preached at St. Augustine’s Oak Cliff, May 31, 2020. First in-person service since March 8; outside
“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?
So admitted our president, Donald Trump, last night at the press conference about the extended social distancing guidelines.
I do not believe it is a coincidence that those next two weeks includes Easter, the biggest feast ever of Christian faith.
Maybe the whole generational divide thing is just an invention to create angst. Maybe the Boomer-versus-Millennial trope is false.
But one of the comments I’ve seen around those sorts of arguments in the last few years is that Millennials have a chance to be the next Greatest Generation. It sounds good, doesn’t it? I want to be known as part of a group who were awesome, like my great-grandparents! I bear my great-grandma’s name (Rose), and of everyone in my family, my mom can’t stop talking about my great-grandpa, Tony. They even lived long enough (both of them, to over 100) for me to get to know them pretty well. And they lived small, and lived faithful, and lived well. They lived a lot of sacrifice, and they lived a lot of love, and they lived a lot of tough times.
So, here’s the thing, Millennials. We can’t just slide into being Great. We can’t just trip into the DMs of history.
Last year at Lent, I was pregnant. This year, I’m in the throes of nursing. One of these has been the case for the last FIVE Lents.
At first, I felt like I had a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card. A few years in, I came to admit that really, it’s more about spiritual disciplines, not like, whether I eat meat or not, so the stipulation of pregnant and nursing mothers being excused wasn’t really an excuse at all.
And now, I’ve come to a new conclusion: we’re fasting all the damned time. Continue reading
I have bad news: the Kingdom of God is not like Burger King.
Really, this is Good News, we might even say it’s the Good News, but just like the questioners in John’s Gospel this morning, I wonder if we often expect that the Kingdom of God, that the way of Jesus, that the call of the Cross, will be somewhat more familiar than it is, that the habits we’re called to take up would fit a bit more seamlessly into our lives as is, that the modes of thinking and talking and relating that God often inhabits himself would be a bit more accessible, comfortable, more common sensical to our current proclivities and desires.
“Tell us plainly,” they say, “are you the Christ?” Remember, these are not strangers off the street, they are not pagans who have never heard a word of Scripture in their lives, they are not even worshippers of some other religion, used to sacred words but not familiar with the proclamations of the God Yahweh. These are people who have heard the words of the God of the burning bush and of the great prophets since they could understand language, and probably even before that; the voice of God ought to be one of the most familiar to their ears, one of the most identifiable to their minds and hearts, and yet as they are faced with the very Son of God, the man who proclaims, “the Father and I are one,” they eye him suspiciously — even more than that, the verse after our Gospel lesson ends today, their response to his saying that he’s one with God, is to pick stones up to kill him. No joke. Continue reading
