes, I meander to the closest of several sinks in my house or in the office, I flick the knob with my wrist, and “ahh,” my thirst is quenched.

Even a hundred years ago, on my great-grandmother’s farmstead in Minnesota, the very most she’d need to do — even in April — was pull on boots and coat, grab a bucket, and trudge across the yard to the water pump, work the handle a few times with vigor, and then enjoy fresh water from the depths of the earth.

The ingenuity of our forebears, the clever and brilliant inventors of our past, have brought unimaginable convenience and immediacy to our lives. Even in our dry season, hoses still spout water for home gardeners, we don’t get concerned that our rivers might leave us without a way to feed our plants, let alone to quench our own thirst. And so, this word from Isaiah, beautiful and evocative though it may be, suffers the risk of remaining in our ears and in our minds, not moving all the way into our hearts and our bodies, because with roads spanning our massive country — even our ponderous state — there’s no real need for a “way in the wilderness,” or for “rivers in the desert.” Except for fleeting, dramatic circumstances (perhaps!), most of us has never needed “water in the wilderness,” or been dependent on some divine being to be given drink to quench our thirst. Continue reading →

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