Category Archives: Sermons

All Called “Good”

Baptismal Covenant, Christmas, Incarnation, John, Sermons

Christmas 1
John 1:1-18

Preached on December 31, 2017 at St Mark’s Episcopal Church in Basking Ridge, NJ.

 

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Christmas is one of the primary feasts in our church life, and it lasts twelve whole days.  I love that beautiful Christmas story we hear: It’s the story of, as we hear in John’s gospel today, the Word becoming flesh and living among us. Mary and Joseph journeyed all the way to Bethlehem to welcome the Christ Child in a barn, because that’s all our God needed, even with the same frail human flesh we have.  This is Jesus Christ: the Light of the World, who doesn’t need anything more than a humble space in our hearts to outshine the darkness of our world, even on these cold, winter nights.

Growing up, every few years my parents and I would go to visit my dad’s family in Mississippi for Christmas. I would always stay with my aunt, uncle, and cousins. When I was a teenager, they got a cat: Duke. Duke was a strawberry blonde tabby cat who liked to sneak out of the house and get in fights with other cats. He was, as many cats are, adorable, but he was also cool and aloof and neurotic…. And very proud. He did NOT like to be held. However, late at night, when we were all asleep, Duke would sneak up to someone for a visit. I vividly remember waking up in the middle of the night from deep sleep to someone tapping me on the should. I’d been lying on my side and as soon as I rolled onto my back to see what was happening, the culprit, Duke, would hope onto my chest to demand attention. I’d pet him and he’d purr, only content to be so affectionate in the middle of the night, when he thought I might not be able to see or remember. For all of his tomcat pride and prowess, Duke needed to feel a loving hand on his back sometimes, just as much as each of us does.

As Christians and people of community, we already know that none of us exist in a vacuum…although all of us came from one.

Today’s gospel passage from the first chapter of John begins “In the beginning was the Word;” John speaks of Christ much as the Book of Genesis speaks of Creation. In the beginning, the earth was a formless void, and the first thing God created was light, separating light from darkness. As we’re reminded in the poetry of today’s gospel from John, God created light to shine in the darkness. God called that light – and everything else that God lovingly made (and sometimes perfected through evolution) – GOOD. What God creates is Good. What God creates is never lacking.  What God creates is always enough. Any voice that says otherwise is not God’s voice

What God creates always enough to outshine the darkness. And God created this whole beautiful world, and then decided that this world needed each and every one of us. Because the Word was God; these four words from John’s gospel today remind us that God is part of all things God calls into being. God is part of all of us, just as we are reminded in our baptism that there is a piece of Christ in every human soul. The Word in every human heart. God’s love in every human skin.

The poetry of today’s gospel passage is beautiful, and at times confusing, but some things are made quite clear; “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” That is what happened on Christmas. Love came down, and Christ was born of a woman. God came and was born as a baby. The infant Jesus needed to be held and fed and cleaned by human hands just as we did at our birth. Because part of humanity is that we need the love and care of others in order to grow and then, accordingly, we are called to sow this love into the world, too. Sometimes, just like Duke the cat, we all need a loving hand on our back to make it through the long cold night. Through the Light of the World, love shines in the darkness, and the darkness does not overcome it.

The Christmas moment where God took on frail human flesh is the incarnation – it’s central to our faith. Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension – aka the Easter promise that ensures forgiveness of all our sins – first required our fully divine God to also be fully human: frail, beautiful, and lovingly-made, just like each and every one of us.

In my daily journeys throughout this world we live in, I am on the receiving a lot of messages about human bodies and a few more specific ones about my own. As a society, we’re quick to label certain people’s bodies as perfect (cough only God is perfect cough), even though images these same bodies are then airbrushed before they can be published. Even our standards of beauty don’t make sense. We’ve definitely got some work to do, and we are starting to do it. On a very large scale, we’re finally starting to have some much overdue conversations about appropriate ways to talk about and engage with each other about our human bodies: their shapes, sizes, genders, colors, ages. As a society, we’re taking steps, but it’s going to take some time.  And all the messages we get about our bodies not being “good enough” go directly against what we read in Genesis; where God called humanity into being and called us “good.” Both John’s Gospel and Genesis teach us the even in this darkness, the light shines. The light shines and the darkness does not overcome it.

In our baptism and confirmation, we all promise to seek and serve Christ in all people. All people includes humans who do things like cut us off in traffic or give us the stink eye or who offer unwanted commentary on our bodies. All people includes those who incite feelings of shame in us, and therefore, all people can include ourselves. Sometimes we forget what we’ve learned from God and what we’ve read in Genesis and John. Sometimes we’re tempted to look at our imperfect human hearts and imperfect human bodies and think one or the other is not “good enough”. But seeking and serving the Christ in all people includes the Christ in ourselves, in our unique and imperfect human hearts and bodies, all shaped by God in Creation. All called “good” by God; any voice that says otherwise comes from somewhere else – somewhere dark. Lucky for us, John reminds us today that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.

And the light we’re talking about – that’s the light of Christmas – That’s Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ: The Light of World, whose love will shine into every dark, sad, shame-filled corner of our hearts, if we’re open to letting Him in. Jesus Christ, fully divine and fully human, took on frail human flesh to help us love better. God believed a human body could help us learn to love each other better, and nowhere in our gospels is there a single reference to any sort of divine height, weight, or six pack. The Christmas Story is about love, a God who loved the world so much that God took on flesh and dwelt among us in a human body just like ours. Following Christ means embodying the light of this love every day. It means loving our neighbors and ourselves just as God does: one character flaw, one laugh line, and one lovingly-crafted human heart at a time.

 

 

Love & The Wound: What Howard Gardner and the Grinch have to do with Epiphany 6

Epiphany, Matthew, Sermons
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Matthew 5:21-37
Psalm 119:1-8
Preached on February 12, 2017 at the Church of the Holy Cross, North Plainfield, NJ

Happy are they who seek the Lord with all their hearts.[1]

As I was meditating on today’s scriptures and their common thread of upholding the law, I noticed that this is not the only thing they have in common; in today’s scripture passages, we hear a lot about minding our hearts. Now, I’m not talking about minding our hearts in the Valentine’s Day sense, although all of this heart talk is seasonally appropriate. I’m talking about not getting stuck in our heads  – on reason alone – when we’re trying to think through something in a world that requires a focus on something greater. Interestingly enough, it’s the scripture passage that doesn’t use the word “heart” that captures this best.

The only reading today in which the word “heart” doesn’t appear is the reading from 1st Corinthians. Typical, that Paul would be difficult. I guess that’s how we know that the Holy Spirit is there though, isn’t it? 1 Corinthians best PR [2] is the passage about love that people read for weddings or write in Valentine’s, but this letter – and the rest of the New Testament letters – are about so much more. The letters from Paul that we read in scripture are the story of the early church being formed. The leaders who are persecuted in Acts are persecuted because they dared travel from city to city in the early world and proclaim the gospel and convert people to way of Jesus Christ. Our church’s bold commitment to being counter-culture is in our deepest roots.  The city of Corinth, the destination of the letter we’re reading from today, was a key city in Greece, but for all of Paul’s evangelism, he couldn’t stay there forever. That just wasn’t his call. Nevertheless, he writes to the people of Corinth as his brothers and sisters in Christ to help them mend their hearts. In the first half of today’s New Testament reading, we hear that there is division among the people of the Church in Corinth. Paul cautions us against a way of life focused only on “human inclinations” – followed our own individual agendas to best take care of ourselves as individuals. In order to avoid jealousy, quarrelling, and other things that cause us to sin by dividing us from our neighbors, we need to focus on God’s agenda. As Paul writes to the people of Corinth in today’s passage, for all of the good work of humans to found the church and share the fellowship, it is always God who makes our faith grow and who calls us to live and love more richly by following Christ [319]

We are each given minds that work in different and beautiful ways, as developmental psychologist Howard Gardner addressed in his brilliant work on the eight-to-ten different kinds of intelligences he believes we all possess in different quantities, but in addition to our ability to reason in whatever type of intelligence God has given us, we must also be careful stewards of our hearts. After all, in today’s reading from Deuteronomy, what keeps the Israelites from hearing God and living into God’s commandments isn’t their ears or their mind’s ability to process the words.[3] What the Israelites are told to do is to keep their hearts turned to God above all. Our hearts know whether we are keeping God’s commandments because they can feel whether what we’re doing is good and is bringing us closer to God or whether what we’re doing is sin and is causing division.

In a few days it will be Valentine’s Day, the pressures of which can be challenging. Couples can enjoy hearts-and-candy bliss, if they can rise above the pressures of perfection. Those of us not part of a couple can enjoy a day spent with beloved family or friends, celebrating other kinds of love, but for anyone who is struggling with loneliness or recovering for a particularly potent heartbreak, the day can be filled with sadness or misery, accentuating feelings of loneliness , invisibility, or simply being “not good enough.”

Loneliness is also common at Christmas time, a fact that is easy to forget in spite of hearing stories like “A Christmas Carol” or “How the Grinch Stole Christmas”. The Grinch, whose bitterness from one bad day, one bad turn, one rough morning commute, one time he encountered a problem before his morning tea turned into a bitter, grumpy, grinchy-ness with so much unprocessed grief and anger that his heart turned away from God  – that’s how, over time, a heart can shrink down to two sizes too small. Clearly, the Grinch didn’t come to church and listen to sermons that called him to be Christmas everyday; after all, he could hardly stand the one.

The Grinch had deep-seated wounds.  Though we do not know what the cause of these wounds are they are wounds that kept him from being in community. They were wounds that kept him from accepting what good about him.  They were wounds that convinced him that others did not accept him for who he was, so he lived alone with his dog, max.  The Grinch’s insecurity around these wounds gave him the kind of bitter thoughts that Matthew cautions us against in today’s gospel passage – the kind that poison our hearts.[4]

All of this poison in his heart made him steal Christmas from every Who in Whoville, but what makes this story so beautiful is how it backfired. For all of the things that the Grinch stole, he couldn’t steal what irked him most about Christmas: the part where every Who gathered together and held hands and sang out joyfully. See, every Who who sang knew what mattered, what brings us together every week: the Love. I remember standing on those blue steps in Junior Choir and singing “Love the Lord will all your heart and soul and mind and strength. I will love the Lord with all I am.” Whole self love. Love with an open heart for the Holy Spirit to descend like a dove and help us grow with God. Love that transforms. The collective love of every Who in Whoville helped transform the Grinch, whose heart grew three sizes that day, wide open, transformed by love, and swelling with space for the Holy Spirit to work through him and love him, with the beautiful grace we live into each Sunday when we, too, pray for the forgiveness of our sins.

Last week, I revealed to you all how when my own job search dragged on. For a time, I struggled to keep my insecurities from poisoning me by making me believe that I wasn’t good enough.  “Not enough” is not in our God’s vocabulary and it is not a phrase that will bring us into a deeper relationship with our Creator. Like Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences teaches us that there are many ways to try to qualify the beauty of a brain, we as followers of Christ must remember that our God fed five thousand people with two fish and created us in perfect, Goldilocks approved, just-right proportions, whether we are part of a pair or not.

Like the Grinch, we each carry around our own wounds. And like the Grinch we can choose to hold on to them or let them go.  We can choose to work through them or let them work on us.  We can choose to walk with them or flee from them.  If we choose to face our wounds and walk with them then we are able to discover that we are loved by God just as we are, and that the Holy Spirit, in a mysterious way, is living at the center of the wound, descending upon us all like a dove even when things get messy and loving us with a love that transforms even with all of our imperfections.

So just how do you walk with wounds that are so deep and so alienating?  The answer Paul gives is Christ and the crucifixion.  Christ who understands and identifies with our loneliness.  Christ who carries our wounds. And by doing so, shows us the God who loves us.  It is in Christ that we can learn we belong – belong to a community of the wounded.  It is in Christ that we learn that we are loved, in spite of our woundedness.   And it is in the community of the wounded who encounter the living God in Christ, in whom we are healed, through our life together; our shared journey; our open, swelling, hearts; and our Baptism.  Baptism reminds us of the story of God’s love that comes to us amid our woundedness to give us healing and life. Baptism, just like weeping, requires water. It also reminds us of dying and rising with Christ, whose ugly death in the wounds of the crucifixion was a necessary stop on the journey to resurrection, and sets us on a path of walking with our woundedness in order to find life therein.

So as you walk through those doors today, walk boldly in all your strength from God and all of the imperfections of your wounds, knowing the Holy Spirit can descend upon your heart in joy or in pain. As the psalmist writes, Happy are we who seek the Lord will all our hearts[5]: all our hearts and souls and minds and strength. All our love. All God’s love. All that we are, wounds included.

[1] Psalm 119:2

[2] 1 Corinthians 13

[3] Deuteronomy 30:15-20

[4] Matthew 5:21-37

[5] Psalm 119:2

Home is Where Your Light Shines

Epiphany, Matthew, Sermons

Year A, Epiphany 5: Matthew 5:13-20
Sunday, February 5, 2017: The Church of the Holy Cross, North Plainfield NJ

“You are the light of the world…Let your light shine”[1]

In today’s gospel passage from Matthew, we hear some of Christ’s teachings from what happens after the Sermon on the Mount. In anticipation of his crucifixion and resurrection, Christ calls us as his followers to be the light of the world – to be the light of Christ in a world where it is always tempting to give in the darkness of things like hopelessness and unkindness. We are called to be bright. As humans, nothing we give light to in our physical world is meant to be hidden. We don’t use candles, headlights, and lamps just to hide them in a box to be left unseen. When we give something light, we expect it cast its glow all around. Doesn’t it stand to reason that God expects us to shine with the light God has bestowed on us as well? When God called light into being in Genesis, God called that light good.

Christ tells us today that we are the light of the world. (Think about how beautiful that sounds). It is our great gift and our responsibility to let our light shine.

I know that it can be tempting to feel self-conscious about shining, but think about all of the times someone else shining has made you brighter. Let me tell you about a time that someone’s light left a lasting glow on me:

In my second semester of college, I sat behind a woman named Tanya in my history class. We didn’t interact much, mostly in a “talk to the person next to you” kind of way or in the venting mutual frustrations before-or-after class kind of way…but we interacted enough that I recognized her when I ended up sitting next to her again in a literature class the following fall. This time, we spent more out-of-class time together as study buddies and collaborators on group projects, where we balanced academics with cobbler-baking and movie-watching. Still, our friendship didn’t really stick until our third class together during my third year at Delaware. This time, our cobbler-centric study parties extended beyond the semester and our time together became less and less focused on studying.. and more and more on being good friends. When I shared with Tanya my discernment of feeling called towards the priesthood, it didn’t shutdown or redirect our conversations. Instead, it deepened them. As we talked about how we each experienced Christ in our lives, I felt called to invite Tanya to church. She’s maybe the second person I’d ever invited to church and having her join our campus ministry made it a richer experience for our small but mighty student community as well as St Thomas parish, which sponsored the ministry.

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Tanya and I used to joke that God knew we were supposed to be friends, and that’s why we got all of those chances to get it right by having all of those classes together in college. Tanya could be reserved, but as she learned to trust me with the bright shining light got put in her, my life and my faith became made richer. She was unwavering in her faith in God and God’s providence. She was always gracious, and even when life was not gracious to her, she was unwavering in her faith in God and God’s plan. She had a great eye for God winks! Tanya was gracious, grateful and faithful even when she spent her post-graduate school years battling a brain tumor that took away her independence. Seeing her light shine so beautifully connected me to Christ in a new way through the piece that was in her. On the days I feel like my light is going out, the gracious, grateful, and faithful glow of her Christ-light is one of the most inspiring that still shines on me and helps me start to glow again.

We are the light of the world, and we are called to shine. Like the candles we hold each Christmas Eve when we sing Silent Night and all our individual lights combine to make the whole church glow, except that we’re called to be light everywhere. I can’t talk about light without quoting the first chapter of John: “The light shines in the darkness and the darkness does not overcome it.”

I know that the annual meeting can be stressful, for us and for many of our church neighbors, in this diocese and in others. I also know that the transitions we’ve been through as a community have brought us much change in not a lot of time. We are not alone in this challenge either. But I’ve also called this place home long enough to know something else. For all of the years we’ve faced stressful annual meetings, we’ve still shining, maybe brighter than ever because we’re so determined to overcome any darkness that might dare creep across our Holy Cross horizon line. Christ’s light may not have led our community where we expected; I talked to you last week about just how hard the Holy Spirit laughs when we try to overplan – but we are most definitely called to shine.

I’ve grown a lot in the light here – the light of this community and the light in each of you, who I am so much brighter for knowing and loving and journeying with.  But last week, after church, when I stayed to lend my heart and hands to Neighbors Feeding Neighbors, I was reminded that there are still new ways I can find Christ in all of you and in this place I’ve known as long as I could know anything.  I remembered hearing about this program, when it first started and was struggling to grow, but last Sunday, I experienced it in action. This room full of people from all walks of life – young and old, families and singles – who came to eat the food prepared and coordinated by people in this room and to claim warm winter clothes donated by Betty’s Basement – another example of what cool things can happen when our light shines in a new way. At Neighbors Feeding Neighbors, I got to be amazed at the light of Christ shining forth from Holy Cross in a new way that connected to all of these new people and that showed me that even in a community I’ve called home forever, I can still find more of Christ’s light. It’s been blowing my mind and making my heart glow all week.

We are the light of the world. We are not meant to hide ourselves under a bushel or behind closed doors. We are not called to play it safe by glowing in the all of the same familiar ways. We are called to glow like fireflies on a summer night, shining in the darkness and stretching our wings as far as we can to light up the night with love as boundless as the sky and full of new places to explore. We are called to take risks and shine in new ways  – think about the beautiful new way Christ’s light is shining through Neighbors Feeding Neighbors!

We are the light of the world. Let’s shine, shine, shine!

[1] Matthew 5:14, 16

The Three Ingredient Recipe for Transformation

Epiphany, Matthew, Sermons

Year A: Epiphany 4
Micah 6:1-8
1 Corinthians 1:18-31
Matthew 5:1-12
Preached at the Church of the Holy Cross, North Plainfield, NJ. Watch it here.

I take a lot of comfort in making plans. When I bake the pies for Thanksgiving dinner with my family, I want to put everything together in just the right amounts and in just the right order. I have a plan and a desired outcome and I know what to expect. It makes me feel more in control to know what to expect, and that’s comforting. In a world I know I can’t control at all, I still like to have a plan to help keep me focused on what’s important. If it’s too precise, the Holy Spirit usually laughs at me, so I just try to focus on the important stuff, like what Micah says today in the last lines of our Old Testament lesson!

What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?[1]

This beautiful verse pairs so perfectly with the beatitudes we hear in today’s gospel passage and it gives us a three-ingredient recipe on how to stay in relationship with God, who so unconditionally loves each of us. Micah’s plan is open enough to leave space for all of the chaos of the world, yet focused enough on the key points to give us the direction we need to stay focused on our relationship with God as we navigate that wild jungle out there.

First, do justice. Justice is a transformative virtue that seeks to establish or restore a community, while aiming to balance personal good with the common good.  It is a virtue which seeks to make right within the community all that which has gone awry.  Justice is a virtue that seeks to consider the relationships within the community and hold all up as good.  In our baptismal covenant, we promise to strive for justice and peace among every human being. We say “We will, with God’s help”[2] because balancing good within an entire community requires all of our best as well as God’s grace!

Second, love kindness.  Loving kindness is more than just “it’s nice to be nice to the nice.” It’s more than just that fake, pleasant smile we work so hard to maintain when we kind of want to scream. Loving kindness isn’t merely being kind and doing the kind thing. Loving kindness is finding joy in your heart in the act of being charitable to all of your fellow humans, even the ones who are rude customers of the business where you and rude drivers along the roads you travel to get there and people who push you way out of your comfort zone. Kindness, or charity, is both about affection as well as ethical, righteousness-based, respectful, and true love of our fellow humans. Kindness isn’t always a smile, sometimes kindness requires us to be a loving presence that is brave enough to tell our friend a hard truth and then support them in living through it. Loving kindness requires us to do right to others for the right reasons, rooted in our love of God and of our neighbor.

Finally, third, we walk humbly with God. We commit ourselves to doing our best in our relationship with God, but no matter how much we feel we might be “succeeding” in this, we never let it go to our heads. We do our best to walk with God, but humility demands that we never allow ourselves to fall prey to the temptation to judge someone who is walking differently than we are or whose sins appear to be different from our sins. This one is difficult, especially if we’re doing justice and loving kindness and we’re convinced we’ve found someone who’s diametrically opposed to our God-grounded way of thinking. The temptation to judge or to be proud enough to believe that we as mortals have the power to damn someone is a dangerous temptation. It is the opposite of walking humbly, and we’re not merely called to walk. We’re called to walk humbly. I did not consider myself a prideful person when I graduated from seminary, but last fall, when my first round of job searching ended unsuccessfully, I found myself swallowing more pride than I even knew I had.  Micah does not say this today, but I really do believe that if we don’t walk humbly, we will be humbled. It’s the circle and the nature of our lives.

Humility is vulnerable. The invitation to welcome people in and to love them is vulnerable. Pursuing justice is bold, and when we do it grounded in love and humility, then we’re bolder through that vulnerability. Every Sunday, we gather and proclaim in the Nicene Creed that Christ was crucified, died, and was buried. And on the third day he rose again.[3] I don’t always agree with Paul, but there’s one line in today’s lesson that really packs it in.  Paul writes that some ask for a sign and some as for wisdom, but “we preach Christ crucified.”[4] In order to get to the big and beautiful and light and love-filled resurrection, we have to go through the vulnerable and humbling crucifixion, the ultimate loving sacrifice.

In today’s gospel passage from Matthew, we hear Jesus teach the disciples the beatitudes. Nine statements in which the humble are exalted and blessed and comforted and promised God’s loved. I truly believe that any trouble or worry you carry in your love-filled heart today can be comforted with one of more of these lines.  When I am sad and weary, it helps me to remember: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Rising to the challenge to work to be in the best possible relationship with God requires that we do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly; this plan is not always easy to follow, not matter how well we know that the benefits outweigh the costs. That’s why Jesus ends his lesson on the beatitudes with the line “Rejoice and be glad.” The road is not always easy and we need to embrace joy wherever we can get it. There’s joyous beauty and working to do justice and love kindness and walk humbly. For all the ways that radical vulnerability can open us up to things that might hurts us, being open and having all of the doors of our hearts wide open like that also makes more space for the Holy Spirit to descend like a dove and fill us with more love and hope and joy than we can possibly imagine…and probably call us into a new radical way of being in the process!

So as you walk out through those red doors today:

Dare to be transformative. Dare to be transformed.

Dare to do justice.

Dare to love kindness.

Dare to walk humbly.

 

 

[1] Micah 6:8

[2] BCP 305: Technically, it’s “I will, with God’s help” but I want to focus on the communal nature of the sacrament.

[3] BCP 358

[4] 1 Corinthians 1:22-23

Fishing Lures & the Great Light

Epiphany, Matthew, Sermons

Year A Epiphany 3
Isaiah 9:1-4
Matthew 4:12-23
January 22, 2017 at The Church of the Holy Cross in North Plainfield, NJ

When I was in high school, my aunt and uncle in Mississippi got a boat. In the summertime, when I was on break from college, I would go and stay with my dad, who lived nearby. On sunny Saturday mornings, when the winds were still and the water was smooth, the phone would ring and my aunt and uncle would invite us to go out on the boat and fish. We’d pack the cooler and race over and the adventure would begin. Many of my favorite memories with my family there are on that boat, even if I wasn’t much of a fisherwoman. I can’t tie a lure to save my soul, and I willingly admit that the one time I can claim “catch of the day” was dumb luck. I can hardly remember a thing about the fish themselves, but the memories of all of us out there together, catching rays and laughing and riding around – those journeys to nowhere and unknown fishing holes – those memories fill my heart to the brim. I came home often with hands empty of fish and a heart full of joy. The real beauty in those fishing trips was in the people I shared those sunny days with.

But just like Jesus and the disciples at the transfiguration, we can’t stay in those big, beautiful, mountaintop moments all the time. Life goes on. Last May, my seminary classmates and I graduated with our Master in Divinity degrees and embarked on our new journeys. We all left our homes and New York to head off to new places. Some went to cities they’d never been to before. More than once, I’ve found myself on the phone with a friend in a new city brainstorming ways for them to meet new people. Each of our ministries may be tied to beautiful and unique communities, but finding community in one’s personal life is an entirely different adventure. I guess you could say that the search for community is much like fishing for people, whether it’s an individual in a new place or a church hoping to grow! What lure will lay the groundwork for new relationship?
In today’s gospel lesson from Matthew, Jesus starts calling disciples. He tells them to drop everything and follow him, saying “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” …but how?

As we talked about a few weeks ago, in his gospel, Matthew is focusing an audience of Jews who are trying to figure out if Jesus is the Messiah. Because they are his target, he’s really focused on the point that Jesus is the fulfillment of all of these prophecies that have come before – like the passage we hear today from Isaiah that is again quoted in the passage from Matthew: “the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light.” In this passage from chapter 4, we again see Matthew continuing to build that foundation which assures that Jesus’ is the fulfillment of these prophecies. It’s comforting for Matthew’s contemporaries to believe this argument. More than just affirming Jesus’ authority, seeing Jesus’ as the fulfillment of these prophecies suggests that everything that is happening – every bit of beauty and every moment of chaos – is part of a larger plan. God’s plan! Gaining a sense of comfort from order – especially the sense that we are part of a much larger sense of order – is comforting, and scripture can be a source of comfort on our craziest days. Furthermore, we need to take that comfort wherever we can get it, because for all of the times the words of the Bible can help us calm a storm, they also call us into radical new ways of ways of being – giant leaps of faith beyond the safe confines of the known world of our comfort zone. We’ve all been around the block enough times to know how this story ends: what makes Jesus Jesus is that he calls us to big, beautiful, radical love that is far more amazing and much more challenging than we could possible imagine!

One of the biggest challenges is that when we go out into these uncharted territories, the armor of light that we wear is not some heavy metal, bulletproof, impenetrable chest plate but instead this “armor” makes us more vulnerable, walking along the road even when we don’t have a map. When these uncharted territories come in the form of a great challenge or profound grief, we probably all react in similar ways. I mean, I know I seek the solace of the ones I love when I feel lost and overwhelmed and brokenhearted. I find great solace in small communities of trusted beautiful souls. Every relationship begins with a handshake, that first invisible hook, luring us outside of our comfort zone and into a new relationship… especially when those uncharted territories find us facing and new place: a new job or a new city where we haven’t formed that community yet.

“Follow me, and I will make you fish for people”

Jesus call to his disciples was also an invitation. In the charge we’re given to fish for people, we’re invited to follow Christ’s lead into big, beautiful, and vulnerable way of being that lures people together and into deeper relationship. Look around this sanctuary! See how Christ has hooked us together with ties like super-strong nautical knots!

“The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light”

Isaiah wrote this prophecy and Christ’s light fulfilled it.
You are the light. We are the light. We’re brighter together, helping each other see the way on the days when one of us might be struggling to shine. There is a unique and beautiful piece of Christ’s light in each of our hearts, and when we answer the call to follow Jesus and to dare to be vulnerable enough to let that light shine, the warmth of that light invites others to do the same. It lures them in. It’s the best kind of fishing for people.

So, dare to follow. Dare to love. Dare to shine.

The Baptism Journey: Roots, Branches, and the Beautiful Light of Christ

Baptismal Covenant, Epiphany, John, Sermons

Year A: Epiphany 2
John 1:29-42
The Church of the Holy Cross, North Plainfield, NJ
[Watch it here]

“And John testified, ‘I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove’”

Hey, wait, didn’t we just hear this last week? In the last week’s short passage from Matthew telling of Jesus’ baptism, Matthew narrates to us how, when Jesus’ was baptized, the Holy Spirit descended from heaven like a dove and onto Jesus. I told you then and I’ll tell you now just how beautiful I find that image! The Holy Spirit moving gracefully through the air like a bird and into our hearts. But in the gospel of John, John the Baptist says this and continues. Jesus is not only the one upon whom the Spirit of God descends, but also the one with whom the Spirit of God remains. I don’t know about you, but that part about the Spirit of God remaining reminds me of the words we use in our own baptism, when the Bishop or Priest marks the sign of the cross upon the head of the newly baptized, saying “You are sealed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.”

While these two passages from Matthew and John depicting Jesus’ baptism do have their differences, both ultimately assert Jesus’ authority over John the Baptist and see the Holy Spirit moving through Christ in baptism. Now, in today’s gospel passage, we not only have a chance to meditate on Jesus’ baptism, but we get to go on a little further and see what happens next – what happens in Jesus’ life the day after he is baptized!

One of my favorite images to use for baptism is the image of a tree: a tree has roots that ground it, a trunk that centers it, and branches that reach out further and further into the world and closer to the sun with each passing year. And the taller and further those branches reach, the deeper the roots go too. In each of our baptisms, we find our roots which ground us in Christ. We find our trunk which keeps Christ at our core and gives us a center from which to grow. And then we find our branches, exploring new ways to take those promises at the heart of our baptismal covenant and live into them out into the world, striving to reach further and further into the big beautiful light of Christ. From roots to branches. None of us are lone trees but a closely-knit forest – all in this together.

So, today, we once again hear the Holy Spirit descend like a dove on Jesus’ in His baptism, then remain with Jesus as we see what happens to Jesus’ the day after this big awesome sacramental moments.  In this second part of the gospel passage, we hear John address Jesus as the “Lamb of God” for a second time in this gospel passage.

It is John the Baptist’s role throughout the verses where Jesus begins to call his disciples to be a witness, to proclaim as he sees Jesus approach, walk by, that Jesus is the “Lamb of God.” And in that proclamation, he is providing testimony as to who Jesus is and points the way so that others come to recognize Jesus Christ.  This was not the expected Messiah/Savior/Deliverer, the one who would be a great warrior!  John the Baptist was proclaiming him a lamb, that which the Jewish community recognized as a sacrificial offering.

So, this time, when John addresses the newly baptized Jesus as “Lamb of God,” two of John’s disciples hear John say this and so they jump ship and start following Jesus. Jesus, being the brilliant God incarnate who is both King of Jews and king of clever parables, notices that these people have started following Him and they tell him that they are looking for a rabbi, or a teacher. No wonder that first promise in the baptismal covenant is to uphold the apostles’ teaching and fellowship. That’s what’s happening here! Right after Jesus’ baptism! Today’s gospel concludes with the calling of the first disciples! One of the two disciples of John who jumped ship turns out to be Andrew, who is so moved by what he learns from following Jesus that day that he gets his brother, Simon Peter, and they sign on with Jesus to be part of the wild, roots-to-branches ride that is following Christ.

After Jesus’ baptism in the River Jordan, he goes out into the world, renewed. We come together every Sunday to renew ourselves and to renew each other in the meditation, grace, love, hope, and story of our faith in our liturgy, grounding our roots and connecting our branches before we branch out again as we are charged with carrying all of this love out into the world as Christians.

Today, we hear Jesus embark on a journey into something new; the great journey of teaching and proclaiming the Good New with His trusted disciples. How many times in our own lives have we embarked on a journey into something new in our earthly lives and ended up finding something heavenly – finding Christ in new places? When have you taken a crazy leap of faith with nothing but Grace to guide you? You know, like how Andrew and Simon Peter did today!

Let me tell you about a time I embarked on something new, other than that time i went to South Africa, that I’ve probably mentioned once or twice (or seventy times seven times) to all of you….

A year and a bit ago, in September 2015, I began my last year of seminary.  While I was used to my seminary community and taking classes and going to chapel, I was also embarking on something new. I was making the decision to now be a half-time student and a half-time intern. In addition to my student life at the seminary in New York City, I was now embarking on a 20-hour-per-week internship gig at St Mark’s Episcopal Church in Basking Ridge as a seminarian and sub-deacon. I had a new commute, relying heavily on New Jersey Transit, and a new community, a new boss and mentor, and so many new names to know.  Every Sunday, I would show up and serve in the service, lead the post-confirmation Sunday school class, maybe preach a sermon, and then shake hands at the door and work the room at coffee hour…. Then, I’d pray to retain all those names while I went through six days of pinging back and forth between my lives as student and as an intern during the week. New Jersey Transit felt like my own personal TARDIS, transporting me between worlds. Names will probably never be my strong suit, but story treasuring – both story-listening and storytelling are two of my soul’s greatest and deepest joys, integral to my call to serve as priest. So, I found that as I got to connect with all of these new people in their stories, where the heart is, I got their names right along with ‘em. And somewhere between the candlelit Silent Night of Christmas and the Great Alleluia of Easter this church full of strangers became a church full of people dear to my heart who honored me by giving me the chance to see the bright, beautiful, and completely unique ways that Christ was at work shining in each one of them. I got to see some of that piece of Christ in each one of their hearts. What wondrous love is this? One that seals us by the Holy Spirit and marks us as Christ own forever. We’ll need an eternity to sing on, indeed.

The sixteenth century Spanish mystic, Teresa of Avila, once wrote:

Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which to look out
Christ’s compassion to the world;
Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good;
Yours are the hands with which He is to bless [all] now.

This poem is one of the best examples of what this embodiment of Christ is.  It reminds us what happened at Christmas: God became incarnate – became flesh – in Jesus Christ to embody fully God’s love for the world.  And the poem takes things one step further and calls on us to incarnate Christ in our own baptized selves and to love the world as Jesus did.  We’ve got our baptismal roots in Jesus, and now we’re branching out.

Remember the WWJD bracelets?  Nice reminders to treat others as we think Christ would have.  What if, however, we changed that up just a bit?  What if instead we asked WWJBD?  What Would John the Baptist do? By challenging ourselves to be like John the Baptist, we become proclaimers of Christ.  We call attention to Christ!  We shout out to all who are within hearing distance, “Hey, look!  See!  God is alive.  God is in our midst.  The Holy Spirit is at work in us and through us and for us and even in spite of us!  Roots. Trunk. Branches. Behold!  The Lamb of God!”

As much as we are called to seek and serve Christ in others, to be the embodiment of Christ to others, we are also called just as Andrew and Simon were called  to embark fearlessly on every wild and Spirit-filled, journey that God calls to, so that in all that we say and do we may proclaim: “we have found the Messiah! We have been marked as Christ’s own forever! And each day, we’re called to search for new ways to try branch out and to stretch closer to that beautiful light of Christ!!

 

Promises on the Wings of a Dove

Baptismal Covenant, Epiphany, Matthew, Sermons

Year A: Epiphany 1
Matthew 3:13-17
at the Church of the Holy Cross, North Plainfield, NJ

“May only your word be spoken, Lord, and only your word heard.”

I pray those words every time I preach. They’re a reminder of the call I continue to choose to answer every time I step into the pulpit. In my prayer, I pause, center myself, open my heart, and invite the Holy Spirit in, that She might move through me. That every word I proclaim to you this morning may be God’s.  Along my journey towards ordination, I had several people alert me to the Grace that can happen in preaching. More than one has found that what people tell her they hear is not always the same as what she said. See this space between where I stand and where y’all are sitting? That’s more than enough for the Holy Spirit to descend like a dove and help the words you need most to reach each of you.

Today, as we celebrate the Feast of the Baptism of our Lord, we hear how the Spirit of God descends on Jesus in the waters of baptism. In the gospel account of the baptism we hear today from Matthew, Jesus comes to the Jordan River and insists that John baptize him.  John’s identity as the man who baptized Jesus is foundational to our understanding of who John I, but there are some differences in the way this story is told in Matthew, Mark and Luke. In Luke, the John doesn’t even really baptize; the Holy Spirit does, and in Mark, Jesus is baptized by John but there’s no conversation between them. As writers, Mark and Luke are focused on an audience of Gentiles for their respective gospel narratives as a whole, so when they tell the story of Christ’s baptism, they’re really trying to drive home the message of forgiveness that baptism offers. Since Matthew’s target audience is Jews who had come to follow Jesus and who focus on the fulfillment of God’s purpose for God’s people, Matthew includes the dialogue we hear where John names his call to baptize Jesus and Jesus consents. The gospel passage we hear today from Matthew acknowledges the authority John had while making sure the focus is on Jesus and Jesus’ power in being the fulfillment of a promise – you know, that promise of Christmas we talked about just two weeks ago? Jesus is the promise that we belong to God everyday. Christmas every day – even on this first Sunday after Epiphany.

Part of being the fulfillment of a promise includes Jesus being fulfillment of the law. The fulfillment of prophecy. The fulfillment of righteousness.

Now that’s a message that would help the Christian Jews to remember where they came from and to whom they belonged! Score one for Matthew for driving the love home with his target audience. He’s working hard in this text to build that bridge from the God of Israel to the God who has just called down from the heavens “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased!”

Here’s God telling the crowd that Jesus is the very fulfillment they’d been waiting for. It’s a beautiful message: “Remember where you come from. Now see where you are going. Follow Jesus’ lead.”

When I think about where I come from, it’s right here. It’s this place – this community. To preach on the baptism of our Lord, when I was baptized right over there – It’s quite a full circle moment. This is the community that raised me up and sent me out and welcomed me home over and over and over again. And it all started before I can even remember.

My journey – and each of our journeys – each of our going out and coming back in to this place –  is grounded in the promises that we made, or that were made for us, in our baptism (304):

The promise to continue in the apostles teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread, and in the prayers

The promise to resist evil and then repent whenever we screw that up

The promise to proclaim the Good News of God in Christ – and proclaim not just with the words of our mouths but with the being of our whole selves

The promise to seek and serve Christ in everybody – even when they’re not willing to seek the Christ in us

And

The promise to strive for justice and peace for all and to respect everybody

Promises, promises. Like many of you, I can’t remember when they were made on my behalf by the people I love back at that font, but I do remember all the Sunday afternoons spent trying to figure out what they meant when I was sitting in a room down that hallway, preparing to be confirmed in my faith as an adult in the Church.

The roots I have in this Church in my baptism – the roots we all have in our baptism – are also our branches carrying us forward. The way we work together to fulfill our promise to continue in the apostles teaching and fellowship and in the breaking of the bread we’re about to share – The way we work together in fulfilling that promise strengthens our shared roots in this place so that we might go out and live our Baptismal Covenant in all places and truly proclaim the Good News of God in Christ in all that we do. Proofreading

In our baptism, we “are sealed by the Holy Spirit… and marked as Christ’s own forever.” (308) We aren’t just Christ’s followers; we belong to Him. These promises of our Baptismal Covenant knit us together to celebrate our greatest joys, to care for each other in times of sorrow, and to support each other when we’ve messed up and need to repent. Wherever we go and whatever we do, we are Christ’s own forever, sealed in that sacrament, and as long as we keep our hearts open, the Holy Spirit will be there ready to descend upon us like a dove.

General Seminary Commencement 2016: A love that binds friend and stranger

Seminary, Sermons, St Patrick's Breastplate, , , , , , ,

Matthew 28:16-20


Jesus said to them… “Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age”

To the end. From the beginning.  The alpha and the omega. Christ within us all, stirring and working within us to answer a call to be part of the community life within this place, and for those of us about to graduate, to go forth into the world having fulfilled this seminarian-shaped piece of that call.

My story is full of Christ beside me in so many wild and crazy and beautiful new ways in my time here. The comfort of the daily rhythm of chapel life, and the occasional whimsy of pranks. Fellowship with friends over wine around all sorts of tables. In the ringing of the bell in the tower. The people I started loving the moment I first heard them speak, and the people I have loved who I didn’t even think I’d like.

But I don’t think anyone here needs to hear a sermon about the radiance of our King of Glory in the beauty of springtime flowers blooming, rainbows cutting across the sky, children laughing and loving someone so deeply that your heart swells so big that it reaches your toes. Christ in the hearts of all who love us.

That’s Glory of God 101.

I’ve seen enough Grace made manifest in enough people here to say with confidence we’ve got it covered that Christ is with us in rainbows and butterflies.

Christ is with us always.

Always means not just when we feel Him in the sunshine or when we see Him in our favorite people or when we’re doing something that makes us feel really proud of ourselves and that we’re sure Jesus is going to want to hang up on His heavenly refrigerator when we present it to Him next time we go to pray.

Always means that Christ is within us through all of our least favorite parts of our stories: the parts when we screw it all up. When we say nasty things about what someone wore or how colossally they stuck their foot in their mouth or how they failed at something daring they set out to achieve. Christ is with us when we fail to disagree in a way that honors our baptismal covenant.  Christ is with us when we avoid the light of a truth because we’re too afraid of what it means. We can close our eyes and cover our ears and turn our backs and stomp our feet, but resistance to this truth is futile.

Wouldn’t it be so much easier to take comfort in the fact that Christ loves us so unconditionally that He is always there to help us avoid making that particular mistake again, if we let Him in? If we let each other in?

Christ is with us always.

Each September, as part of the ritual that ties all our stories together, each new class prepares to sign the book chronicling nearly 200 years of matriculates, Each September at matriculation we join together in singing St Patrick’s Breastplate:

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.

Restore. Restoration from any breaking down. For all the love I’ve learned so far, my story includes walls tumbling down, too. All of our stories have these ups and downs.

But Christ has the power to restore us from any deaths in our spirit that might interfere with our ability to experience the Gospel of Life, if we’re willing to take the time and do the work and name whatever the problem is – rather than pretend it simply isn’t there.

What does acknowledging Christ in times of danger even look like?

This past January, I had the privilege of going to South Africa on the General Seminary pilgrimage – something I highly recommend to every single person in this room – and as part of this wild ride, my fellow adventurers and I had the honor of dining with Fr. Michael Lapsley, who graced our campus with his presence two weeks.  Lapsley was one of many people whose stories and perspective helped enrich our class’s understanding of South Africa’s long journey of ending apartheid and continuing journey of restoration. One of the great many things Lapsley has done with his life is to found something called the Institute for the Healing of Memories. He believes that the entire human race has been traumatized by what we’ve done, what was done to, and what we failed to do. He believes the key to moving past this trauma is to have our stories acknowledged, reverenced, recognized, and given a moral context. Through his institute, Lapsley seeks to create a space that is secure for people to bare their wounds and move from victim to survivor to victor through being courageous and vulnerable enough to speak their truth.

Christ in mouth of friend and stranger.

Christ is with us always.

To fully acknowledge the Christ within us, we all must be courageous, too, when we go out through those gates and into the city. But having courage like Christ means we need to be brave enough to be truly vulnerable.  If we want to go out there and inspire the world with a love like Christ, then we need to follow the model of our God – who so yearned to be in deeper relationship with us that our God led by the example of stepping out of a heavenly, glorious, comfort zone and taking on an infinitely more vulnerable way of being – frail, fragile, human flesh. Christ before us. The word made flesh, tabernacling among us.

The love doesn’t stop there. Obviously.

In case taking on frail human flesh for us wasn’t enough of a vulnerability, Christ died naked, nailed to a cross in the crucifixion and that violent, vulnerable, Good Friday nightmare – was the death that preceded the resurrection. Think about that. There’s no big, beautiful resurrection without the crucifixion. That is mind-blowingly miraculous vulnerability! That’s God’s love for us. That’s Christ.

And Christ is with us always.  

We are never going to get it all right, out there or in here. But if we spend our whole lives hiding from the truth of the errors we make or too afraid to speak a truth that goes against popular opinion because we’re afraid, then we’re living in the kind of fear that perfect love like God’s casts out.

And even if we’re cowering, there’s no sure way of avoiding having the crowds of the passion play yell “crucify him!”  or “crucify her!” at any of us.

And for all the pain involved in standing in front of the angry mob…
It’s that COURAGE!
It’s that VULNERABILITY!
It’s that TRUTH!
That gets us to resurrection and new life!

We wouldn’t have a resurrection without a crucifixion.

Christ loves us with a love unafraid to be truly, deeply vulnerable because He knows that’s the path to new life.

How do we experience rising again if we don’t fall down?

In the words, of St Patrick’s Breastplate, here is my prayer for us all:
Christ be with us, when we go out of these gates into the city.
Christ within us, help us love more deeply
Christ behind us, call us out of our comfort zone.
Christ before us, continue to inspire us with your example of deep, vulnerable, love
Christ beside us, help us help each other rise back up when we dare greatly enough to fall.
Christ to win us over to a better way of life.
Christ to comfort and restore us. Always.
Christ is with us, always.

We have already bound this love unto ourselves. Let us dare to live it.

Love like Big, Boundless Skies

Sermons, , ,

I preached the following sermon at St Thomas Episcopal Church in Newark, DE, where I worshiped and was involved in campus ministry when I was at the University of Delaware. The propers are for the Fifth Sunday after Easter C, focusing on the gospel, John 13:31-35.You can watch it here.

“Everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another”

Christ calls us to love and honor all people.  It’s one of the foundational promises of our baptismal covenant and the subject of many a passage of scripture. 1 Corinthians 13 tells us that love is patient and kind and bears and believes all things. It’s a lovely passage. But you don’t have to worry about my preaching on it today.

For me, I know all this talk about love makes it tempting to write today’s gospel off. I know to strive to hold the door for people behind me, to hold my tongue when I’m tired and grumpy, and to hold off on tailgating the car going the incorrect speed for its lane choice.  I mean, I’m trying to be good and to be kind.

Jesus said “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another”

How does Jesus love his disciples that isn’t covered in 1 Corinthians?

When Jesus first called his disciples, they weren’t wandering around like baby ducks looking for a mother to imprint on and to follow. They were people like you and me, waking up and going out into the world with one or more jobs to do.

Picture it:  you’re waiting tables at a café or checking out customers in a grocery store line. In your frantic, mad rush, you turn to your next customer and there’s JESUS and he says “Hey, I know this is how you put food on the table and a roof over your head and that you’re shifts not ever for another few hours, but you should stop everything you’re doing and follow me.

“Now.”

That’s scary. That’s wild. That’s outside my comfort zone.

That’s Jesus loving his disciples by inviting them into a new way of being, – should they dare to accept such a radical love – and spread wings they might not even know they had.

And that was just the beginning!

Following Jesus around in this new way of being did not guarantee any sort of glamour or social desirability.  I think I can say with confidence that there was no “Disciple of the Month” award that came with a modest Applebee’s gift card. Jesus’ love that called the disciples into a radical new way of being also called them to love everybody. The real everybody. Not just everybody in their neighborhood or where they used to work or who they went to school with. Jesus’ love called the disciples – and still calls us – to love the people we like to pretend we don’t see or only exist in the form of being causes we give our money to.  People who are forced to sell their bodies. People who talk to themselves when they ride the train. People who we can smell when we walk by them, making it harder to pretend they’re not there.

Jesus’ big transformative love doesn’t allow for the big invisible walls our society can put up to keep us separate from people less desirable than we are.

Jesus’ love called the disciples to invite them to dinner. This love believes we should all come to the table together.

This past January, I had the incredible honor of returning to South Africa for 10 days with my ethics professor, Fr. Michael Battle. Towards the end of our trip, we had breakfast with Desmond Tutu and one of my classmates asked him what his greatest passion is. His answer: Freedom. It was at the heart of Tutu’s passionate work to end apartheid in South Africa and still visible in his support of his daughter Mpho’s plans to marry another woman, the center of much discussion in Cape Town around the time of our trip.

“Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another”

Talk about a love that transforms! Tutu’s leadership and passion for freedom helped to transform a nation and break down the barriers established under apartheid and inviting an entire nation into a new way of being.

You never know when the Holy Spirit might come lovingly knocking at your door and inviting you into a new way of being. And while these outrageous acts of Grace are about as easy to predict as finding a door to Narnia (never the same way twice), we do have some control as to how ready we are to welcome such big love. Where might there be invisible walls that keep up from making space within our very own hearts?

A few days ago, I was going for a walk with one of my classmates. We were talking about the good, the bad, and the ugly in the great world of Job Searching in the Episcopal Church.  It’s a pretty big church out there, but in all the pressure to find a job, it can be tempting to force ourselves to fit into a good-enough one. To think the fit is close enough to right. To convince ourselves that we won’t be clipping our wings enough to even notice.

But if we’re contorting ourselves to fit into this new space, it doesn’t sound like we’ll be leaving much room for the Holy Spirit to make a Graceful entrance. I don’t mean to underestimate Her so much as to acknowledge just how distracting that kind of contortionism can be.

This conversation about the church prompted my friend to share a bit of her personal experience from earlier in her life. She told me how she had been tempted many times to make that same mistake in relationships. To force herself to fit. To clip her wings a bit to see if that might turn “good enough” into “good.”

It didn’t.

If you’re clipping the magnificent and unique set of wings God gave you to fly with in the one-of-kind way God is calling you to fly, you’re doing it wrong.

If your love for someone is shaped like a birdcage, contains any sort of latch, or requires wing-clipping; you’re definitely doing it wrong.

And that’s wehn my friend said something else to me that sounded a lot like Bishop Tutu’s passion for freedom from birdcages of inequality and injustice and abuse.

She said: “You know how I knew my husband was the one for me? I didn’t have to even think about clipping my wings. He was already shouting, ‘FLAP HARDER!’”

That’s the kind of image that lines up with Holy Spirit in the form of a dove.

A love that invites you to spread your full wingspan and SOAR requires a lot of space. Those boundless skies have a lot of big, scary, stunningly beautiful room for transformation.

Jesus said “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another”

 “Just as I have led you with love that transforms you, you should love one another in a way that breaks down barriers”

Flap harder. Tell your friends.        

 

Good Friday, Easter, & Living in the Tension

Sermons, , , , , , , , ,

The following is a sermon I gave at the Easter Vigil, a joint service for St Mark’s Episcopal Church in Basking Ridge, St John on the Mountain Episcopal Church in Bernardsville, & St Bernards Episcopal Church in Bernards, NJ. It was held in the barn at The Ross Farm in Basking Ridge. This sermon was almost exactly one liturgical year in the making.

Allelulia! He Is Risen! And we are here to celebrate.

Easter is my favorite day of year. Resurrection. Life. Light. Flowers blooming. Miracles. Hope that wasn’t in vain. The knowledge that no matter how badly you’ve screwed up or deeply you’ve grieved, Jesus is RISEN, and promises us that in our baptism we’ll be risen too.  We are a resurrection people. After all of the grief of Good Friday. The weeping. The tears of mourning have been shed and the font is about to be filled with the same waters from which God called forth swarms of living creatures. We are a resurrection people.

And as Episcopalians, we are also a liturgical people. We divide the many lessons our Bible teaches us into a calendar we repeat year after year. To get to Easter – the beautiful 50 days of love and light and hope come to fruition in the miracle of the resurrection – to get here – takes 40 days of Lent, culminating in this journey through Holy Week that our communities have shared together.

Still in seminary, my liturgical formation – a vast amount of which I attribute to my liturgics professor blessed Fr. Pat Malloy, who has become the voice of my inner, liturgical, Jiminy Cricket – My liturgical formation has made me more deeply aware of the richness of our liturgical calendar than I had been before I started this journey. One particularly poignant learning moment occurred just one liturgical year ago.

Last Easter, I experienced the miracle of the resurrection with the church I was interning at in Brooklyn, and since I was not able to make it home across the Hudson to my family afterwards, that evening, I broke bread at Easter supper with friends who had become family near my home at my seminary in Manhattan. Love. Life, Joy, Resurrection. Easter blooming new life.

But my joy at this moment in our liturgical year was harder to carry forward into those 50 days than it had been in the past. Easter Monday should have been a mixture of riding the wave of the momentum of Easter joy and a respite from a whirlwind of liturgical adventures. When I woke up Easter morning, slow to rise on my much-earned day off, I picked up my phone before I could even pick up my head and the first thing I saw was a message about my friend Ty, a young woman I shared a house with during my year in South Africa, a country where two oceans meet, our shared home nurtured a friendship that deeply intertwined a handful of those of us living there into a family.  At 23, on Easter Monday, Ty had died. She had joined in the resurrection I had just experienced the day before, but I was not in Easter with Ty, I suddenly found myself back in the midst of the grief of Good Friday. Couldn’t I carry the miracle of the resurrection out into the world for one whole day? We just retold the story of the Lord dividing the Red Sea to guide the Israelites to safety, but suddenly my grief made me feel as if I was drowning with the Egyptians who dared pursue them. Walls of water tumbling down around me, too.

Today’s gospel passage brings us to dawn on the first day of the week after the nightmare of Good Friday. The women who watched the crucifixion of their lord and Savior have learned enough about breathing again to go to the tomb of the savior with the spices they had prepared for the ritual that follows death to prepare to say goodbye to the body of their savior. Their companion of the journey who had taught them so much. Someone who they loved. On this lonely morning after the climax of their grief they found themselves at the tomb, only the stone was rolled away and now instead of facing the cold body they’d been preparing themselves to see all that was there was an empty tomb. Suddenly darker than they’d imagine. And The weight of the unknown had multiplied.  They were in the space between Good Friday and the miracle of the resurrection we celebrate this night.

Lent. Good Friday. Easter Sunday.  On our liturgical calendar we quantify and measure when these days will come each year. We can control them in our measure of time, in a way we can’t in our day-to-day lives: the soul-filling joys and ecstasies of grief we cannot predict or that fall outside of our liturgical schedule. The Easter of the birth of a new life – or miracle that one was able to preserved against all odds – and the Good Fridays that catch us off guard – the valleys of nothing but dry bones that we somehow stumble through, struggling to find our way. Fighting to see through bleary tear-filled eyes.

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Lent is NOT a season where we endure giving up chocolate chip cookies for 40 days out of our calendar year. Lent is the wilderness we get lost in when we least expect it.  The storm that unexpectedly rolls our way in the midst of relatively smooth sailing. The darkness that encroaches on what we thought was a well lite path. The telephone call at an unexpected hour to let us know that the rules we’ve been playing by this whole time no longer apply and that leaves us wondering if we’ll ever be back in the game again. During moments like these, the Good Fridays of our own lives can take much longer than one calendar day – much like we often speculate the creation narrative to in the face of modern science.

And even when our eyes clear of the tears that cloud our vision and our legs learn to stand, there’s still a space between standing and being able to move forward into Easter morning.

The women in today’s Gospel reading are in that space between.  Waiting in that tomb, fighting the fear and the grief they’ve been fighting since the crucifixion that they’ve had to fight every step –  every breath – of the way to  even  this far. Wanting so deeply to move forward in their grief but not knowing what to do yet. No light to guide their way.

The space between.

In the beginning, the earth was dark and formless too, but then a wind from God swept over the face of the water and from the dark, empty space and deep, surging seas, God said, “Let there be light” and so began the seven days of creation that filled the space with life that God called good.

While the lamentations of the prophets and the power of the passion we heard last night and last Sunday retell the story of my grief in the Biblical stories of our salvation, there is one more non-canonical text that has been a supplementary map to the many unscheduled Lents that I’ve encountered in the past seven-and-a-half years: it’s the Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat Pray Love. In the midst of many beautiful moments about navigating Lent in our lives outside of worship, there’s one moment that I carry around more than most of the others that resonates with today’s gospel passage. At this particular moment, Gilbert is grieving her divorce and her great lost love at an ashram in India. She is longing for God but her worship is impaired by the immensity of the grief that weighs upon her over the end of her marriage. At this particular moment she is conversing with a dear friend who she refers to as “Richard from Texas” and as Gilbert conveys her struggle to move forward after all of this time, Richard says to her:

“[You say you miss him?] So miss him. Send him some love and light every time you think about him and then drop it. You’re just afraid to let go of the last bits of him because then you’ll really be alone, and you’re scared to death of what will happen if you’re really alone. But here’s what you gotta understand, if you clear out all this space in your mind that you’re using right now … you’ll have a vacuum there, an open spot – a doorway. And what the universe will do with that doorway: It will rush in – God will rush in – and fill you with more love than you ever dreamed. So stop [blocking] that door.”

When the women arrived at the tomb on Easter morning, the stone was gone, rolled away, no longer blocking the entrance to the tomb, and when they walked in, the tomb was empty, and for all the grief and fear and confusion they could fill it with in the space between when they saw where the body was no longer laid and when the angels spoke, the angels did appear, dazzling, next to them to tell them “He is not here! He is RISEN!”

This is the miracle we celebrate now at Easter., Easter is the season in our liturgical year that we celebrate the miracle of Christ’s resurrection and eternal life and a great, beautiful moment of joy but it’s joy is greater than its annual place in our liturgical calendar. For me, the joy in this day is that it is bigger than this day. This moment represents the timeless the triumph of eternal life of Christ’s resurrection, the promises made for us in our baptism. And there’s more. Easter is a reaffirmation of surviving all the Lents and Good Fridays that happen in our lives outside the liturgical calendar –that are measured in late night phone calls and moments when the water rose too fast and too quickly. Easter isn’t just about the glory of the past 40 days of adorning our altar in purple and not saying Allelulia  – Easter is the resurrection we’ve shared with Christ every time we overcame the heaviness of our broken hearts and kept moving forward. Easter is being able to get up Sunday morning after very nearly wishing we’d died too on those Good Fridays that dragged on and on beyond the safe confines of the few hours allocated on our liturgical calendar. The joy of Easter is what happens what the waters of grief recede and the spirit of God rushes across the receding waters to fill the weeping shores with the love and light and the miracles of the resurrection. The rebirth we experience in the waters of baptism – enduring heartbreak we thought might drown us to be cleansed and called forth from the waters into new life as we read about in Genesis.  This is why we have water to be thankful for in Easter.

Allelulia. He is risen. And we are here to celebrate.

12439194_10153673866850668_8332603914593784087_n***The Easter Vigil at Ross Farm***