Category Archives: Uncategorized

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“Happiness is the consequence of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for it, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly in the manifestations of your own blessings. And once you have achieved a state of happiness, you must never become lax about maintaining it, you must make a mighty effort to keep swimming upward into that happiness forever, to stay afloat on top of it.” – Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Daily Bread That Gives Life to the World

Eucharist, John, Uncategorized, Year B

Sunday Sermon – August 19, 2018 from Christ Church Christiana Hundred on Vimeo.

Year B Proper 15
John 6:51-58

I can still remember the first time I received communion. I was nine years old! I grew up in a small Anglo-Catholic parish, and when I was a little girl, we still did the whole “first communion” thing, rather than focusing on baptism or on our own hearts. For a few Sundays over the course of the fall, my friends Rebecca, Cory, and I met with our interim rector, Mother Alison, on several different occasions to talk through what this sacrament meant in our commitment to love the world and to love Jesus. It was a lot like how I do baptismal prep now… Anyway, while I remember feeling SO grown up when the big day came – The Feast of Epiphany. I also remember what happened after the service. The mother of one of the other girls, Rebecca, made each of us a red, hooded cape – just like the kind our Felicity American Girl dolls had. After the service, most of the congregation left quickly to get home before the snow started, but Rebecca, Cory and I ran around the empty church JOYOUSLY in our white dresses and white shoes with our red capes trailing behind us. Our families had to drag us home.

I’m grateful for that memory in my life with Christ – that pure, innocent joy of childhood. As we grow up and take on more responsibility and acquire more knowledge, life gets more complicated. The questions we ask and the answers we seek get more complicated.

We all have deep yearnings that change through the different seasons of our lives. We struggle with not enough time in our days. We need more space in our heads to remember thing. We all have unique and profound burning questions that we don’t yet have the answers to. Some seasons find us yearning for deeper connections with another human being, or sometimes, the void we’re struggling with is one we don’t yet know how to fill.

In today’s gospel, Jesus tells us that he is the living bread that came down from heaven. We talk about Easter and the promise of eternal life, but the bread that sustains us in our earthly life lives too. What all is Jesus getting at in today’s gospel when he tells us that he is the bread of life for the world?

We break bread together every Sunday. We gather around that table and praise God for the salvation of the world through Christ our savior, retelling the narrative of the Last Supper in the sacrament of Holy Eucharist. Sacraments are outward and visible signs of inward, spiritual grace, given by Christ. In Holy Eucharist, the grace is found in the bread and wine that also become the body and blood of Christ. Grace is that unearned, undeserved, unconditional love from God that forgives us of our since and draws us closer to God and to each other.

The bread of life for the world is that grace: love that redeems, love that sustains, love that breaks down barriers and bridge chasms, love that connects us more deeply, love that abides and abides. In today’s gospel, Christ tells us that when we receive the sacrament of communion with open hearts, we’re taking Christ into ourselves. When we receive the bread and the wine, we’re choosing to abide in Christ and to trust in God’s grace – and when we invite God in like that, God lives in us.

That what Christ is trying to teach his listeners today. That’s what he’s trying to teach us today. Communion. The bread of life. This encounter we have with Christ deepens our relationship with the God who promises us eternal life. I know my heart hungers for that, but what about all of the other things we’re hungering for? We have questions about ourselves and the world; we struggle for more balance, greater clarity, deeper understanding and stronger love. And what about those seasons where it feels like our hearts have a hole in them?

Lord, give us this day our daily bread. We say these words in the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday, after the eucharistic prayer, and they’re about more than eucharist. Daily bread is sustenance; daily bread is not a meal with a dessert cart. When we follow Jesus’ teaching and pray for daily bread, we’re praying for sustenance. We’re praying for what our bodies, minds and spirits NEED to get through the day. The answer we want is not always the one we get, but if we keep our hearts open to God, we’ll have just enough of whatever it is we need to get us through. In all of the seasons of uncertainty that we encounter in our lives, what better sustenance could we ask for than the bread of life?
The Grace of God surpasses all understanding in its ability to redeem and heal and transform and connect us more deeply to God and each other. Come to the table and receive life. Come to the table and be fed. Go out into the world and proclaim that message with every little kind word you say and deed you do and truth you proclaim. Then, come back and be fed again, so as to keep your heart full – so you can keep passing that grace on!

My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that
I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am
actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You
does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And I know that, if I do this, You will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost
and in the shadow of death.
I will not fear, for You are ever with me,
and You will never leave me to face my perils alone.

-Thomas Merton

“He lives in you”

Baptismal Covenant, Uncategorized

Year A: Epiphany VII
Leviticus 19:1-2,9-18
1 Corinthians 3:10-11,16-23
Matthew 5:38-48
Psalm 119:33-40
Preached at The Church of the Holy Cross, North Plainfield, NJ

Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.[1]

Paul reminds us today that we are temples. We are God’s people.  This is why I keep talking about the sacred spaces of our hearts being such fertile ground for the Holy Spirit to descend like a dove and fill us with as much love as we can open ourselves up to receiving. Paul’s words and our God’s unfailing presence are much-needed comfort for us in a world of rapid change, politics charged on multiple fronts, and many temptations to create division between ourselves and other humans on a daily basis.

Last week, I talked to you all a bit about the context of Paul’s letter to the still-forming Church in Corinth – a community Paul had helped to found but was not called to stay with. Last week, we heard Paul address the tension and conflict stirring within the community of Corinthians. This week, Paul builds on the importance of our unity as God’s people to remind and to teach the Corinthians what they were – and what we are still – called to build together.  While, like any skilled Lego Master Building, what we each are called to build will differ, we have a common foundation: that foundation is Jesus Christ.

What does it mean to have a foundation in Jesus Christ? Well, this week, we hear a lot about the Law. The passage we said/sang from Psalm 119 is all about praying to keep God’s law and to incline our hearts towards God’s desires for us and God’s law. Before I entered seminary, I didn’t have much use for the Psalms, but I’ve come to really, deeply, appreciate them. The beauty I found in today’s Psalm is that call for order. As someone who enjoys planning, I can relate to what the Psalmist calls for today: the prayer to God to tell me what to do, to give me rules so that I can follow them and maybe feel more in control in a chaotic world. In this plea, I find myself feeling more grateful than ever for the apostles’ teaching and fellowship – for our fellowship – figuring out how to keep our hearts open together.

Our Old Testament reading takes us back to Leviticus, a challenging, stern, and at times rather funny book, which in today’s passage covers several statements of law, including one that takes us again back to our discussion last week about how we orient our hearts. As God’s people, we can’t afford to let any hate for our human kin into our hearts, no matter how tempted we are in these days of division. Instead, we’re called to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, regardless of whether or not our neighbor loves us. Even the gospel passage from Matthew includes a list of decrees, but again, notice what they have in common? In the midst of all of this talk about keeping the Law, minding facts we learn with our heads, we are also hearing about love and about what we should be doing with our hearts: loving God, loving our neighbor as we love ourselves, loving even when it goes against what is happening around us, seeking and serving Christ in all persons, just as we promise in our baptism. Just as we work together to uphold with fellowship modeled after the apostles.

After declaring our belief in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in the words of the Apostles’ Creed; the first promise we make in our baptismal covenant is that we will continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of the bread – our communion in communion – and in the prayers. That fellowship is especially important; it seals us together whether we’re gathering together around a table to break bread for a parish dinner or in Holy Communion. This fellowship is our commitment to working together and to loving together to live into these promises we make in our baptism, to being Christ to each other on good days and bad, to hold each other up, to love each other as best we can and in doing so proclaim by both word and deed – love – the Good News of God in Christ. It happens everywhere from adult study to those late-night conversations with our nearest and dearest where we ask each other “Is this the right thing to do? Is this the right risk, the right leap? What path is the most right? How can I be the most loving?”

When the chaotic world is too sad and too complicated. When the rules we’re trying to follow seem too many to remember or become too overwhelming. When we’re in a situation where the promises we make in our baptism are challenging us and we don’t know how to begin seeking and serving Christ or what it means in this particular instance to strive for justice and peace among all people. This is when we use the love to tie it all together. This is when we remember that the foundation we have in Jesus Christ is held together in love: love for each other, love for baby Julian, love for our family and friends, love for strangers, love for enemies. The best way we can live into our promise to respect the dignity of every human being is to be love in a world that so desperately needs it. That needs Christ and the Christ in each and every one of us. Part of what makes our baptism so beautiful is that it’s not just about making these promises for the newly baptized. In Julian’s baptism, we also renew these promises for ourselves and in doing so, we promise to help Julian and to help each other do our best to be the love in a world that so desperately needs it. From holding a door to lending an ear to saying a prayer. From offering our neighbor a coat from Betty’s Basement or a meal at Neighbors Feeding Neighbors. Today, Paul teaches us that a skilled master builder needs a foundation in Jesus Christ and all the laws and promises that make that up are cemented together in love.

In our Baptismal covenant, we find what it means to be a faith community, cemented together in love – and love isn’t just a noun. Love is a verb, something we do, an action in a world that needs it. Acting in love is what makes us alive, living as the living temples that Paul teaches us we are called to be with a firm foundation in Jesus Christ. “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?”  This is a question to the community as a whole, the entire Christian church in Corinth.  To suggest that God dwells among the gathered community was radical in first-century Corinth, because previously God was understood to dwell in the temple in Jerusalem. But God dwells here, too. In this building and in each of us and we are charged with carrying God and the Good News of Jesus Christ out into the world, whole in loving each other as our heavenly father is whole in loving us

[1] 1 Corinthians 3:16-17